Hi everyone! I love doing devlogs so here I am again writing another one. I've been doing them every month for Desideratum (which I realize I'm behind on since I spend almost all of Feb working on this project and not it!) and I did one for Guest detailing everything I did to make it.

I'm not going to go as hard this time as it was a MONTH of work, but I want to specifically talk about the new things I did while making Pet that I hadn't done before and maybe how many hours I spent on each part of it.

REN'PY: Prior to this, Guest and Desideratum didn't have much if any GUI work, nor did I do more than add a numerical counter for choices or make a simple image map. For this, I made multiple endings based on selections at different points in the main game body, an endings screen, used persistent variables, added many music cues and audio files, and even messed around with multiple main menu images.


My favorite thing I added was small lines that only play if you get certain items or pick certain routes, which I feel makes replays much more enjoyable.

I hadn't planned on it, but I ended up even doing some code refactoring. Nothing too big but I put things in some different fles, so my main "script" wasn't too cluttered. Oh, and I learned how to make a splashscreen! (Shout out to my 11 year old who drew my "development studio" logo.) 

I still have a lot more to learn but I feel like I could make something extremely complicated at this point. Before starting, I wrote a sketch outline that really evolved once I started playing it. The original version only went to ending 3. I would estimate it took me 20 hours to write and code this.

BLENDER: I downloaded Blender when a friend pointed out it was free. I knew I couldn't start from nothing, so I did what every good developer does: I found a creative commons project that I could use to click on until I figured out what all the buttons did. 


To be honest, this was kind of a wild plan because Blender has hundreds of buttons and even after the 10 hours I used to take the alley way and the vending machine from what they were to the final product, plus make a skybox and learn the camera and how to map things... to be honest it's probably more like 20 hours, but that's okay. I learned a lot of skills and if I had to do the whole thing again it would probably take 3-5 hours instead.

MPC BEATS: In Jan 2023, some friends got me a midi keyboard. The program that came along with it was MPC Beats. I had been playing around with it, and even wrote a song for Guest before I started working on this project. I spent so much time listening to samples and even had a little help from some friends with things like drum lines and what effects worked best. 


Over all, I feel like I used the melody I wrote to my advantage and reused it in different ways with the same B minor chord progression over and over. I'm very happy with this part of the project. This kind of work took me probably 10 hours, but it was way more fun than Blender since it was something I have a lot more experience in.

CLIP STUDIO PRO: My husband bought me a small wacom tablet for the holidays. I am NOT an artist but I really learned a lot. My preferred method of making things was in GIMP before this, and I don't think I'm going to go back to it after switching over. I learned a lot about brushes. I think I was also thinking, like with Blender, that I'd have to start from nothing, but I didn't - I paid an artist to do some stuff, used references for other things, and used the heck out of brushes. Holy cow there's so many brushes out there in the world. 


This was another lengthy thing to learn and I'd say it took me maybe 15 hours to get all the nuance and do things like make that phone from scratch (the amount of layers in it is.....a lot).

MARKETING: I am very bad at this but I am trying. I really want people to experience the creation I made, but it's hard to know where to ask. I tried posting a lot more places this time than I did with Guest. I'm going to continue to try to share it with people, and make more games, so hopefully people will keep finding it and enjoying it.

About 60 hours seems right, for this taking me about 3 weeks to release. There's stuff I didn't mention like playtesting, grammar editing, the amount of things I did and then immediately deleted because they didn't work or were bad...

Over all, I feel like I learned so much during this that I'm really ready to start this next project I'm working on. It's all leading me closer to Desideratum, where I feel I'm going to have to be much, much better and tougher to complete that whole project. I know how how to do it, and that I can do it, and I don't necessarily need as much as I thought I did. I can learn Blender and how to do art and music. I feel really confident that I made something I like, and that others may like. Cool shit.

Thanks for reading this! I hope you enjoy Pet!