I've never finished a post mortem draft, so I'm hoping to make it through with this one!

How did this got started?

I quite honestly, didn't want to do Freakaversity again. I was into other projects, drifting more towards a more point and clic area. However, the people in Jam Garden, specially Zach, did come to me and say "Hey let's do the sequel" and eventually, I got into talk about it. We discussed many aspects, for doing a sequel vs a new visual novel. Of course, you all know how that ended, but for sharing purposes... here are the pros and cons of doing a sequel, that eventually won.

Pros:

- Already existing lore, characters, art concepts, scenarios, settings, dynamic, all that

Cons:

- Lack of personell to pull of a succesful sequel (And that I wanted to do something else  lol)

As the date for the jam start aproached, it became clear that in order to survive the month, the sequel was the best option. So then, I began hunting extra hands. However, I knew the people we got was still not enought to make it, we needed one more artist, and one more programmer. However, I decided to deal with it when the time came, and of course, it eventually did. 

The idea was already in my head way prior to the jam, as I sometimes drift towards having fun in my own mind with the funny characters of this game. Many times, I also throw the funny situation I imagined to Rads, and he also adds to it. It's a bit of how Freakaversity is, I just say  the dumbest thing I can imagine to Rads, and he replies with more, and we laught about it lol

First week, the complete unbalance

The first week is different for EVERYONE. And it's not my first jam seeing this.

As some move like a rocket and being making assets like crazy, others struggle to find an initial rythim. While our art assets were shooting like crazy because Rads is a bit insane, we were still discussing programing stuff, and having to give a deadline to our programmer, which was that if we couldn't come up with some proper quality of life options, we'd make a U turn and go to Ren'py. Ultimately, we stayed in Unity.

I did fine the first week, laying down music and writting. I pretty much got two of the songs ideas layed down that first week, with a third one that did not make it into the game. As for the dialogues, I don't know the amount of words, but I pretty much layed out the entire begining of the game, to the point you drift to sidequesting, during that week.

By the end of the week, the programming area stabilized and began working... but we still were one programmer down...

Second week, the horror

Asset making continued, and I got a bit caught up in the problem I explained earlier... While Zach was working in the architecture of the game, I had to begin coding the entire script. And this, for anyone who has done it, is a royal pain in the butt. Some people like it, but me? I HATE IT. However, no one else was going to do it, and that I knew very well. So for each line of code you read, I coded the character portrait change right above. In a game with probably more than 2000 lines. So yeah, it wasn't an easy task, it was very time demanding and I began to slow down in writing, and let's not even talk about the music.

We were also approaching another problem, we lacked enought hands for the backgrounds. Our background artist was amazing, but we still needed more people for the original idea of the game... which was, to Freak The Town.

They were supposed to go to town, and do all the shenanigans we saw in the castle... but up town. This, background wise, was doubling the number of the backgrounds Gnome did, and it was simply imposible without having more people... so...

Rescoping time.

Third week, the allnighties

After a long ass voice call with Rads, where I just kept rambling and rambling on how to tie the plot and how it didn't work and blablabla, we came to an okay way of things, in which we rescoped everything down to just being in the castle. Now I could continue the writing more properly, with a right direction.

However, did anyone said... more tasks?

It was casting voice acting talent time. Gladly, Alex took over that and did a wonderful job, but as much as he did, there was no scape from sitting down and do a listening party for the auditions... which lasted 4 hours straight. Alex, Rads and I, went over every single audio, many times, in order to get the right people, we even did a second round of auditions in some cases. Then Alex also scheduled meetings with each of the selected people, so we could explain to them a bit more in detail all that was related to the game, formats and all that. It was his first time doing this, and he did a wonderful job.

Now, there was another problem... Sort out how many and which lines were to be voiced, extract them, and make a script for each voice actor. Long ass hours of me finishing the plot in order to do this with enought time for the voice actors to have a week to lay down their lines.

Gladly, after I cleaned the entire amount of lines and did Phoebe's personal script, Rads took over and did the rest of the dedicated scripts for each actor. With the time he bought me, I continued coding and coding the entire game script, while Zach kept fighting different bugs that continued to appear.

All of this, after having some news from the sound section, which joined later in the jam. Matthew was taking charge of the Fmod integrations and all that, which was the whole reason we managed to get voice acting in this game.

Fourth week, the last steps towards the line.

By the fourth week, there wasn't a single hour of my time that wasn't going to this game, and I can say the same for many of my companions in this, specially Rads, who went on and beyond and kept doing every CG we could imagine, every extra character shape, even learnt how to use github and began uploading more and more assets straight into the game project. Truly a brutal force of nature lol

After finishing the script and writting, I began retaking on the music duties, which had been sporadic moments of work across the month. Tried to give closure to what I had, and make it as okay as posible considering the time.

Most of this week on the programming end, was fixing bugs, characters not appearing, dialogues badly written. Rads began editing all the typos he could find, with the help of our proofreader Veronica. I just kept fixing different protraits not appearing, quests not happening, scenes being repeated and more.

By the last day, I mixed how I could, with my brain completely burnt out, and added the music to it. Had to leave out the ending song, which was a fully sang piece of music, but I just couldn't bring it to sound good enought in time (Heck, I even cut a string on my guitar recording May's solo. I hadn't cut a string in 5 years!!!). I did a sort of okay mix and didn't had enought energy left to properly master it, because I knew I'd just make it sound worse, doed to my zombie state.  In the end, the music was way less than what I wanted it to be, just like the past year. I lacked the time to do it, and it was once again, very frustrating.

Conclusions

Most of the problems we had, I saw coming. If I didn't get to correct them, it was because I was unable to do so, some things just don't depend on me, and are out of my hands to solve. This was an insane amount of work, and everyone on the team did a wonderful job, with all our rights and wrongs. There were many ghosting moments, most of them came through in the end, and some just were the best it could be, considering the IRL obligations many of us have.

After doing this, however, I really don't intend to ever do something so crazy again, I looked like a damn zombie the last weeks. And felt like one too.

If I have to give it all, and still not making it to the finishing line the way I wanted to... then I clearly did something wrong, such as bad scoping and being unrealistic on how many tasks we can get done in time. Gladly, these things can be corrected, and this time, it was clearly better organized and better scoped than last year, so in the end, I can safely say we came out stronger and wiser out of it.

See? I finished this post mortem. Clearly better than last year!!!