Whew, finally it's done. Released my first game on itch for Vampire the Masquerade Jam 2022! Like most first-time projects, there're many things that are far from perfect, and that lessons could be learn from it.

In this dev log I'd like to take a look back at the development process and examine the good, the bad & the ugly and the lesson learned.

1. The engine - Haxeflixel: 

• The good: Haxeflixel is very, very lightweight and the bundled build is also very small (48MB in total, with around 41MB of assets). It's free and open-source too!
• The bad:  Haxeflixel does have a community with supports and answers to questions should you run into bugs. It's proven to be sufficient but it's miniscule compare to the support and amount of tutorials more popular game engines such as Unity and Ren'Py has. The engine does not have any GUI like Unity or Ren'Py which I think might have a big learning curve if it's one's first game engine.
• The ugly:  Haxeflixel is a general purpose 2D game engine. You can't just pop your visual novel game's script in and have it ready to run like Ren'Py. The VN system for this game had to be developed from scratch. It worked, but I would never recommend anyone doing it for a month, ever. In hindsight this is part of the reason why the game's length was short. A lot more time was spent to code a functional VN experience than on the game's dialogue & script. Oops.

2. The graphics

• The good: Thanks to free stock images sites Pexels and Unspalsh, combined with photobashing and paintover, graphic assets creation process was much faster than drawing everything from scratch (which was my usual method).
• The bad: Due to having many assets from different sources, it's hard to maintain a consistency in term of art style. I tried my best, but I don't think this can beat a wholly hand-drawn game.
• The ugly: The time limit means I can only do so much. There are parts of the graphics that seems very "sketch" like, it's not polished to my usual standard but it is what it is.

3. The writing

• The good: I guess I had fun. Clan Tzimisce to me has always been iconic, with characters like Sascha Vykos & Bloodline's Andrei all gave us such strong impressions. I mean... the guts, the gall, the balls when Sascha - then Myca Vykos - did at the convention of thorns? Absolutely iconic. Overall I think I've tapped into the whole obsession, possessiveness and control, but maybe not enough fleshcrafting for my liking. 
• The bad: The game's length is shorter that I'd like it to be. I thought I wrote a lot but when divided into 4 endings, each has very short gameplay time in total.
• The ugly: The entire game's script was written in Figma - an UI prototyping web application, and so there were no spellcheck at all. I'll be running the whole thing through a spellchecker at a later point in time.

4. The development process overall

• The good: Scoped down small enough for it all to be done in a month. Last year me and my friend attempted something for VtM jam too, but the scope quickly spiraled out of control. It's still in development till this day.
• The bad: My good-old ~7 years old laptop broke down for a week during this jam. Thankfully it's fixed now, but that whole week of no progress led to the impending-doom-kinda-feeling of oh no I'm never gonna finish it now wasn't that nice.
• The ugly: Shoulder cramp. Need to take breaks in more frequent interval.

And that's it from me for now. I'll be playing other games from this jam now! o(*￣▽￣*)ブ