Hi everyone, I thought some of you might be interested on my thoughts about making the game, and also what are my plans after that!
Let's start with some numbers:
7k+ lines of Go code, 8k lines of yarnspinner code
14k words of dialogue
30+ background images
250 character images (30+ if you don't count expressions)
about 300 git commits
Money wise, I spent about $3,300 to get assets (mostly pictures) for the game, to which roughly $900 for additionnal commissions must be added.Once I deduct taxes from what I've earned on patreon during the last couple years, we get $3,400.So in the end, the whole thing has costed me about $800.I'm lucky enough that my savings can cover that level of expenses - without you all I'd have to at least reduce the scope of the game in a major way (like, at the beginning, Elunore wasn't supposed to gain any weight).
What do I think went right, and what didn't go so well during the game development?
The game being made of several expeditions led to it being naturally "vertically sliceable". The first expedition (to the recycling plant) hasn't changed that much compared to when it was first released, and I think this has helped prevent scope creep.However, it also meant that some decisions, consciously made or not, couldn't be reverted as easily.
For example, making Tel and Aleneïra stay at the base for the first expedition and tying gameplay loops (artifacts sale and research) to them being there, meant they couldn't go for expedition with the player. Which in turn, meant the opportunities for dialogues between NPC would be rarer. It took me a while to realize that - and also how repetitive only talking with Elunore during expeditions would be (this being exacerbated by the fact I'm not a writer, and English isn't my native language).
Working with vertical slices helped me "regularly" deliver new content, but I have to say that trying to meet my self-imposed deadlines has made me feel very stressed at times. I've now learned to underpromise by a big margin - but I've yet to achieve a regular, sustainable way of working on this on top of my IRL full time job, other hobbies, housechores and whatnot. Especially as my health isn't as great as it was 4 years ago.
Turning WholeLottaBlank's art into game assets has also been a learning curve, for both of us. At the beginning, characters only had one expression per weight gain stage (and that expression was different for all stages!).At first I made a lot of things (like resizing the images, or mixing expressions) manually, using GIMP, until I finally decided to automatize what I could - but that could only work if Blank followed some extra rules when drawing.
Trying to balance the game has proven a bit too difficult for me. With all the possible choices, there's a combinatorial explosion, and I hadn't expected it to be that hard.The walkthrough/guide has been a way to mitigate that.This being a kink game also made that issue a bit tougher I think. I can't count the number of times I've played a wg game and quickly decided to cheat/savescum/whatever in order to just see the characters grow fat, so the game needed to stay easy - just not so easy it would get boring.
Obviously, managing to get supporters on Patreon helped a great deal. I don't have precise analytics, but I think most of you come from the weightgaming forum. I thought it would be more balanced between it and my other socials (tumblr, bluesky, twitter, various discord servers...).
What comes next?
I currently have two game projects:
the first one, named GGLLC, will take place in the same universe as Vvakta IX did. My goal is to make a kind of mix between Dispatch, "Cook, Serve, Delicious", and visual novels. The art will be made by JackieJaws (for the characters) and Cyorck (for the background)
the second one isn't named yet, but is basically "romance games meet idle clicker". I'm mostly an executant for that one, as the original idea belongs to WholeLottaBlank.
The clicker game already has a working proof of concept, but Blank currently doesn't have a lot of time to create more content for it (be it art or dialogue trees). When they have, I expect the game to quickly grow.
GGLLC on the other hand already has some art, and some code, but it's still at least a couple months away from having a demo. However, as that would be the project I'm leading and focusing on, you can expect progress on that game just like you did with Vvakta IX.
Vvakta IX will also get some very minor updates, with some sprites being replaced once Blank will have finished redrawing them, and probably a couple bug fixes and/or quality of life features.