Post Jam Devlog (0.1)

HOWDY DOWDY

Razzy here! I never thought I could make a game but here I am! 

I've always been terrible at finishing things, finishing my jam entry was definitely a challenge to myself more than anything. I wanted it to be playable, no matter how scuffed, and it definitely needed it to be a game I enjoyed. That's why I decided to put a spin on the visual novel idea and made it a point-and-click adventure too.

The moment I saw the jam topic I was struck by inspo. In my head, I've always gamified social situations to manage my stats, so I wanted to make a game that reflected my reality. I added things that I like, like lesbians, dogs, The Party (1993), dog lesbians, various shades of pink, and mean girls.

In an effort to summarize my thoughts, here's the game's features that I decided using the MOSCOW method, i.e. Must have, Should have, Could have, Won't have. (Unfortunately most things in the Could-have didn't make it into this jam version for lack of time.)

MUST HAVES:

The Worst Party Animal (Twpa from now on) is actually a simple numbers game. By  nature of being a game-jam entry, the must-haves were:

• Visual Novel
• 3 Alterable Stats (Food, Fun and Social)

That's the obvious part. Now here's the thing about me- I kinda don't like straightforward visual novels! Don't get me wrong, I love a good story and I love great graphics to go with it. But I need a little more than that for it to be the sum of it's parts. A lil skill-based progression. So I made it a point-&-click adventure! (because I love them).  So from there I attached increments and decrements to your stats depending on the thing you point and click at, bringing our list to:

• Events according to a +,-,0 distribution chart so each event is unique
• Event type counters to track how many events (and types) are being accommodated for.
• From the math, 14 events that uniquely affect the 3 stats
• At least one ending with the worstie

SHOULD HAVE:

Romance! To an extent. And by extension, Lesbians! I was teeter-tottering about how much romance (or even spiciness??) i should add to the game, but ultimately I decided to leave in an implication of romance more than anything. If I could devote more time to organizing the story then I might have made it more explicit, but I didn't want a fully baked game with a half assed romance. Instead here's a full assed friendship! (or 3!)

• Romance/Friendship
• Flavour text for each party event
• Unique CGs for each party scene to cover the clickable items
• 3 girls- representing introversion, extroversion and ambiversion.
• Multiple endings*
• Unique chat sprites for each character
• Unique in-game sprites for each character (Sorry leigh yours was blurry because I did the export all wrong WEH)

*My original idea was to have all 3 friend routes happen in one night but it didn't quite make sense. It was easier to separate them into 3 endings. With more time to develop the story, I'll work them in! There were more ideas in the SHOULD HAVE that got shunted to COULD HAVE as time progressed, that didn't make it in (they're all struck through).

COULD HAVE:

These are things that would be nice if time permits. I got halfway through a couple of these before abandoning them for wont of time sadly, but they'll make it into the demo build I'm sure!

• Unique themes for each character
• Unique animal sound voices for each character sprited
• Sprited, named NPCs (Only Ello made it thru this one waddahale)
• The Deer Diary**
• Notebook themed UI
• Unique extreme-state animations for Dotty (eg tired, queasy, anxious)
• Gallery
• A tutorial area instead of a tell-don't-show
• Ending CGs

WON'T HAVE:

Stuff there's no way I could've made in this time. But! With some funding and time I'm sure I can get these into the demo and final ooo

• Animated CGs
• Time system
• Persistent endings
• Custom bad-endings
• sex (LMAO)
• Treat's siblings
• Finished artwork BAHAHA
• Inventory and fetch quest-puzzles

**So about the deer diary:

This was supposed to be a run-unique diary-log that made a list of what you were doing in order of doing so, so u had a cute receipt at the end of a run, and unique every time! I was in a rush and couldn't figure out how to make a custom string display on a custom page in the time frame, but it's not a total scratch off! I want to make it for the 1.1 demo for sure.

Please consider donating i want to open up a steam acc i need 100 bucks for that and also a little better music i might need 300 bucks for that pleaaaaa thankyu: https://ko-fi.com/puppylovestudios