It’s been about 4 months now since Ciikos Bridge was released, so I wanted to take a look back at the development journey for skyharborr’s first visual novel release. This postmortem will cover the development period, asset creation, release, and a little bit of post-release. It’s also mostly from my (blistered/rei) perspective as the lead developer.

This postmortem aims to pull double-duty as a record of Ciikos Bridge’s development for my own reference (to compare later with future games), as well as providing some insight into the challenges the project faced, which will hopefully help other devs prepare for similar challenges in the course of making their own games.

In the course of writing this postmortem, I also gathered some questions from other VN developers on twitter which are indicated as “Audience Question!”, which have been answered by either myself (“R”) or teruki (“T”).

INTRODUCTION

Ciikos Bridge began as a NaNoRenO 2015 project. It was meant to be completed in one month as a short practice project so that I could experience the full development cycle, from concept to post-release, before returning to work on my long-term project, Theo.

I had a few creative goals in mind for myself when I started Ciikos Bridge:

1. I wanted to tell a story with little to no conflict in the plot.
2. I wanted to do all the artwork on my own.
3. I wanted to release a companion guidebook along with the game.

Concepting for Ciikos Bridge took place in February 2015 and I spent one week on it with my teammate, teruki. I wanted to use characters from our established shared universe to simplify the writing and character design processes. teruki came on board as a co-writer and programmer. We quickly sussed out a high-level outline of the story/game flow, and some details of the alternate universe that would become the setting for Ciikos Bridge.

With these things in mind, we set off to make the first skyharborr game.

THE DEVELOPMENT PERIOD

Our Communications Toolbox: Trello, Skype, Dropbox, Google Docs (at first)

We used Trello to keep track of tasks, prioritize, and record design decisions made while chatting over Skype. Trello allowed us to see each other’s progress and see how the project as a whole was progressing. Using Trello also has the added benefit of having an Activity Feed, showing when tasks were added, completed, deleted, or moved. I used our Trello Activity feed to make a proportional timeline of Ciikos Bridge’s entire development period (excluding concepting in February and post-release build updates past Version 1.0):

View the full-size here

The ranges displayed on the timeline show the approximate time period when a task was begun, until the task was finished. For example, the “Sprites” bar shows when I began working on sprites (sketching, setting up files, etc) until I finished all the sprites (all sprites exported and ready to use in-game). Working on asset creation during each of these time-periods was mostly on-and-off because of our lives as students. I also spent a lot of time task-switching, which resulted in the “frequent task-switching” type of development progression shown below:

View the full-size here

Ciikos Bridge’s development began with daily task-switching. I would write during my commute to school and during breaks between classes, then in the evening I would work on art assets. This resulted in slow and steady progress on all fronts, until I injured my hand towards the end of NaNoRenO, which resulted in a drastic change of pace for development. After recovering from my injury and the NaNoRenO deadline had passed, I gradually shifted to a more focused development style, switching tasks every 1-2 weeks, then eventually staying with one task most of the time until it was complete, reserving task-switching for when I felt stuck on something, or if I was waiting on feedback.

ASSET CREATION

Part 1: Writing

Writing was a joint effort between myself and teruki. We split up the writing based on characters: teruki was in charge of the scenes with their characters talking to Taku, while I was in change of the scenes with my characters talking to Taku. Since Taku was my character, we tried doing some scenes in a roleplay-like format in Google Docs, but as we got busy with school we opted for writing whole scenes individually and passing them back and forth for feedback/edits. This was the first time either of us co-wrote a story, and we had some disagreements on style and amount of narration at one point. We ultimately settled on something in-between our individual styles.

I was in charge of editing and quality control and tried to ensure the story read as though there was only one writer. After editing, I would do scene direction/expression coding and teruki would check my work and make changes to the scenes with their characters as needed.

✿ Audience Question! How did we come up with these unique & charming characters and dialogue?

• R: We actually “cheated” with this in the sense that these characters were already in development for many, many years prior to Ciikos Bridge. All the characters were kept more-or-less in-character with a few modifications to take into account their backstories in the alternate setting. I guess the take away is that spending a lot of time developing your characters makes it easier to write them without having to force anything to happen, and hopefully this lets their personalities shine through to the audience!

Part 2: Art and Design

I. Concept

I am not the best at choosing colors, and Ciikos Bridge was meant to be in full color, so I decided to use a limited palette. I created a palette based on all the characters outfits, skin tones, eye colors, and hair colors. The result was a set of 30 colors which were the only colors I allowed myself to use for all the art assets. I found this to be very effective for myself and plan to continue using this methodology.

