Where did the Moon hide?

Hi y'all! I’d like to announce the Masada-sensei team is looking for artists! We are an independent team making a non-commercial game, a visual novel about a crime solving-schoolgirl. I’ve been working in this project for about 2 years and it’s about half completed now. We currently count with 2 artists already, but we still lack some strenght in order to push our project.

Namely, we still don’t have any formal background artist. Anybody who can handle item, icon or interface design is also welcome. And also, if none of those things interest you, we could always use a hand with character sprites and cutscenes. At the very moment we’re still on character design, so input from someone who has a strong suit there is also appreciated.

If you’re interested, message us at this very blog. We accept people of varying levels of skill, but some responsability is absolutely required. Have in mind, if you don’t have a lot of free time and you’re not sure you wanna spend it working on a thing, this is probably not the project for you. We are flexible though in terms of deadlines, as long as a minimal work pace is kept.

Last we left off, I talked about how I tried to make my detective visual novel in an engine meant for Ace Attorney fangames. As it turned out, every engine I found was only capable of running the game in a very low resolution, so there was nothing I could do. I turned to my next idea, which would be one of the worst ideas I would have in the entire project so far. Build the game in RPG Maker.

Now, to be fair, you can absolutely make a visual novel in RPG Maker. It has fuctions for dialog boxes, dialog branches, you can put images and stuff so you can actually put character sprites and anything you want. I had some practise with the engine, what could go wrong? Well… there is a difference between something “being capable” of doing something and “being actually suited for it”. I had ridiculous ideas on how to run the game. Because RPG Maker doesn’t have point-and-click, I planned create those sections by taking the third person view player character and turning it into a cursor. I would fill the game with custom scripts without understanding very well what to do with them, go insane thinking how I would make menus… what a nightmare.

I think this is a problem I have, a lot of people have when it comes to making games. I want to make a game but I don’t wanna study to become a programmer. I don’t like games so much I would go to an actual programming school, I don’t even know what sort of courses should I even begin to take if I wanted to learn the bare minimum to make my game work. There’s these handy engines that are easy to use for people, “easier” you could say. I’ve read the tutorials and I can make stuff work, it’s just that I so often run into a dead end and I don’t know what else to do. I think it is unfair that they advertise these engines saying things like “anybody can make a game with this!” and promises of cute anime girls and stuff. But it’s not easy. And having a handy tool helps, but there’s only so much you can do with that.

I’m ranting a lot, but this a very accurate representation of my thought process at this time. Like I said last time, you can have this really cool idea for a game. You can write the story, find some really good graphics somewhere, maybe even strike luck by thinking something very original no one’s done before. But when it comes to programming your game, building a funcional, tangible thing is all that matters in the end.

I stopped working on Masada-sensei at August 2016. I decided to work on something else for a while, trying to build a different game closer to my abilities. It’s here when someone directed me to game jams. Game jams are an interesting way to give yourself an excuse to work in a serious way, meet new people and plan out projects. It’s also a great way to find idiots who say they TOTALLY wanna work on a game and then drop the project 2 or 3 days in because they didn’t know they had to work in order to work. Or they simply didn’t realise they couldn’t combine a hobby project with a 9 hours a day job.

Aaanyways. I didn’t finish any game during this time, but at least I improved a lot on my producer skills. Also realised producing is a thing. Thinking about what feature in a game is essential, what feature in a game isn’t essential, what sort of scope can you aim for, what can you create within that scope that turns out interesting, how to organize information to work with other people, etc. All in all, it was a worthwhile experience. It’s gonna take a while for me to want to work with stragers again, but worthwhile.

Meanwhile, when it comes to Masada-sensei, I spend a long time polishing the sprites, because it was a task I was capable of doing. I spend an incredibly long amount of time, but now I’m very proud of it. I thought for a long time if I could use them on a commercial game, now I know I certainly can’t, but at least as long as I make these games non-commercial, I have at least some very decent quality sprites I didn’t have to pay anyone to do and I completly designed myself.

It was at May 2017 when I began to work on Masada again. I thought making the game in Renpy would be a sensible option, given that it’s an engine meant for visual novels and it also can be heavily modified using python. I heard python is an easy language to learn at My First Game Jam, so I figured out it would be a good idea. I also figured I could formalize all the information about my game in text files and store it in a drive folder in case I wanted to work with someone else (wink, wink). Then, a couple months later I had another idea. My best idea so far. Something that would trump all my previous ideas and be a hundred times more cost/effective…

Have someone else code the game.

So, I began to work on Masada-sensei on no less than 2 years now, around late December 2015, early January 2016. The first work I ever did was designing the sprites. I was developing the characters while coming up with a story, which would later become a visual novel puzzle game with an anime style.

On my earliest idea, the game would be pretty much a carbon copy of the Ace Attorney series, except with a different tone for the story and and branching paths. From January to April I made all the characters and their poses in Kisekae 2, downloaded backgrounds, wrote some parts of the story (mostly introduction cutscenes) searched for artists for additional artwork and of course, tried to programme the game. Emphasis on tried.

Because originally the game was just going to be a skin for Ace Attorney, my first idea was to make the entire game in one of these “Case Makers”. You see, the Ace Attorney community has actually made not one, but several engines in order to make AA games. Some of them even require very little coding and can be made by people with little experience. I already had some programming experience from practicing in RPG Maker and Renpy, so I started using PyWright. Unfortunetly, PyWright does not accept images of a certain resolution, because it’s meant to be used with the GBA and DS sprites which have a tiny handheld size. And the one thing I had going for my game was the pretty sprites in a very good resolution. So I tried another another engine made by fans, PWLib. PWLib was a little more complex, but I was actually able to contact the maker of the software and with a little help from him, I managed to figure out some things. This began around late February, I kept working on this engine until late March that I was able to confirm something with the creator of the software. Something I wanted to know form the beginning but didn’t quite understand from the manual. Could PWLib show images in a bigger resolution? The answer was no. No one besdies me had used the engine so far for anything else other than regular AA games with AA graphics.

I think this was my first real defeat while developing the game. I didn’t care so much about starting again from the beginning the first time, after all I only spent about a month working in PyWright. However, I had now wasted 3 months on pointless work and that had its toll on me. I did contact several artists on tumblr to post promotion art for the game in their blogs as a comission, but after the porgramming fiasco I left that for later.

The silver lining is, this was despite all one of my most productive points. I made most of the sprties, wrote a great chunk of the script, including puzzles, I actually found some royalty free music for the game that sounded good and found incredible backgrounds that fitted the quality of the sprites. Most of those assets I’m still using now. It’s kind of weird when developing a game, you can accomplish a great deal of work for the project without programming knowledge. Heck, you can even design a board game or a card game and print your own cards if you want to make a game. The problem is, if you can’t code at all or don’t know someone who can code, that project seems to be miles and miles away from done. Maybe it even looks as an impossible task. But, if you keep sticking until you can make that work useful then it was really valuable after all!