Rogue Star River: On Writing, Gamejams and the Future

Hi everyone, Vanillabell here.

So with the voting stage over of the May Wolf Gamejam I think I might as well talk about the project.

Rogue Star River managed to place 11th place overall, which isn't bad considering how this is my first attempt of writing a fvn.

I'm glad I made the effort to participate in this jam. While I could have gone for a more traditional concept of what one would expect from a my wolf vn which I have a few ideas for, Rogue Star River's concept has been cooking in my head for a while now and I wanted to get it out there.

This was a new experience for me as I had never used Renpy up until this point. If I had more time I'd be looking to see what kind of transforms I could do to help enhance scenes but this will be touched upon in a bit.

Writing this story was a blast since I wasn't limited by the characterization or whatever plot elements that exist when writing fics so it was very freeing in that regard. Unfortunately though I ended up committing a cardinal sin in that regard.

One piece of useful advice I had seen for game jams is basically to have your game done halfway into the jam so you can spend the rest of the time polishing it and adding extra levels or whatever to it.

This would probably translate differently to a vn, I imagine the appropriate way to translate it would be to have it all written by the halfway mark. Then you'd spend the rest of the time making it look nice.

Anyway as you can imagine I didn't do this, I had finished writing by the third week and I spend the last week cobbling it together in Renpy. So tragically I didn't have much time to do more than the bare minimum with Renpy and create UI. The last one is a bit of a stinger for me since I have previously done UI work for Supernova which you can read here.

That being said though, it was definitely something I'm proud of trying out for myself and seeing the feedback tells me that I'm doing something right.

As for the future of the project, as you can imagine from the story threads that came up that this is not the end of Rogue Star River. There's more fights to be had and fun moments for Daniel and Xavier to experience but naturally there's a lot that will need to be done before that can happen. Here's a few things that I feel I will need to address.

1. Writing: So outside of probably making sure to have someone look at and edit my work to help improve it's quality, I want to write out the entire plot. I have a general idea of the story and what I want to happen but I want to put some time into having it all planned out properly and ensuring that Xavier and Daniel are engaging characters.

2. Art: Without the sprites that Cody provided for this jam, there would legit be no sprites for this submission since I didn't have the time to make them. But naturally if I want to continue this story I'll need to get my own sprites for this. Anything else will depend on what I plan for the visual presentation for this vn.

3. Music: One way or another I'm making sure this vn has it's own music. I'll learn it myself if I have to.

I can't promise when a lot of this work will begin for the project since I have a full time job at the time of writing this but trust that some day this will begin since it's a story I want to create.

I will probably keep this page up as it is in order to keep it preserved in this state but I imagine when I'm ready to begin development for Rogue Star River proper, I will create a separate vn page for it.

Thanks for reading this, I wanted to throw out a devlog since some of the other May Wolf jammers were doing it so I figured I'd so the same and to reiterate. This isn't the end of the story so look forward to it when it happens.

Vanilla.