Demo Post-Mortem

So it’s been a couple days since the end of NaNoRenO, & I’m realizing just how exhausted I am after all that n_n;;;;;;

Here’s some fun stats about the game jam & demo :

• 100 Hours of work completed
• 5k word script | 30-45 min of gameplay
• 11 Backgrounds including the hotkeys + the main menu
• 3 characters | 16 expressions
• 2 blood milkshakes
• 1 game jam completed! (and my first one at that)

Why did I decide to do a game jam?

I’d been wanting to participate in a game jam for a long time, but hadn’t really found the right time or the right jam. I knew I wanted to do a solo jam as well just because I’m a stubborn person lmao.

NaNoRenO came up in a slack channel for a writing course I was taking & I decided to participate purely on impulse. I figured if I didn’t participate now, I’d lose a perfect opportunity to have just enough stress to produce something cool without completely burning out. I got to learn Ren’Py for this project too, which has been really fun.

The idea for Mona Mourn had been rotating in my head for a short while before the game jam, so I thought it’d be good to run with & I’m pretty glad I did!

How am I feeling about the demo now that it’s done?

Overall I’m 9/10 happy with the demo.

There are a couple of things I ended up cutting out due to time constraints + some nitpicks I’ll be fixing/adjusting for the final version, but I think for a first game it’s pretty solid. I’m hoping a couple more people will pick it up & give their thoughts on it just so I can have a better idea on what other people think of it too.

Some changes to be made to the demo section :

• Change the transition between the images to be softer
• Add more ambiance music throughout the came, refrain from too much silence
• Add an icon to the .exe
• Expand the range of expressions
• Scale the sheriff’s sprites up a little bit
• Start adding the persistents to the demo choices

For the demo, I cut out ~2k words due to time constraint with making the art, so I have a good jumping point to start with for the full game. I’m honestly surprised with how good all the art came out in such a short amount of time. Environments are not my specialty at all, so doing all of these was good practice lol.

What are my goals for the full game?

I’m a huge fan of detective games that leave it up to the player to put clues together, so that’s my goal for the writing. Now that I’ve finished the demo, I can’t really ballpark how long the full game will be, however. I’m also debating putting out an artbook & TTRPG version of the game, but that’s in the far-future.

All in all, Mona Mourn is a passion project that I’m working on in-between work & other stuff. I’m really happy with how things are going so far & hope they’ll continue on smoothly.

I’ll be continuing to post devlogs on the demo page for the sake of keeping things consistent for myself & anyone who’d like to follow along for the development.

Thanks for reading!!

-Saylt