Hello! I'll be talking about the development of the overall idea of Reverie Channel. From when I thought of and prototyped a vastly different version to the time that I was able to release the game as it is now.

Development

The game was initially created with different gameplay in mind, at first it started as a top down exploration game which shared only one or two of the characters in the game now. Unfortunately, that version of the game became too complicated as the scope got out of my control and I had to stop developing it. Afterwards, I took a break to do some other stuff, near the end of February I saw the NaNoRenO-2023 game jam and I wanted to join so that I could try to reuse the idea in some way. This was also an opportunity for me to try and make a game that focused more on it's story. 

This is a sketch of a character who was supposed to be in the game but was cut due to time constraints.

I planned about half of the story and sketched a few of the characters on paper before the jam started. During this time I also decided the style of the gameplay, I can only remember that I wanted to have gameplay that incorporated 3D exploration. This would not work for my scope however as I didn't (and still don't) really know how to do that and it would take too long to work. That was when I considered to make the game into a point and click which was still somewhat familiar to me and it would allow me to have gameplay that was different from the previous games that I've made.

Things that worked and things that didn't

I think that the style of the game, especially the menu art, turned out well and is simple to create while at least looking visually interesting to me. I liked that I tried to do something different with the story and the gameplay, those were the second most fun things that I did during the project under art being the first thing that I enjoyed working on.

The game's initial scope when I joined the game jam might have been too big as I wanted to add a few more areas, characters and interactions. There were a few glitches that were frustrating to work with that I eventually worked around, even during the release of the game.

What's next?

I'm going to see if I could add anything else to this project since I'm already coming up with new things to try out. I'll try to focus on my storytelling and dialogue since my other projects didn't have much in terms of story. I would like to try and inspire people to make their own stories as well.

Besides that, I'll just check out some of the other NaNoRenO games that released.