So I've decided to make it a habit to write postmortem logs after completing each game. I'm not sure how many people read these, but I personally feel that having a diary sort of post helps to unscramble thoughts and may ease future development.

In all honesty, I never expected I'd create and complete Harlowe's Eve. I was introduced to Twine in a Discord chat and decided to check it out. Normally I'd go with Ren'Py, which I've used for a long time now, but something about being able to create a game that you could play on a browser tempted me.

I wanted to see if Itch could really explode the zip file so that local resources could be referred to, so I downloaded a waltz piece inspired by Tchaikovsky from Kevin MacLeod's site. (If you don't know who the guy is, he's the composer for Swan Lake. Listen to it here.) The music was rousing and encouraged me to download several swanky castle images and... here we are!

Originally I was going to download and credit visual novel sprites by other artists for the love interests; unfortunately none of the images fit the bill. Poor Lord Willow's basically wolfman Jason Momoa (can we call him Jacob Momoa?) so I simply left all the character images out except Lord Allister, the main character. Even then I'd ripped his image off my equine furry novel...

Now I know why nobody's downloading and using my VN assets! It's because everyone's characters and story are different. Aha! That's taught me something! I'm going to stop farting them out like they matter.

In any case this is my first text-based interactive fiction! I love my game and I can say so proudly. Though, in hindsight, it's probably healthier not to get too attached to pushing out free stuff to the point of distraction and burnouts - we don't particularly get any payout for making them, not even a word of thanks (we're likely to get low ratings too haha!). It's easy to get disappointed by the lack of feedback when you've worked hard on something which you're not even charging for. So sometimes it's good to take one step back and just... breathe.

Post-development-wise, I've learned to be able to put things out for myself instead of completing them in one sitting. Sometimes it's good to publish a game in development mode and slowly work on it. Creating free media is often a thankless job - but the ones who forget to thank us are often ourselves.

So let's say it together now: "Thanks, me, for finishing my own game!"

Cheers!