Okay, now that the jam's over, and we're all back from Eid holiday, is it time for a little post mortem?

Thought it'd be fun to do this in kind of an interview format, but here are our thoughts on the process of making the game ^^

What went right:

Anja: While the process of realizing how I wanted to approach the lore writing for each Galatea took a while, it was something that clicked together immediately once I sorted my thoughts on them. Each Galatea served their own purpose and I think I did pretty good on writing each of them distinct enough so that you can see the way they change and how they change along with MC.

Summer: I think I did quite well with getting the changing fonts and animations to work! I think in terms of organizing my work, I did quite well with that, I didn't have a crunch despite this game having quite a lot of new features. I'll chalk it up to me finishing the programming pretty early during development. I've seen people say that they love how the text and GUI changes and I'm really glad to hear that it turned out okay!

What could be better:

Anja: Funny enough, the lore writing too. Both as the thing that went great and the thing that could've been better. I was so lost on what was the "right" way of writing OC lore. I got so fixated on it to the point I was stuck and stressing over how to even write it to begin with. How do I tell the story of this Galatea? How can I communicate through Galatea? Will this resonate with others? Eventually, I realize I was too fixated on how to write it then confronted it by, well, just writing. It was messy, sure, but I think that's an inevitable part of any creative process, especially when you've just started it. I have to thank Aca and our friend and playtester for the game, Bob, for our sharing sessions where we revisit memories about our OCs and early fandom activities to the point we're laughing until our stomach hurts!

Summer: I knew this was gonna be crazy to do but I actually wanted to have 5 different GUI formats for each of the galatea iterations, at least with the main menu but I pushed it back too much and didn't have enough time to do it…  

Summer: Oh, and so much IRL stuff also happened during the development of the game and it was just overall a really difficult time to work, so I ended up y'know- kind of not being able to do anything for like  a week, for the first time in my life i had to drag myself just to be able to draw and it was just roughhhhh. I had planned way more marketing for the game too (a whole 20 day post schedule! Can you believe?) but with everything happening in our area I ended up throwing most of it out of the window because it felt kind of wrong and insensitive to shill out during such a serious and precarious time, not to mention how high strung we were and how I was barely able to drag myself to finish drawing the arts for the game. I wish we worked during more peaceful times... :'D

Lessons learned:

Anja: Be weird about it! Feel the doubt and do it anyway! Sometimes it's best to actually do it to figure out how you want to approach something and this was definitely the case with me working on Galatea. There's no way of knowing if it's the right way of telling a story unless you try it out and see if it works or not. So, definitely check your work, test it out. A LOT.

Summer: Plan all (if not most) of the features first and get it down ASAP!! it's better to experiment and cut down or change features in the first week or so of the jam, as opposed to stressing about it later. It's also always good to have time limits for experimentation before calling it off and trying something else. I think I tried to get ConditionSwitch to work with layered images but after fiddling with it for a couple of days, I had to try a different way rather than spend even more time in it. I think it's good to be able to know what you can or cannot include as quickly as possible. Features first, pretty it up later!

Anja: Agreed on plan it all, not being afraid of experimenting and focus on pretty it up later. Get it down, even if it looks bad. Because the point is to find out why something looks or feels bad. The early stages of development is the time for you to get messy. During planning, I'd also like to think about marketing as early as possible. Aca had already said that there were plans on how she wanted to approach the marketing, however, it ended up not coming into fruition due to the current climate where we both are, which made us set marketing aside and prioritize working on just the game. As Aca said, it would've felt insensitive to push on promoting the game while tension's running high. We worked through it, of course. Still, an early planning on marketing will be something we keep in mind for future projects. Hopefully, life (as a whole) will be easier on all of us by then.