Woo postmortem behind the scenes post time! So it's been a little over a week since WTTFM was released to the public and I'm happy of the positive reception so far! Thank you so much for the ratings, comments, and the donations! Your support really means the world to me and I can't thank you enough! WTTFM in particular is my biggest project yet and the one I put the most effort into, so seeing people appreciate it makes me really happy.

HEAVY SPOILERS FOR WTTFM starting from here on out, so please come back once you've finished the game if you haven't. Otherwise, if you don't care about spoilers or have finished the game, continue on! (There will be no spoilers for my other works, so if you haven't played them, feel free to read on as well!)

Concept & Concerns

I initially wanted to develop more bite-sized games after releasing For Amerta. But as usual, I changed my mind a lot and ended up wanting to make a longer VN. I wanted to see how far I can go and I wanted to test myself, so I came up with the plot of WTTFM.

WTTFM started off as two illustrations of a random OC I drew back in 2020, a boy based off of orange rhododendrons and another boy based off of a purple/pink hydrangea. They met under the roof of a bus stop in a rainy day and talked to each other, then eventually got closer. That was the whole premise years ago. Then things happened. I was inspired from a lot of medias for this, mainly from ZENO (this game is on itch and is available for free. I really like it and I think it's really uunderrated), Mamiya, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, and Slow Damage.

I was honestly worried at first. WTTFM has a pretty complicated plot and a LOT more details for me to keep track off (like the details of Caleb's grandparents and his parents, the details of Project MP, trying my best to research about brain/memory transplant). Honestly? It was a fun challenge. I've always been more into developing character relationships, so WTTFM is a good way for me to train my worldbuilding skills. It's not perfect by any means, but for someone who hates worldbuilding? I think I did somewhat okay LMAO (at least that's what I'd like to think). Aside from that, the length of the game also worried me a little... and I kept adding more things to the game. At first, I didn't initially plan for the game to have two routes. I only planned the story to go through Seven's route and that's it. But I thought that longer games run a risk of boring their audience. So I had to spice the story somehow, and I decided to torture myself by creating a Caleb route (and to be perfectly honest, Caleb's route was a fun one to write. I did not regret my decision at all). One of my biggest worries was also about how WTTFM would be better if it had gameplay elements. I feel like a point and click element would be great, but I genuinely did not want to go through the hassle. There's no guarantee that all of this work will be worth it, so I wanted to play it semi-safe. 

Aside from all those concerns, developing WTTFM has been genuinely the most fun I've had when developing a VN so far. There are some bumps in the beginning of the development process, but the development of later chapters made up for it! I really want to thank Spader, Dia, and all of their friends for wanting to become a playtester (and betareaders too) and for supporting me during this process. Their enthusiasm is really infectious and it made me enthusiastic about my work too. There was some points where I felt like developing WTTFM is a pure waste of time and considered giving up, but thanks to them, I pushed through with it. I also want to thank Alouette and Vieno_M for helping me playtest as usual (they've playtested my other VNs too haha, sorry for always bothering you guys).

Tyranobuilder

One of the reasons why the development of WTTFM has been fun is because of me using TyranoBuilder (not sponsored, sadly). Ren'py is good, it's VERY good for both beginners and experts. I'm really grateful for Ren'py and its amazing community. However, I find TyranoBuilder easier to work with. Now, TyranoBuilder has its ups and downs as well, but I feel like it suits me and my style of developing better. If I compare it to cooking, Ren'py is like a recipe book and a kitchen with complete ingredients. With Ren'py, you can cook anything you want, but you'll have to cook everything up from scratch (or copy some recipes!). As for TyranoBuilder, you can think of it like instant noodles. The cooking is very simplified, but also restrictive. You can only cook noodles with it. If you have the skills, you can add your own ingredients to make it more filling, but you can still only make noodles with it (unless you're using Tyranoscript, which to my understanding is kinda like the base of Tyranobuilder, and it's similar to Ren'py.) If you know more about this and you spot any mistakes in my description, feel free to correct me!

I spent around 520 hours making WTTFM apparently, nice (the rest of the hours are for other unpublished, unfinished projects)

To get into details, TyranoBuilder is very beginner friendly. For those who doesn't want to deal with the codes all that much and wanted to focus on the story and art, then TyranoBuilder is perfect for you. However, if you want your Visual Novel to have unique gameplay, RPG elements, or some other stuff that's usually not in the VN genre, then you're better off using Ren'py. Otherwise, if you're looking to make a simple VN with choices and maybe some camera panning here and there, TyranoBuilder is good. One thing I love about TyranoBuilder is how you can easily drag and drop sprites, images, and even the textbox. In Ren'py, you'd have to deal with numbers to get a character to where you wanted them to be and I find that so tedious lmao. I really respect people who can deal with that because I just can't.

The downside of using TyranoBuilder is that the community is kind of dead at the moment (unless you're japanese. TyranoScript and TyranoBuilder seem to be thriving in the Japanese VN community). The problems/errors I've encountered so far is fixable by myself, thankfully. As long as you're making a really simple VNs, this shouldn't be too big of a problem.

The Process

As per my usual way of developing VNs, I first started with random sketches of the character sprites, how I want the UI to look, and generally get a feel for the game (and warm up, I guess). Now, for this project, I decided to make a moodboard as well so that I can be more accurate with the graphics and the vibe of the game.

These are the compilations of the sketches that I made for the game (that are also in-game, so if you'd like to read the texts, please check out the extras page in the gallery). 