II. Backgrounds

Sharm on the Lemma Soft Forums (LSF) inspired me to try a modular style for the background art. It looked like it would be a timesaver, since the original plan was to complete the game within a month. My backgrounds weren’t nearly as modular as Sharm’s, but I do think this method was effective for what I wanted to do. BGs were the quickest part of development to finish out of the tasks I was responsible for. Ciikos Bridge has a total of 8 backgrounds that use modular elements (out of ~14 backgrounds).

View the full-size here

III. Sprites

Using existing characters came as a double-edged sword for the sprites. Because I was pretty confident in drawing the designs and expressions for most of the characters already, I decided to push myself with multiple arm poses. In total there were:

• 8 character sprites
• 5 sprites with arm pose variations
• 1 sprite with ear pose variations

This made completing sprites take a little longer, and I also had to figure out how to do it on the fly since it was my first time doing sprites with multiple arm poses.

✿ Audience Question! How does sprite creation compare to other kinds of illustration?

• R: Every artist has their own way of doing things, so I can only speak about this in terms of my style and workflow.
• I find the biggest difference in making sprites compared to backgrounds or stand-alone illustration is that sprites demand a strict layer hierarchy which should be mirrored across all sprites. On the other hand, the way you structure the layers/image for backgrounds or stand-alone illustrations can vary piece to piece. It’s important to mirror the structure of the sprite file across all sprites for the same project because it will help to export everything in an orderly way. It also makes coding in the sprites easier when they are all organized the same.
• Event/CG illustrations with variations (like the one in Ciikos Bridge) have similar structural demands as sprites, but pieces without variations don’t need to worry about code and can be structured more freely and individually.

View the full-size here

• Sprite creation also has a certain demand of cohesion, whereas stand-alone illustrations are freer to depart from the game’s style, or the artist’s typical body of work.

IV. GUI Design

Canonically (in the shared universe from which the Ciikos characters were borrowed), Taku adores rabbits. I carried this over and this became part of the theme of the GUI design (the other motifs being hands and flowers, which are more related to the game’s setting). The first parts of the GUI to be finalized were the in-game items: textbox, choices, quick menu, and the inventory. These set the tone for the larger, more complex screens.

For designing the larger screens (preferences, save/load, credits, help, etc), I turned to pen & paper thumbnailing. The advantages of this method for me were:

• Thumbnails are small and quick to iterate.
• I only have one monitor, making physical sketches easier to reference once I started working digitally.

The preferences screen went through the most iterations because it has the most items the player can interact with (it was the most complex for me). I discovered it was easier for me to design the rest of the screens after the preferences screen was complete.

Part 3: Programming

This was entirely teruki’s domain except for the menial stuff like dialogue, menus, sprite expressions, and the odd number fiddling on my part. We used Cute Demon Crasher’s sprite code so a big thank you goes out to the SugarScript team for making that available!

✿ Audience Question! How did we decide on the design for the trading system?

• T: Rei had a rough plan of the trading and spells system. I gave some input and clarified the rules. Underlying our exchanges were the following principles: the interface should be intuitive and simple to use; the game shouldn’t be frustrating or too easy to figure out; and no situation should arise where the player would get stuck (i.e., have to reload from a save or restart to move forward). Despite our efforts, a player got stuck, but we’ve managed to fix that and other post-release bugs rather quickly.
• Rei had full reign in designing the trading interface and system, only limited by what I could code (and the design principles). The process went something like this:

View the full-size here

• As an example, at one point, we thought it would be cool if the items could overlap each other in the inventory, like they were jumbled up in Taku’s backpack. I could probably code that system now (and back then, actually), but the plan was to finish the game in a month. I decided to use a grid to arrange the items in a character’s inventory, but I couldn’t get the grid to give me the overlap effect. Neither of us insisted on the feature, so we kept things simple and implemented the inventory system that was ultimately released.

✿ Audience Question! Were there any specific challenges in coding the trading system?

• T: When I was developing the trading and spells system, the hardest part was finding (and sometimes using) expressions in Ren’Py screen language, but I was able to get by with the available documentation and my limited programming experience. It probably felt more like an ordeal than it actually was.

Part 4: Music and Sound Effects

All the music and sound effects used in Ciikos Bridge were found online and used under CC-BY, public domain, or another commercial-use OK license. I resorted to making one sound effect on my own after not being able to find anything satisfactory online.

RELEASE

Phew! All that asset creation (and hunting) is hard work! After 9 months of development and 4 months of me working on the guidebook, we were finally read for release.

Part 1: Preparing for Release

During September and October 2015, I set Ciikos Bridge aside for a little bit to work on art for a Yuri Game Jam entry. It was successfully completed and released within the jam’s time frame. This slowed down Ciikos Bridge a little bit, but it was a good experience to collaborate with other devs.

