O2A2 Post-Mortem
01 Aug 2026
(Cross-posted on the game page!)
Thank you all so much for checking out my little visual novel! I’m going to ramble a bit here about what it was like working on it and what I learned.
I am highly skilled at starting projects and then not finishing them. Prior to this game, the only visual novel I’d completed was for a class in high-school. It turns out jam deadlines work the same as school deadlines for my brain, so I actually got it done! The deadline wasn’t the only thing I found useful about the jam, though. I think the smaller format comes with its own perks as well.
One thing that’s useful about a small scope is that tech debt can’t hurt you. Every mistake I made is something I can fix on the next project. Meanwhile, if I’d had 10 sprites, maybe I’d have had to go back and deal with things like “my sprites were scanned at too big a resolution”, “my code is completely disorganized” and “drawing a face directly on the sprite means adding new expressions is a huge pain”. But I don’t have to! I can just use that knowledge to do things correctly from the start on my next project. For example, I am definitely making a spreadsheet image of all the different facial expressions next time. It’s a huge pain to have to change it up 5 times until I find the one that looks right.
There’s a bunch of little skills I’ve learned from working on this project that I had been avoiding on my other projects. Now I actually know what transitions and layered sprites are. I’m also going to be saving myself a lot of time in the future because I didn’t know that you could use shift + R to reload the game. I’ve been sitting and waiting 15 seconds for the game to restart and then fast-forwarding through the game to where I was this entire time. I don’t even want to know how many hours of my life I have wasted doing that.
I watched a video last year where the creator mentioned finishing the first bit of their animatic completely so that they’d have it as motivation every time they had to watch through it while working on the rest of it. “It looks so good, just imagine what the fully finished product will look like!” I haven’t used the technique for animation yet, but I’m definitely going to start doing it with visual novels in the future. It’s so cool to actually see sprites on screen instead of putting them off until after the first draft is (never) completed.
I’ve also learned when to let things go. Jams come with deadlines, which means the game just needs to be done. My initial plan for the blinking effect was more complicated than how it came out in the end, but I trashed it instead of wasting time on something that wasn’t working. I don’t think my music is going to win any awards, but it only took an hour to make. That’s the important part.
Jams come with deadlines, which means they come with the permission to suck. That permission is really useful, because you can’t make good stuff until you make a lot of bad stuff. It’s easy to get discouraged when a project isn’t coming out as perfect as the idea in your head is. Jams give an easy out for that. I can say to myself, “well it would’ve been perfect had I had more time,” even if that might not be true.
Unfortunately, jams coming with deadlines means that my productivity will grind to a halt for the several final days where I am unable to work on the jam nor anything else. I thought that was just a school thing, but apparently it applies to things I genuinely want to be doing too! That’s good though, it means it’s something I can learn to work around. Probably. Hopefully.
In terms of the game itself, it was pretty easy to write. I made both characters over a year ago, so I already knew how to write their dynamic. I filled in all of Lucilyn’s fandom stuff with other characters of mine so I wouldn’t have to waste time designing one-off gags. Maybe those other characters will show up in another game of mine someday!
There’s definitely a few things I’d want to change if I’d been given more time on the game (e.g. Aqua’s majoring in physics, but somehow is doing fine without calculus credits. It’s a last-minute change that I probably shouldn’t have made.) but I’m going to resist the urge to change them when I add the french translation. It’s a jam game, so having it be unpolished is in the spirit of its creation.
As a last note, I wanted to say that jams are cool because they let you see other people’s games too! I haven’t played through too many yet, but I’ve been having a lot of fun looking through everyone’s final products. They’re all so interesting.
Thank you for reading! Here’s a couple of the other VNs from this jam that I enjoyed if you’re looking for ones to check out: