Finally done!

Undying Desire is finally done!

This has been one of the longest and most draining "quick project," I've ever worked on. I've been thinking about and planning this short game since August, and started working on it officially when the Spooktober Visual Novel Jam began in September. I missed that deadline, and lucked out with the Monstrous Desires deadline moving backward twice. Lots of false starts, scrapping everything, running into hardware limitations, and all-nighters stretched out over 2 months, just for a 10 minute game jam entry. But I had a mad idea to make a NDS game, and I was going to do it damn it!

I would like to say though I'm proud of what I finally accomplished, despite it taking entirely far too long and far too much of my creative energies. Not all of my pixel art is up to my standards (I took shortcuts on those BGs), and there were a few more images I wanted to make, but I was trying to cut down on my scope. In retrospect, the story is pretty weak as well (I'm not a romance writer) and probably works too hard on smashing allusions/plot points from other vampire and gothic short stories to create a mystery rather than building the relationships with the romance-able characters. The endings probably come out of nowhere, but again, I thought that a 5k word visual novel was a good place to start but that was too much work for my pipeline and the janky engine I was using.

So yeah, making retro games is much harder than I remember, despite them being all I've done. I guess all my experience with GB Studio has meant I know it very well and understand its limits when scoping a project, while using DS Game Maker meant I was flying blind. I literally chose making a visual novel because I thought it would be easy, but my need to have it sideways like Hotel Dusk meant I had so many more headaches rendering the dialog on top of everything else.

In conclusion! I'm sure you've all enjoyed reading this rant about how terrible this project was and how hard it was. But I should really talk more about the future of this project. There are still some bugs I want to fix, and see what I can do about the background music, but I needed to get this game released for a separate deadline unrelated to the Monstrous Desires Game Jam. I hope to release another version in the next week or two with some more updates. But other than that, I think I'll probably just leave this game as is, I don't really plan on fleshing it out into something bigger.