It's been a little over a week since I released Duskbound, my first completed visual novel project. To be honest, I couldn't be more proud of myself. I've always been the kind of person who has a thousand ideas and starts a hundred projects only to lose interest and jump to the next thing, resulting in never actually finishing anything. Motion City Soundtrack's Can't Finish What You Started might as well have been written about me. Throughout it all, the one idea that kept haunting me and wouldn't let go was completing my own otome game. I had many ideas, drew sprites, wrote whole chapters, made demos, but nothing ever really took off. Now that I've completed a VN with a finished product that comes very close to the original vision I had for it, I'd like to analyse why this time was different, and perhaps help some other people who are wanting to make their own game but struggling with the execution.

Beware! This post will have spoilers for the game, so please don't read it if you still have the intention of playing it at some point. It'll only take you 45 minutes hehe

The advice people always give, and how to listen to it the right way

So when you look into advice given to first time (VN) devs, the most common thing to come across is always: start small. And I think everyone's instinctive first reaction is "No! I want to work on my dream project!!!" And I get it entirely. There are risks associated with both starting with your dream project and with starting as small as you can conceive, and I think the trick is to combine both. When you've never made a VN you have some idea about the parts you'll need, and perhaps some estimate of how much time it'll take you. But there will always be unexpected hiccups, things you didn't think about that need to be sorted out and take time, and the smaller your project, the less of a rippling effect these will have. But at the same time, you can't finish something if you're not motivated. My problem when thinking of short, manageable projects was always that I didn't really care about the story I was trying to tell, I wasn't invested. So my advice is this: Start as small as you can bring yourself to care about.

My question to myself when brainstorming was this: how can I tell an interesting, impactful story in as short a time span as possible? This quickly brought me to a few things: I wanted only one LI to flesh out the story the most, I wanted the MC and LI to have a pre-existing interest/obsession with one another so there wouldn't need to be too much "build-up" time. I personally love when VNs make use of the structure of replaying the game so I quickly arrived at the idea of a time loop (one of my favourite tropes), this also meant I could include many different outcomes but with all endings still contributing to the overall plot. Every ending is valid and "canon", instead of some being simply bad/dead ends. 

The other thing I did to keep myself interested was unapologetically catering to my own interests. Whenever I wondered "Well, I want to include this, but will other people like it?" I said to myself: "It's your game, do whatever makes you happy." I figured that surely my self-indulgent pandering would appeal to someone, and as long as I finished anything I'd be pleased with myself. Looking at the reception of Duskbound so far, I think I was right! Of course, if your project is commercial you might not be able to take this stance, but if you're a fan of otome games and you like what you're creating, then the target audience must exist even if it isn't large!

Set a strict deadline

I actually didn't intend to participate in Otome Jam 2023 from the start, the fates just happened to align. I chose the start of July as my deadline because I intended to participate in Art Fight (an online art challenge that lasts throughout the month of July), and doing game dev at the same time seemed like a disaster. I discovered this perfectly coincided with Otome Jam and said, why not? Now my deadline is even more reinforced in some physical reality. 

With my previous projects I started working on them loosely, without any timeline. I was making it all by myself, for myself and it wasn't going to cost money in the end, so it didn't matter when it'd be done, right? This inevitably resulted in me spending a lot of time on it when I started out, then eventually gravitating towards other interests and never really picking up where I left off because I forgot what I was doing. After enough time passes, you might even stop liking the old art/writing/whatever you did and want to redo it, leaving you at effectively zero. 

Still, I don't think it's enough to pick an arbitrary date and say: "This is when it must be done!" There has to be some concrete, outside reason why this deadline exists. For me it was the start of Art Fight, an event that would occur at a set time whether I finished my VN or not. But a game jam is obviously a very clear, objective deadline as well, and probably what I would recommend most for this reason and another one...

Get involved

If there is one thing I love about the fact I got to participate in Otome Jam, it's the connection I felt with other developers who were working on their project at the same time as me. I joined the Devtalk Discord server and followed fellow devs on Twitter and this way was kept in the loop of what was happening around me. Seeing others working passionately on their projects motivated me to continue on my own, and being able to talk about the process with people who were going through the same thing was invaluable. The VN dev community is extremely welcoming and there are always people willing to help you out if you ask.  It also serves as accountability if you post about your project, there are people looking at your progress and expecting to see more!

Start with the part you struggle most with

My final piece of advice is perhaps the one that mattered most. If I had to pinpoint one reason why I succeeded this time where I failed before, it's this. Find the point where you get stuck, the part which you struggle with, which makes you want to give up and throw the whole thing in the bin. And make sure you finish that before anything else. For me, it was clear that this point was writing. Whenever someone asks me my feelings about writing I say the following: "I love having written things, but I hate writing." The process of putting words onto paper is a slow and excruciating one for me, even when I love my ideas and know where the story is meant to go. I don't do well with outlining because I feel like the story already exists and I'm bored of it before I even finish writing, but just starting somewhere and seeing where I end up leads me to dead ends where I don't know how to proceed far too often.

Every previous time, I would stop because I reached this point. I'd tell myself I'd think of something later, start drawing sprites and enthusiastically showing my friends, but the rest of the story never came. I still haven't really found a foolproof process, but I said to myself: "You're not allowed to do anything, you're not even allowed to talk about this project to anyone, until you have a finished first draft." I knew that if I had the story done, everything else would just be a matter of putting in enough time and effort, slowly grinding away until it was done. And I did just that! The script was short, but it was a complete story from beginning to end and it had all the points I wanted in it, and with help of an editor it finally got polished into the Duskbound you see today! 

I feel like this experience of finally finishing something gave me the knowledge and dedication needed to finish whatever next project I set my mind to. I'm not a perpetual failure, I'm not an "ideas guy", I'm a visual novel developer! 

Well, that's all I have for today. If you'd like me to go in-depth into some other part of the process, please let me know in a comment.