AFTERTHOUGHTS - This was my partner and I's first (successful) attempt at making a small game. I still love the cast (I even made a fake social media page of one of the characters here!) and, albeit it's a very basic game, I'm still proud of what we created!

We came up with the outline together, and she did the writing and programming while I took care of the visuals. The original scope was much smaller, just 3k worth between dialogues and story (and just two out of the six characters that appear throughout the story), but then we kept adding and adding to it. It's still a pretty short game, but the fact that we changed the story so many times made it challenging to have everything be coherent, and at some point we just wanted to be done with it. The GUI I did is pretty basic and, now that I have a little more of a mental library on design elements thanks to neocities, if we ever go back to it that's the first thing I'll be fixing, along with artstyle inconsistencies.

In retrospect, I think it would have been better to create a specific player character rather than a faceless one. I think it would have made us free to explore the story from a more specific lens, as we often felt compelled to be more vague/generic in some dialogues or choices, as not to break immersion / roleplaying aspects of the game.

AFTERTHOUGHTS - I LOVED working on this. It was originally meant for a game jam but unfortunately we couldn't meet the deadline due to a natural disaster. On a good note, it was lovely that we could do this at our own pace, and add several extra features that would otherwise never have made it into the game. On top of visuals, I also took care of some of the game design. I had a very specific idea of the kind of pace the game should have, the waiting times, customer rushes and other mechanics relating to the restaurant-management genre, and Kotzwinkle, our programmer, was patient enough with me to tweak many things several times until we were all satisfied with the state of the game!

He also kindly walked me through how to set up choreographies for customer arrival patterns through DB Browser. I spent a couple of days manually inputting the data to create a flow that was 100% clearable but that still required some strategy to advance through the levels, especially in the last levels. It was so fun! I hope I get to do something like this again soon.

On this topic, I need to stop making hard games lol. Not that Fish and Tips is incredibly challenging or anything, but it definitely requires a little bit of experience within the genre to be completed first try, which can be a little annoying for most players. Either way, definitely a work I'm very proud of, with a team that I can't wait to work with again!

AFTERTHOUGHTS - This was for a game jam, and my first one! I joined the team when the others had already started brainstorming a bit, and I was definitely intimidated by the prospect of doing backgrounds, which is something I don't have a lot of experience with. I don't think that I really hit the aesthetic that we were going for fully, but I feel like they still fit with everything else.

I loved doing the little rooms of the hub and the tiny sprites for it. I'm a fanartist at heart so getting to redraw Sabi's wonderful designs in my own chibi style was a walk in the park compared to everything else.

But my favorite thing was simplifying the music charts (by SunnieD_) to make them easier to clear. Some players still felt like they were too hard for an itch game (which I agree with, in retrospect), and if we ever go back to adjusting some aspects of the game, Easy Mode will be the top priority. Can't wait to work on music charts again!