It was also during Yuri Game Jam that I started closed beta testing for Ciikos Bridge. I gathered some Windows OS testers (friends and fellow developers) to give Ciikos Bridge a whirl. This first round of testing helped us to identify most of the major bugs in the trading system, and teruki was able to iron them out. In November, we finished up all the game content and I got a few Mac OS testers to test the full game. We were satisfied that all the major bugs were eliminated, and the game sat at Version 0.99 while we took a break for the winter holidays and all the big titles for Christmas were being released.

Part 2: Guidebook

After the holidays, I needed to finish the guidebook. There were many times I considered releasing the game first, then the guidebook second, but I ultimately decided against it because I figured my next chance to try a simultaneous game/book release would be far off judging by the length of Ciikos Bridge’s development. I don’t get the chance to lay out pages very often, so designing the guidebook was a fun challenge for me. I gave myself a CD insert size constraint for no reason other than I wanted it to be the same size as a PlayStation CD insert. (Some players said Ciikos Bridge gave them PlayStation 1 era vibes which I consider a huge success and honor..!)

Part 3: Going Gold!

We went gold with Version 1.0 via twitter announcement on April 22, 2016 at 9PM EST (a Friday night). I decided to release at night because it was a weekend and I wanted to do a soft release with a smaller audience in case there were any obvious errors in the build. We did spot some typos and minor errors, which were quickly fixed, and a new build was uploaded the next day before I posted Ciikos Bridge to LSF (a much larger audience) and tumblr (here). Releasing on a weekend seemed to be a good idea because we got a lot of traffic and downloads the first few days. I also released the game right before my final exam week so I got to stay high-energy and sleep-deprived for the first week of release, whoo!

I think the timing worked out pretty well and Ciikos Bridge had a modest but largely positive reception! I’m very proud of the work that went into Ciikos Bridge and grateful to everyone who supported the game’s development and helped spread the word after release.

✿ Audience Question! How did we go about marketing Ciikos Bridge?

• R: The short answer is that we didn’t. The long answer is that I just tweeted about it semi-regularly and interacted with other VN developers on twitter, which was both fun and often insightful. I wasn’t used to cross-posting content while I was working on Ciikos Bridge so the NaNoRenO thread was woefully neglected after March ended. I tried #screenshotsaturday on twitter once or twice, but that’s not enough for it to matter much! In the end, I just owe it to my friends and fellow devs for helping me spread the word!

Part 5: Numbers

As of August 18, 2016, Ciikos Bridge had:

• 3940 views on itch.io
• 1034 game downloads
• 414 guidebook downloads
• 12 purchases (pay-what-you-want)

The greatest sources of traffic were: LSF, twitter, tumblr, itch.io. Other sources of traffic were: VNDB, this blog, youtube.

The one statistic I was interested in when Ciikos Bridge went live was the game/book download ratio for the simultaneous game/book release. As of August 18, 2016, the game/book download ratio was 40.0% which sounds pretty good, but I don’t have much to compare it to.

Other than that, I didn’t have many expectations as far as numbers go when I was developing Ciikos Bridge. It makes me incredibly happy that people played it at all. I guess these numbers will be the comparison point for other games down the line.

A hearty thanks to everyone who downloaded the game, shared, tipped, and supported skyharborr thus far!

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Overall, Ciikos Bridge did its job as a practice game. Though the development period was much longer than I anticipated, I think the effort was worth it to run through a full development cycle, seeing where I stand, and how I can improve. I had fun working on it, and when players tell me they had fun playing it really makes everything worth it! Of course not everybody who played the game gave me glowing feedback, but I’m happy for all kinds of comments and grateful to the players who gave this small game a chance.

I definitely recommend new developers start with a small project to get their feet wet and help them learn about what kind of workflows work best for them. (Much smaller than Ciikos Bridge, btw…. 8 character sprites, 16 backgrounds, and a trading system for your first game is quite ambitious haha). I think in addition to learning about the full development cycle, doing something small and for fun will help you figure out the kind of games you want to make and the kinds of stories you want to tell.

Thanks for reading!

You voted and the results are in!

CIIKOS BRIDGE Character Popularity Poll Results:

• ① Faun Prince Ratsu - 37.5%
• ② Forest Lord - 18.8%
• ③ Jinsuke - 14.6%
• ④ Taku (Protagonist) - 12.5%
• ⑤ Kamiya Shinji - 6.3%
• ⑥ Passagekeeper - 4.2%
• ⑦ Riku - 2.1%
• ⑦ Tanukawa - 2.1%
• ⑦ Haré - 2.1%

You can download the special character ranking illustration as a 1366x768 wallpaper on itch.io. (And if you haven’t played yet, you can download the game there as well for Win/Mac/Linux!)

