Loophole Kingdom: Making the deadliest Visual Novel - A Post Mortem by Mateus

ORIGINAL IDEA:

So I had this idea in my head for a game for a while now, a sort of adventure game that was extremelly whimsical and chaotic but at the same time allowed the player to mess with the characters in an equal manner. This was inspired by the RPG A Dark Room that Robbotron plays on Twitch with his viewers. The first ideas for characters were: a dangerous Witch who had severely low self-esteem, a tough guy who was weak of heart and controlling it all was a terrifying demon who seemed impossible to defeat.

PREPARATIONS:

Before the jam started, I had already made a sort of "engine" in HTML5, which I used as the basis for this game and I might use again in the future. I'm not a programmer, and I only know really basic Javascript code, so I made it as simple to program as possible. (The code is still a mess though) I focused on organization above all else, because I knew that the scope of this game was bigger than any other I had done before, and I knew it could get very confusing very fast.

I invented a system to organize what I called "gameplay modules" which were the blocks of code that wrote the characters lines, expression and dialogue options, which branched off into other modules. I ordered them like this:

M_A1:

M_A1a, M_A1b, M_A1c:

M_A1a1, M_A1a2, M_A1a3, M_A1b1, M_A1b2, M_A1b3, M_A1c1, M_A1c2, M_A1c3:

(you can see how that gets crowded quickly with just 3 options each)

I didn't overscope this game.

MAKING THE ACTUAL GAME:

Firstly, I had to make up a story. I spent several hours, plotting and constructing a somewhat cohesive story, but I knew I had to be quick otherwise I would run out of time. I had to improvise a lot of things while I was programming in all the dialogues but I had a general idea of what I wanted at that point, even if 50% of the game was completely made up on the spot.
For Iscaroth, I wanted to do something similar to the Impossible Quizz, except this one threatened to kill you if you failed, which is supposed to build on top of the pressure of answering a test correctly.
I had other things planned, but I managed to do the main plot points and that to me is a win.

By the way: You can die in the Main Menu.

I didn't overscope this game.

Here's all the branching timelines (censored because I'm not a fool):

WHAT I LEARNED:

DON'T make a narrative adventure with 100 branching story arcs. 6 endings is already waaaaay more than a developer can handle, and I only manged it because I cut a lot of time on the graphics (I did almost all of the backgrounds in the last 30 minutes and it shows)
However, I do think that you should try to make a narrative adventure, if you can. You learn a lot from it, more than making a linear story. Giving player choices to make is a really simple yet effective way to keep a game interesting and fun, and also makes the player feel a kind of sense of freedom, even if false, that you can't get with a linear game, while also putting on them the pressure of chosing the right thing (or not).
Plan ahead, but be aware the Theme might trick you. I was EXTREMELY lucky to get the theme that we got, because it luckily matched my idea pretty well, but I could have just as easily been screwed over. Typical Ludum Dare things, I guess.

Also did you know this game's story file has almost 3000 lines of code?

https://i.imgur.com/sdKvziZ.mp4

Ok, maybe I overscoped a little bit.

CONCLUSION:

I was so incredibly tired from working all day, 12 hours a day for 3 days that I uploaded the game and went to bed right after. It was exausting, but it was really fun too.

Here's the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/loophole-kingdom

I can't wait to play all* your games!

*I don't actually have time to play all of them.