Hello! This is Altila, the dev.

Thank you for playing Caged Bird! Welcome to the postmortem of the game! If you haven't played it, please give it a try.

This time, I'm going to talk about the game's production for a bit.

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THEME AND IDEA

This game is made for Velox Turbo 2. The theme is 'The Eye of the Beholder'. To be honest, even now, I'm not quite sure what it means. I had to search on the internet and I remembered I have an old draft that can be used if I tweaked it a bit. This game is based on something I wrote for Nanowrimo 5 years ago (incomplete, of course). 

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STORY WRITING

English is not my first language and recently I feel my English is deteriorating a lot since I barely use it. When I was going through the old script, I found that I had two or three different versions and was like  "HUUHH???" at myself. By the way, Caged Bird is the actual title with Nero as the protagonist. 

If anyone noticed, I used this game as a way to introduce my OC haha. They were doing a self-introduction, and the painting part was like a bonus. I wrote Elisa's part just fine. Looking at Nero's painting is an actual event in the old script, even though I didn't go into details so I didn't have much difficulty. However, I got stuck on Xavier's part because he is actually quite a complicated character, especially his relationship with Nero. Jin was a last-minute addition because I thought having everyone narrating poem-like opinions and projecting to the bird in the painting might be a bit boring. And aren't there a lot of people that don't understand art interpretation? Me, for example. Actually, he was supposed to say something about his neighbor having a bird as a pet and the advantages of keeping birds as pets but I stopped myself.

Oh. By the way, actually, four people were looking at painting. There was supposed to be another girl called Sakura before Elisa. The themes of their interpretations are:

Sakura: breaking free from her cage (a.k.a wants to see the world instead of living in the countryside).

Elisa: trying to do her best inside the cage (a.k.a if they really love music, there are still things that she and her sister can do even though her sister lost her ability to sing).

Xavier: being freed from the cage (a.k.a Nero found him and introduced him to something that he truly enjoyed + free pass to peace and quiet time because Nero was scaring other people).  

Jin: finding happiness can be done anywhere.

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MUSIC

As always, I relied on free music!

Here is the reason why I cut the other girl's part off. The BGMs that I used play the same song but with three different instruments, so three versions (music box, piano, guitar). The ears of the beholder (jk). Anyway, if I add a different track, it will be weird. So, I just cut her off. 

If you see my BS, you may know that I had some trouble with audio. This happened during the last testing for the newest version with CGs so I can only hope that the BGM is working properly.

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ART

For the GUI part, I just wanted to try without a textbox, so I made it like that. This part doesn't change much. I added outlines to the text because the text is hard to read once the CGs are in!

In my BS, I said that my CSP/Pentab wasn't working properly. That's why the very first release is without CG and only a pic of a wall and painting. At first, there was only one version of that image too. Jin's wall BG is the original. I made the wall color a bit orange for Elisa and Blue for Xavier as visual aids because there was no character image.

After I uploaded the no CG ver, a few hours after that, I managed to fix my pentab and started drawing immediately. I made those CGs in just three hours. Haha. I was that desperate. Actually, I already made a sketch for Sakura but since I decided to not include her, I didn't continue. Something like this:

By the way, if any of you are curious about how Nero looked like, there he is:

BONUS

That's all! Thanks for reading!