Thank you for voting, everyone! ^__^ How did your favorite character do?

Yaoi Game Jam has started! You can visit the jam’s tumblr page to find more information and follow along with everyone’s game development! I’ll be taking part (and hopefully complete a demo) with a new game called Hot Jalapeño!

Hot Jalapeño will most likely have 18+ content, but I will do my best to prepare a safe-for-work/16+ version concurrently with the adult version! If you enjoyed Ciikos Bridge, I hope this new title will have the same colorfulness about it (even though the age rating is higher :’D). Please look forward to more information later!

Ciikos Bridge has been out for a month now! Thank you to everyone who spread the word, downloaded, played, got their friends to play, sent in comments, and supported me during development! Ciikos Bridge has over 500 game downloads to date thanks to all of you! If you played through, you can vote on the Ciikos Bridge Favorite Character poll! The poll will be open indefinitely, but I’ll be using the results up till Sunday, June 5,  2016 to draw up a special character ranking illust ^___^ There’s a tie for 2nd place right now. I wonder who’s in the lead?

You can download Ciikos Bridge on itch.io!

If anyone has a specific question about the development process for Ciikos Bridge, feel free to ask and I will do my best to address it when the poll results go up!

For anyone wondering about Theo, I’m still working on it. Theo is one for the long haul so most of the updates for it come in the form of vague progress tweets. The goal for this year is to finish writing most of it (stretch goal: all of it) and we all know how exciting wordcount updates are haha.

So! In the coming days/weeks, please expect some more information about Hot Jalapeño and the Ciikos Bridge poll results/post-mortem.

Thanks for reading!

You can download Ciikos Bridge for Win/Mac/Linux on itch.io here: https://skyharborr.itch.io/ciikos-bridge

Embark on a journey through forest and fog! What kind of adventure will you have in this colorful world?

Features:

• A friendly adventure story
• Trading gameplay
• 5 endings
• Guidebook with more fun stuff
  

After a year of development (on and off between classes no less!) it’s finally out! This is skyharborr’s first visual novel release and we put a lot of hard work into it! Please explore the world with Taku and have fun!! ^o^

Hello fine folks!

It’s been nearly a year since I updated the blog so I figured I’d do another update!

I spent the better part of last year from the time the blog went up till December working on Ciikos Bridge. With a lot of hard work and a little luck, Ciikos Bridge should be out by the end of this month (crossing my fingers; university work tends to get in the way at the worst times).

Some good news is that this will be my last semester of university which hopefully means more time to spend on development and maybe more frequent blog posts? I’d like to do some basic art-focused posts in the future for improving visual novel asset workflow so hopefully there’s some interest in that! As far as non-art topics, I’ll have to see what I feel like I can talk about. As a one-person operation, blog updates will likely be every other month at first (since I’d like to spend most of my time on development…).

For smaller and more regular dev updates, there’s always my twitter (beware of daily life ramblings as well!) If you’re not into the daily life/informal interaction thing it’s probably better to just follow the blog. I’ll do my best to keep this blog on-topic (visual novel/dev related).

Looking forward to blogging about more interesting and relevant things this year. Let’s work hard!

Hello! Welcome to skyharborr’s shiny new site! This is where I’ll be posting updates on current projects, general annoucements, and maybe some learnings and thoughts about visual novels and game dev. Right now skyharborr is working on two games:

NEW PROJECT: CIIKOS BRIDGE

“Ciikos Bridge” is a fantasy adventure visual novel in progress for NaNoRenO 2015! I’ll be working with teruki, my secret weapon awesome friend, who will be doing all the cool code I can’t be bothered to learn in one month (phew!). I’ll be on main writing and art duty as usual, but teruki is going to help me co-write some parts (since we’re using both of our original characters in this story)!

If you want to follow our development, we’ll likely have a bunch of informal updates at our LSF thread throughout the month. This is our first year doing NaNoRenO together so I’m excited!! Good luck to everyone else taking on the challenge this month! :D

UPDATE: THEO

If you’ve been following me elsewhere for a while, you’ll know that “Theo” is my main project right now. Theo is currently sitting at a little over 22,000 words! It sounds like a lot but it’s actually not much farther than the end of alpha v.1 story-wise… The upside is that I added a bunch of additional scenes and choices in the beginning to establish some facts/world-building stuff in the least infodump-y way I could manage! When April rolls around I’ll be heading back into working on Theo alpha v.2 full blast >uO)b

Thanks for reading and see you next update!