September Update

In Summary

Honestly, this month was on the sucky side in my personal life. I’d normally skip this month, but I had some thoughts on Spooktober as that was one of the good things about this month.

Spooktober

This was the first time I had ever participated in Spooktober due to intimidation. It had humble beginnings but has since grown to be big enough to have broken containment and become something that people outside of visual novel specific spaces recognize. While I’m going to do a dedicated retrospective on the game, there are some general things about game jams I wanted to reflect on. Firstly, it was nice to have several roles on the team: one that required a birds eye view and one (technically two) that did not. This was my first time doing project management for someone else and it was kinda fun. It actually made me realize somethings I was doing wrong on my personal projects. For example, I find having that set end date massively helpful when it comes to planning rather than planning from task to calculate the end date. I’ll be trying some mix of the two or possibly just setting a far enough deadline to be comfortable with and planning backwards. Then evaluating once the deadline hits. This was also my first time with a large cast of VA. The first project I worked on with VA was You’re My Angel back in May but only the love interest was voiced. It also just cemented that I really like Naninovel even more. While I have only found one VN software I actively disliked, (which to my knowledge doesn’t exist anymore) I do like to pay attention to how using each one makes me feel. The blocks I run into, any bugs or perceived bugs I run into, and just how much fun I have. But even when we were running up to the deadline, I was having fun using Naninovel! By the way if you don’t know what game I’m talking about, it’s a ghost yuri game about possession, vulnerability, and CRTs called Possessed By Fate which you can play here: https://sapphicore.itch.io/possessed-by-fate Anyway, despite September being a bummer besides Spooktober, I’m hopeful that October will be a good month. As I posted on my bluesky, it’ll be my month of resting and finishing things! Hope your September was better than mine, and I hope you have a good October!