Hi all!

By this point I feel like I'm beyond writing proper intros to these things. You know why you're here. I hope you enjoy reading.

Results

Wow!!! I'm writing this section after seeing all of the results for the first time and they're genuinely wild to me. 1st place in music? Are we being for real? Thank you so much to everyone who played and voted. I need to lie down after publishing this.

Conceptualization + Story

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of  pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn  delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy."

• Ursula K LeGuin in "The Ones that Walk Away From Omelas"

I have an admission to make. I can't seem to stop writing love stories where the love interest is a ghost. I've published 10 (scratch that, 11) stories on Itch at the time of writing and at least 3 of them are about this. I include in this all manner and variations of "ghost," all the unreal are welcome here. I do not know why this keeps happening*. I don't think I can help myself. The same thing applies to the tendency of my narrators to hallucinate the world they live in. I really can't help myself.

This VN is, on paper, something of a rejection of the tenets of these kinds of storytelling, a challenge for myself to, for once, write something straightforward and happy. I've had the basic bones of this story stuck in my head for the past few months since I had the above realization about my work. The narrator's best friend comes back to life after a horrible accident and the two fall in love. There are no twists, only a terribly great fortune for everyone involved.

I will concede that I've again written something of a bait and switch against the theme. The setup here, of someone coming back from the dead, is pretty expected material, especially (read the above) from me. It's in the insistence TN has of this not being another ghost story that a greater and more interesting dissonance begins to form. The conflict of "Make a Fountain, My Chest" lies in the narrator's (and also, I suppose, my own) ability to convince the reader of a fundamentally impossible fact.

How does TN go about convincing you of this? Unfortunately, we are not dealing with a particularly trusting narrator. TN states some facts straightforwardly upfront. In other moments, TN intentionally plays into narrative tropes. If people think in terms of stories, then so be it. If the progression of a story from introduction to conclusion is one about arriving towards a truth, TN rewrites the introduction to reach the truth. Do you believe someone more after they've already admitted to a lie? Do you feel like you've discovered something?

Music

Ok enough of that let's talk about music. This was the last part of the project I made. In Velox Turbo (4 days!) I found that I only had time to make 1 track. It was only about 3 minutes long and it probably loops once or twice in a play-through. 

I started composing music at 10:30pm on a night when I still wanted to go to bed at a reasonable time. While I did not have the time to plan out multiple tracks with distinct personalities, I was able to make one quite long track that goes through a few different sonic arcs. It probably (depending on reading speed) wouldn't loop more than once. I left a lot up to chance with this one. Would the reader find the audio lined up nicely with what they were reading, or would it uncomfortably clash? 

The piano was improvised by yours truly and augmented with a number of different reverb effects to change the quality of the piano and the room it played in. I'm still learning how to play the piano, but I think the good moments sounded quite good and the reverb carried through the not-so-good moments.

Art

From previous jams, I've realized that painting backgrounds when a work has several scenes can be a recipe for conflict. In You'll Never Catch Me Leaving, I sidestepped this issue by using some backgrounds across a number of different scenes. I kind of hated this, I wanted each scene to look a little different. This was bad news for me this time. There are 20 scenes in this story, many of them only a sentence or two long. To make this work, I used the same filter on a number of different photos I've taken to make a large amount of visually cohesive backgrounds. I feel the need to call out Misericorde as arguably the most influential work on this aspect of the visuals. 

Sprites! Sprites? I've done sprites before, they featured pretty prominently in Repeat it Back To Me. This is my first time doing them for a jam though, which was scary! I've read some comments comparing them to the portrait work in Disco Elysium and I take that as a very high complement.

A Note On Efficiency

I'm so unbelievably lazy. I slept two full nights and probably spent upwards of 4 hours in the jam period playing games that involve no reading at all. I've read everyone else's postmortems while editing this one and the things some people will do for a game jam are wild to me. I am a believer in being a chill guy. Some of you need to calm down.

In all seriousness, I think I'm able to make up for what I like in the dedication to the grind with a relatively sharp idea of what I'm trying to do and what I'm capable of. At this point, I'm confident enough in myself to be at least a little lazy.

