MAY WOLF experience and what's next?

Heya everyone, Erebus here. I finally have time to write my first Devlog yay!

First of all, thank you to everyone that has played my VN and given me feedback. I was very nervous about it, mainly because it's my first time actually writing a full(-ish) story and there are a lot of things I want to put in the game but couldn't because of the time constraint.

MAY WOLF EXPERIENCE

You see, Moonlit Field is made for the MAY WOLF game jam, and I was half serious entering the event. I thought it was a fun joke, everyone can make their silly games about the "my wolf" trope. I've always wanted to make my own VN so I thought "Hey, this is a perfect excuse for me to learn Ren'py and learn other stuff!" (yes, I have zero experience with Ren'py).

I was genuinely curious how other FVN devs did blinking & talking sprites, beaming lights in the background, and other cool things. A good visual novel (for me personally) should be able to deliver both a good story and utilize visual-audio effects to deliver an immersive experience, making the narrative feel more alive. Simple visual cues can be used to do storytelling without words. Since I feel like my writing skill is still very lacking (I barely even write lol), I decided to put my effort in other departments.

Everybody said it's beginner friendly. Well, it was, but only for very basic things (at least that's what I felt). I want my wolf to wag his tail and do more cool effects! tl;dr I juggled between learning Ren'py and making assets for the first three weeks of May. That was an interesting experience and I was really happy since I managed to pull off the stargazing scene just like what I wanted.

Remember I initially thought the jam was just a joke? The last 10 days proved I was terribly wrong. I thought other participants would just do the bare minimum with 2k-word stories. But no, at that point some had already written 6k words, one even at 10k+ words, while mine was just sitting at 1k words (the first scene). I felt awful for not putting in more effort. It was really late, but from that moment I got serious about the project. As you can see (if you've played the game), I put several neat Ren'py tricks in the game but the writing part suffered a lot. It's really rushed, heck I even had to write the story directly in VSC. itch.io also decided to trip me over in the last few minutes, I wanted to just... perish >_<

With how things went, I honestly did not expect much. So it was a huge surprise that my project was well-received! More importantly for me, I got tons of feedback on what to improve, which part bored the readers too much, which part was confusing, and other helpful input. And now there are more things I wanna do.

Oh, if you've read this far, try to check out the other jam submissions here. They are surprisingly good! In fact, one of them is currently my favorite VN, better than some of the long-running projects out there.

COMING UP SOON

My first priority is to polish the game and have it uploaded very soon, including:

• Bug fix for the wrongly color-coded text early in the game, and for error near the playlist part.
• More interaction between the characters, switching the coffee part to make it less boring.
• A better explanation for... how the alternate ending can exist.

And later, hopefully by the end of this month, I want to expand the story for a bit to make the story not end too abruptly.  This should include:

• About 2 days' worth of content, specifically the 2nd date, and the festival trip.
• More Ren'py tricks! Let's see if I can figure some things out.
• Possibly NSFW stuff (I probably need some beta readers and a lot of input for this one. Don't wanna ruin the story because of it.)

NEXT PROJECT?

I've been asked this question quite frequently. I do have different 2 ideas in mind. Let's just call them Plan A and Plan B.

If you've played Moonlit Field, you might notice that I slipped a playlist for the readers. That's a list of some songs that influenced my writing, especially Constellation and Cold Is The Night. The stargazing and climax scenes are basically my attempt to emulate the atmosphere I felt from listening to both of those songs.

For my Plan A, this project will be an anthology-ish of 5 parts that involve the third character from Moonlit Field. I have some plans for the major plot points of the first 3 parts. And just like Moonlit Field, they will revolve around my interpretation of some songs:

- When You See Yourself, Are You Far Away (by Kings of Leon) and Yellow Light (by Of Monsters And Men) for the first part.

- Nobody Else Will Be There (by The National) and Hello My Old Heart (by The Oh Hellos) for the second part.

- Love Love Love (by Of Monsters And Men) and Saturn (by Sleeping At Last) for the third part.

As for Plan B, it'll be more of a detective story with supernatural stuff and action scenes. I'm gonna borrow some elements from several classic mythologies for it (already did with Moonlit Field, might be not too obvious but there's a reference to Sisyphus). There's a rough idea of how I want the first build to be done, but that's all I can say about it rn.

When will either one of them starts development? Someday haha. The biggest obstacle for me to start working on them is from the asset side (character sprites). I can render quite well, but I suck at drawing characters. I'm definitely not gonna solo these projects like I did with Moonlit Field. So if you happen to know someone who can draw, or you can draw yourself, even if it's just lineart then umm... *wink *wink

Alternatively, I feel like I need a lot more experience before I start a much bigger project. I want to explore more stuff with Ren'py. If anyone needs someone to help from the coding side, just shoot me a DM on Discord!

I guess that's all for now. It's kinda funny how a silly little decision to join the jam just for fun snowballed into this, and boy am I glad I made that decision. See ya later!