A very messy behind the scenes post

It's been 20+ days since Sweetest Valentine is released, I guess now is the right time to spill some stuff about it. But before that, I'd like to thank everyone for 1000+ downloads, for the reviews and comments left, and for the donations. I did not expect the game to gain as many attention as it does and I'm extremely grateful! <3

Now, onto the story behind the game.

The Development Process 

(There will be some spoilers of Sweetest Valentine below)

I was on a long semester break three months-ish ago and I didn't join any organizations nor activities in my uni at that time, so I was pretty free then. I'm happy for the break, but long holidays like this usually makes me feel worthless, like I wasn't doing anything with my life. Usually I'll just try to shrug it off by hanging out with my best friend or watch some youtube videos, but this time, an idea popped up in my head.

"I really want to make a yandere visual novel all of a sudden."

Before this, I've tried learning Ren'py, but I gave up after only a day. However, this time, I was determined to actually sit down, try to learn it, and make something out of it. I learned the basics overnight, made a very small game to test that basic knowledge, and once I feel like I got the hang of it, I started developing immediately.

The first thing I did was sketching for character looks and design, because that's something I really love doing. Here are some old designs of the cast (please don't mind the chicken scratch writing):

The game's initial story started off very otome-like. Everyone was made to be into the MC. Even Haruto, but he was made to be one of MC's secret love interest. But that obviously changed. The one who stayed pretty much the same from the concept stage until finished is Ichigo. The story still revolves around him being a murderer. MC is also pretty much the same, I've wanted her to be crazy from the start.

Speaking of MC, here's also what she looked like before I decided that I hate her design and changed it.

After drawing those sketches, I made character sprites. The first one I drew was Ichigo. I didn't sketch his sprite beside the others, and that was my mistake. If you think that his proportions looks weird compared to the rest of the characters, now you know why. I learned that it's better to sketch every character sprites beside each other first, just to match the vibe and proportions, before you color them one by one. 

When the sprites are done, I got to writing. I was a messy writer. I know where I wanted the story to go with Ichigo's route, but Yuzuki's route was a bit... unplanned and has a lot of improvisations. In my mind back then, there are two variations of Yuzuki's route. Variation 1 is where Yuzuki doesn't die, and he loves Ichigo instead of Haruto (I wanted to make a scene where MC kills Ichigo, that's why). Whereas variation 2 is the variation I eventually used in the final game. I consulted with my best friend, Alouette, who also became my playtester, and she's the one who encouraged me to stick with variation 2. I honestly feel like I could polish Yuzuki's route more, but I admit I was a bit lazy and I wanted to finish this game quickly. I feel like if I stay and fix too many things, I'll eventually get all timid and never posted it.

About coding, I actually have little to no experience. I did try to learn HTML and CSS, but I never really finished the course. So big shoutout to the Ren'py tutorials on youtube and the Lemmasoft forums. They're very helpful and insightful to beginners. 

I do the writing, coding, and drawing the CGs interchangeably. It's just based on if I feel like drawing or feel like writing that time.  While I was drawing the CGs, I realized that I drew too many variations of one scene. I wanted to back off at first, knowing that I'll have to draw too many CGs, but in the end I went with it. So now there's a total of 51 CGs in game, and I know some of them looks off and janky. If I had known the game would get this much attention, I'd probably polish up the CGs more. I'll keep this in mind for my next project instead.

There's also this  illustrated "thank you for playing" screen that I scrapped because my hand was starting to hurt. As you may know, I went with the lazier alternative instead (a thank you for playing screen with blank dark background lol)

Future Plans

I'm planning on making another visual novel in the same universe as Sweetest Valentine. It's not exactly a sequel, however, the root cause of the conflict in that game will be related to what happened in Sweetest Valentine. I haven't started coding it, but the story is already there, and I have sketched a bit of the characters.

Edit 31/08/2022: This idea is scrapped! The new project won't really be related to Sweetest Valentine, but it's still within the same universe.

Wrapping it all up

So finally, we're nearing the end of the post. I hope this post is at least entertaining or insightful to you, despite the messiness. All in all, I'm still proud of myself with what I've accomplished. To some, this may be a small thing to accomplish, but for me, it's definitely not. Even though the game is simple, and even though there are some aspects of Sweetest Valentine that I'm overly self-critical about, in the end some of you who played it likes it, and I also gained a lot of experience from my first game. That's more than enough for me. Seriously, I'm genuinely very happy to read the comments and look at the analytics. Thank you so, so much for the support! It makes me want to create more and improve!

Also, look forward to 14th of February next year. I'll definitely make a second devlog and have something planned during that day.

For now, thank you for reading and I hope to see you all soon! :D