The Art Section Again With More Opinions

I have another admission to make. I feel a little gauche as an artist whenever I state my intentions too clearly. What do I want people to feel about my work? Well, I think you should go read it and find out for yourself. 

That being said, I have a particularly nasty bone to pick this time. It's with the way some horror media handles the disfigured, the damaged, and the ugly. It's infuriating enough to the point where I'm willing to admit that I try to undo as much of the work done here whenever I get the chance. Put frankly, I hate it here. 

We could point to examples in many genres of similar behavior, but this tendency feels fully realized in horror where the human (and nonhuman) form is at higher stake of being morphed into something that inspires terror. As I continue to read horror and write any number of near-misses on the genre, I find this bothering me more and more. 

I don't think narratives that use ugliness as an indicator of badness or evilness have much to say. I want to find love in the things we are told are not to be loved. This is the bare minimum artists can do. Please, challenge me to do so. 

Right now I have very little interest in drawing characters in a straightforward or appealing way. I want to show what people really are. This will continue in the works I currently have planned and likely past those as well.

Programming

Ok enough of that let's talk about numbers. I used to be a math tutor (if you couldn't already tell that.) This is my area of expertise I promise.

This game marks a switch from me off of my own Ren'Py NVL framework onto Narrat, which does basically all of the same things but is generally more functional in all the ways I care about. To start, I am no longer reliant on the integrity of my sloppy code to continue functioning. Second, I'm familiar enough with web development to be able to iterate pretty quickly when doing things like editing CSS layouts. Third, and this is the big one, Narrat being web-native means it runs so nicely in a browser compared to Ren'Py, at least from my own testing.

Coming back to my point on laziness, I think it's so important to find the right tools for the job. Right now, for me, that is a more specialized engine that does the heavy lifting I wanted to do.

If anyone wants help using Narrat as a VN engine the way I've been using it, please reach out! I'll help you.

Some More Critical Thoughts and Future Work

I have a final admission to make. I've become a much harsher critic in the past few months than I've been previously, both of my own works and of the work of others. I won't be critiquing anyone's entries here since I do genuinely think everyone did a great job (especially considering the time constraints!), but I will be more of a downer here. In case that's not your thing, the announcement I'm ending this thing with is that I'll almost certainly be releasing both parts of my next (longer) story, Clarity, by the end of the year.

I've been thinking a lot about writing discourse that I see floating around. A lot of it is quite bad. I say this as if I am not also at fault for reading it. The specific strain of discourse I'm talking about is one that seems untethered from both writing and reality itself. Vague gestures about writing that are somehow divorced from any actual writing. There are so many researchers and writers who've contributed so much that I feel a bit embarrassed whenever I make a suggestion in this strain, let alone post about it.

It is after acknowledging this that I must regrettably embarrass myself and say that I've been thinking a lot about cliches in art, especially in my own. 

I've grown a bit concerned about how much a collectively hallucinated reality has been impacting the things I write. Especially, now. I think this probably comes across the hardest in the mall scene. Even when the setting was an imagined one, the awareness of what I was leaning into made me feel weird writing it, especially knowing that I damn well did this unconsciously before as well. I find these compulsions towards familiar symbols and ideas to be a worrying one. For one, it's boring. More problematically, I'm worried that it's cooking the way I see the world. Repeating something doesn't make it more true. As more and more media seems to be garbling itself up into nothing, I find myself wanting to push against this, too. 

I want to see the world as it is, not as what I think it is. 

This is a profoundly uncomfortable and difficult process, especially knowing that there's a good chance that nobody ever notices. Still, I can't keep myself away. I've been working on my next game, Clarity. I'm keeping it as short as possible and I think it'll be about the length of a novel. It will be out this year, barring any other dramatic realizations about my own writing that cause it to go through another round of major revisions.

* I lied, I Do

The basic premise for why these stories compel me is actually pretty easy to spell out. The "human" character desires love where it can't be returned while the "unhuman" character desires to become real despite the bludgeoning of, well, reality. Neither can ever get what they want. This fact is what keeps the desires from resolving in a narratively boring place. The only choice is drama and escalation. The only ending is a bad one. Isn't that what love is all about? 

Until Next Time,

Sky