O2A2 Post Mortem

Hey everyone! For this O2A2 Walt the Fish and I directed two games: I Got Isekai’d Into A World Where I’m a Paraplegic?! and Mindread, respectively. The former unfortunately did not make it into the jam due to time constraints, but we’re still very happy with what we’ve accomplished. This was both of our first time participating in a game jam and we can’t believe the reception people had towards Mindread as it sits at 2,000+ browser plays and 300+ downloads!!

Art

Ladymeowsith : For the art I had a pretty clear idea of what the main menu screen and sprites would look like. Aside from Mark’s design, I didn’t go through many revisions for the art and the final version ended up looking pretty much to the sketch. When it comes to visual novels, art is definitely the aspect that comes most easily for me. For Mindread, I had a lot of fun designing Mark (especially the set of expressions he would have!) whereas for Paraplegic I enjoyed the challenge of combining uncommon ideas into one cohesive aesthetic.

For the cafe background, I photobashed a stock image in order to save time and then blurred it.

Process

Ladymeowsith : Julius is an established character from one of my other stories that was used for the purpose of O2A2. We were deciding between a myriad of different scenarios but ultimately decided on an ex for the past history and tension it would provide the narrative. In the beginning we were debating whether the “ex” should be male or female and had several concepts for them. Ultimately we decided on Mark’s design since it was the queer edition of o2a2. Both of us were involved in some way on every step, and it was very helpful to bounce ideas so frequently. I feel like it helped immensely in producing a vn of the quality that Mindread ended up being. We started with a plot outline on a shared google doc before delving into the script, with both of us making frequent edits.

Walt the Fish: Of the several ideas we came up with for O2A2, Mindread stuck out as the one with the most potential for a good story.  We already had Julius as a concept but not as a fully fleshed out character - all we really had for him is he is a mind reader and that he doesn’t like that very much. I personally thought the trope of “mindreader who hates his abilities because he hears every thought” was overdone, so I wanted to take it in a different direction and allow Julius the choice to mindread, in a sort of curiosity-killed-the-cat way.  After some thought, an ex bf/gf gave us a LOT of ideas. How did their relationship work? What do they still love about each other, and what made them abandon that love? How does this all get talked about in a chance meeting at a coffee shop?

Originally Mark was going to be a girl! We ended up settling on a bf for Julius to match the theme of the jam better. It worked out great, since we fell in love with him in like a day, lol. But LadyM did some concept sketches of f!Mark that I really love.

For the mindreading mechanic itself: We thought of the three word concept first, then thought that colors would tie into emotion and give the reader some hint as to what Julius is seeing. The theme of anxiety/making assumptions came after we made the mechanic - it’s easy to make assumptions on such limited information, which ends up screwing Julius over. As soon as the 3 words idea was made, we came up with ways to break it, which is what the big major ending stems from.

Script

Hi! It’s me, Walt, the script writer! The script was originally twice the size of the allowed 1000 words. Cutting out all of Mark and Julius’s cute interactions felt like ripping the limbs off my own child :,). Thankfully LadyM is very good at making my word vomit work for a visual novel. Besides the word count, though, the final script is pretty much exactly what I put to paper. We came up with a rudimentary plot (basically what the flow of their conversation would be), I wrote it in a conversational style, we cut out some awkward bits, and that was that. 

I had a lot of fun fleshing out the types of people Mark and Julius are through their dialogue. I wanted to make it apparent to Julius through his internal monologue that he’s very anxious and insecure, but make it appear more to Mark that he is genuine. Which he is, to some degree! Like anyone else, he’s a blend of traits, and while he’s a little two-faced he does have redeemable traits. A lot of what fleshed out Mark got cut for word count, but we did leave in a little bit of his snark, lol.

Music

Hi! It’s me again, Walt the music guy! This was my first time ever producing music, and I learned a lot. (When I say first time, I mean first time - I hadn’t even tested the software I used for the music until I started writing the song.) I came up with the melody in a day, and by day three it was the song you hear in Mindread.

Originally I wanted to write a pop song. Something you’d hear at both a cafe and at a party, upbeat and fun but still something you could unwind to. As it turns out, writing pop music is HARD. Instrumental pop music just sounds so empty without lyrics. My musical background is also in classical/jazz, so as much as I wanted to break away from it, with the time constraint and my lack of experience I just found it to be the safest bet to go with the cafe ambiance rather than actual cafe music. I was also unsatisfied with the sound, since I’m not great at mixing or tuning electronic instruments. To me it’s a bit disappointing, but it’s something to aim for for the next project! Besides, a lot of comments said they enjoyed the ambiance with the music, so I’m happy about the reception!

For the curious, I used an AKAI MPK Mini III as my keyboard/beatmaker, and MPCBeats, the free music production software it comes with.

Thanks again for playing our games and it was a lot of fun interacting with the community for O2A2 <3