Despite switching engines, my workflow remains mostly the same except for the fact that I don't have to linger on UI designing for far too long, since Tyrano simplified the process for me. First, I finished most of the character sprites first, then I get to scripting. For WTTFM, I would send two chapters to my playtesters to see if there's any bug or if there's any plot holes/grammar mistakes due to the length of the entire game. I had hoped that this would alleviate some of the burden for my playtesters, but they still ended up getting burdened a lot because one of them decided to play through the entire game TWICE to spot any grammar mistakes/odd sentences (It was Spader. He was helped by his friend, Dia for his second playthrough but still, the sheer effort they went to make this work better is insane. I cannot thank them enough).

After the script is written and finalized, I started working on polishing the CGs, from sketches to a finished one.

Like so! It's so satisfying seeing a folder that's used to be filled with sketches now filled with finished CGs.

Truly one of my favorite parts of developing a VN. Sometimes I look at all of these and I think "damn how did I manage to draw all of these?" knowing how much of a lazy bum I can be. I guess I love making visual novels more than I expected lol.

After I finished all the CGs, I created a CG gallery to top it off, and we're done!

Truth to be told though, I almost gave up making WTTFM. I'm gonna be perfectly honest, there are a lot of times when I would feel like everything I do and anything I make isn't worth anything. That I'm just wasting my life even more than I already do, making useless visual novels for god-knows-who. Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of what I've made, and I try to be positive about it, but sometimes this train of thought is still pretty stubborn. I feel bad for thinking like this, because I know some people really like my work and have been supporting me. It feels like I'm being ungrateful, like I'm disrespecting all of you when that thought crosses my mind and I hate that. However, I just want to be honest about this because this thought does come up a lot during development (not just for WTTFM, for all of them). I think that this train of thought is common though, and for those who are reading through this and is currently feeling like this, I just want to reassure you that you're not a waste of space and that I appreciate you being here. I believe you'll be able to create amazing things and bring some sort of value in this world, even when you yourself don't see it just yet. If not for others, then do things for yourself that makes you happy, don't worry about other people's reaction too much (unless you're actually harming others or doing a crime LMAO)

Whoops got a little corny there! Onto the next section!

Project Metempsychosis

So, more about Project Metempsychosis! Here's a tree structure thing I made about the divisions and stuff:

If you can't read it, you can zoom in with ctrl + or something lol. It should at least be readable that way.

At first, I found the term "Metempsychosis" from google, because I was searching up synonyms for reincarnation and that word popped up. And the definition for metempsychosis is perfect for the kind of ressurection I want for WTTFM, and that is to move the soul to a new body or even a different species. The actual theory for Metempsychosis is spiritual in nature, if I remember correctly. I swear, I've read up on metempsychosis and I forgot most of them already. Metempsychosis is a very interesting concept though, and I think I want to explore it some more. I think I already have some ideas, particularly about the body division. Which, speaking of...

Future Plans

If you happen to follow me on instagram, you might've already seen some of these. However, I erased some info there to hide spoilers for WTTFM. So here are some sketches I drew for my next (maybe) project, without any blocked off spoilers!

Spader helped me brainstorm designs for 03 (for those of you who forgot, 03 is one of Aran's clones. He's actually the first one). I thank Spader so much for his endless help with my VN shenanigans LMAOO

I thought I'll tease this because I think I'm 99% sure that I will work on this, let's see if I change my mind like I always did whenever I tease a new project.

This will revolve around Project Metempsychosis, this time focusing on a subject of the body division, 1316-BD-4-01 A.K.A Uno! Uno finds himself waking up in the facility's Intensive Observation Room with no memories of his whole life and identity beforehand. As he spends his days in the IOR, under the watchful eyes of Dr. Arvin, his memories are slowly coming back to him. Not just his memories though, something seems to be growing inside of him, crawling under his skin, slowly overtaking his body. What exactly is it? And what exactly did they do to Uno? What even is Uno?

I know it seems similar to WTTFM's premise, but this is different, I promise you. There will be no romance at all in the next project and I'll try to focus more on the horror aspect of it. It'll be a linear VN and a shorter one (maybe as long as Sweetest Valentine? Idk). As you might've already noticed, some characters from WTTFM will be showing themselves again in this project, but only as side characters.

EDIT: this was a very rough concept and some things may change majorly in the final version

Wrapping It Up

Thank you for reading this far! I really appreciate you taking a time out of your day to read my incoherent rambling and I do hope you find it insightful or at least entertaining!

WTTFM is honestly my dream game. I've always dreamed of making something like WTTFM ever since I was just a teenager, and I always thought that it was a far-fetched dream, yet here I am! While I am proud of all of my projects, WTTFM will always have a special place in my heart. Though as much as I would like to promote/talk about WTTFM more, I can't for reasons that I'd rather not talk about. I really hate to act as if WTTFM doesn't exist in most of my other socials, yet I also can't proudly yell that I made it either, it's kind of sad lol. But oh well, that is how it is. The fact that I was able to release WTTFM at all is already a big achievement for me and it really feels liberating. I poured my soul into it and having it out in the world is just really refreshing (and kind of nervewracking lol).

So if you've finished WTTFM in its entirety, or if you've played my other works and enjoyed them as well, thank you. Thank you for being here, truly. I'm glad you found some meaning in any of my works, that means a lot to me.

Until we meet again, have a wonderful life, stay safe, and stay healthy! :D