Hello gamers! Another week, another game jam for Itch.io user rainslices lmaoo!!

This time, I bring you (in robo’s words) a “beautiful and mournful” visual novel with point-and-click elements! If you haven’t played it yet, I invite you to do so since this postmortem may contain spoilers for the game. Otherwise, time to crack open my notes that I wrote in my half-sleepy stupor lmao

First of all, shoutout to “The Prince of Egypt” and “Joseph King of Dreams” by Dreamworks- my attention span could not have survived working on this game without one of these movies taking up half of my monitor. I might just rewatch them when I do work later. Valorant also kept me sane, no matter how tilted I was in those two games.

Second, I enjoyed participating in Velox Fabula and collaborating with the immensely talented individuals I recruited. Shoutout to them fr. Know that at first I dubbed our team name as “VELOX FABULA DREAM TEAM” as a joke. But I see now that I was right all along.

Now, where to begin? I can’t tell you enough how extremely proud I am of our output. And while you can rest easy knowing that production on our end wasn’t too gruesome, I did almost fly too close to the sun with how ‘perfect’ I wanted this game to be. Some things ended up being scope-knifed (more on this later) and I am sad about that. But even so, I’m happy.

It started off as a simple idea. I was looking for something to eat until I came across some French onion soup packets in our pantry. Surely, this would be an excellent choice for lunch! Ah but, I don’t know how to make French onion soup… Haha, imagine if someone made a game about that. Oh.

And so, this ended up being the idea for our game! We dubbed its tentative title: FRENCH ONION SOUP VN. But Crescence, my co-writer, had an awesome addition to that idea: a “Stanley Parable”-esque element. That game had such a vivacious, comedic narrator; the sass, the off-handed comments, the way he gets mad when the player strays from the typical path of the hero. A narrator like that would be so perfect for the jam’s theme, I thought, and I thank Crescence for that giga-brain that idea.

Down the line, there were the typical bumps in the production process. People had IRL-stuff, writing still hasn’t been fleshed halfway through the jam, etc etc. It’s no secret that I struggle the most with writing, I don’t consider myself consistent enough to be good at it. But it’s exactly why I wanted to work with Crescence and soon Andy (our editor!), I wanted to learn how to write better, and they made it so easy to…

Art on the other hand, was right in my ballpark. I wanted to do all the backgrounds and CGs. But ah, the sheer amount of assets I wanted in the game could just not be done by me alone, so I recruited Kin! Who is a stellar background and reliable general 2D artist! Their work on the ingredient CGs is just fantastic, and they follow instructions so well. And lastly, programming. oh god, it’s a skill I’ve also yet to get good at. But there’s no one else I trust more than Marina (MWAM!) to come in clutch in that regard. I’m kirby-vacuuming so much information just by staring at the code alone (Crescence also came in clutch with the coding).

All in all I imagine “Oblivisci Memorias” would never see the light of day if I did everything on my own. Which brings me to one more thing I wanted to impart: Keep your confidence up with what you’re doing. It’s so easy to set high standards for yourself, only to be your worst critic. You need to learn to walk on this earth like you’ve got the biggest balls in town and are proud of it. So yeah, learn to be okay with what you’re doing, and set your standards accordingly so the work is both doable and enjoyable. Even if you think it’s shit, there’s people out there who will eat that cake you made.

AAAAAAAAAAND THAT’S ABOUT IT FOR POST-JAM REFLECTIONS! Sorry, my thoughts are so all-over the place, it’s easier to write when I’m too tired to question things but here I am with a full 8 hours of rest.

NOW, ON THE MATTER OF THIS GAME BEING SCOPE-KNIFED… Unfortunately, there were many things that I wanted to include in the game but couldn’t, such as CGs and visuals that ACTUALLY show your fellow potionmaker that Mr. Potion-San keeps yappin’ about. Haugh. BUT! FRET NOT! I’m going to rework the game! Soon. So, do me a favor…

… look forward to the release of “OBLIVISCI MEMORIAS: REPRISE” soon :)

Thank you for playing our game!

Edit: I forgot to add the promised background process. How cringe of me.