Dev Note

Hello! 

This is Altila, the developer of Eternal Flower. Thank you for playing the game! If you haven't, please check it out! Here, I want to share a little about my experiences in Nanoreno2022. I receive some help with the background from Yui, but I mostly do everything myself. If you want to solo game jam, maybe you can take something out of this ...or not.

Original Plan

Yeah, so... I have an original plan for the system (yeah, system and not story). However, due to the time shortage and I was busier than I thought IRL in March, I decided to cut it down. The first one is the looping system. You have 11 tries to get the ending you want.  In the original plan, when you have used your try, there will be differences in scenario and dialogue. Some of them can only be seen after you do the retry. Among those, there are also timed choices and choices that will unlock secrets that will lead you to the true ending. It is also only available after retry. They are not in the current version because I scraped them all.

Story Writing

This story is actually something thought of back in JHS, but it was already long ago and I lost the file. So, I completely rewrite the story. Mary and Chronos are not even in the original and I cannot remember Albert and Gregor's original names, but they existed. The similarities are Scarlet and Carmine's names and appearance, Carmine's occupation, the existence of the watch, and flower fields. Story-wise, it's nothing similar.

I have to confess that I didn't have any plan for the story. Not outline or something like that. I wrote the story straight on the script files. Whatever was in my brain at that time, I wrote that. Because of that, I forgot that the story is supposed to be a romance story, but I did not add much romance (close to nonexistent).  That might be a bad practice. At least, it is better to have an outline prepared beforehand.  Around the end was very hectic. I just wrote anything. Luckily, I had this idea to cross-check with the prologue. There were some inconsistencies and it was great that I found them before release. I am no fan of long and flowery narration, so you will not find many of them in my works.

Future Plan

I am thinking about implementing my original plan to the current version and adding some CGs. Either that or keep the current system but add the prologue so it does not become two different games like right now. Or maybe no change at all. However, I haven't decided on anything since this year is quite a busy year for me. 

Afterwords

Should you join game jam? Yes. Especially if you have a project or something you want to make, so it will not be forever ongoing or forever a dream.

Should you do game jam solo? Why not? It is indeed complicated to do almost everything by yourself, but free resources exist and many softwares do not require or just need a little programming. In fact, trying solo can gives an overview of developing a game. Just try to be realistic and not too idealist because there is a time constraint. If you are after the quality or busy but want to participate or you just want to contribute on a certain part, you might want to do a group project, though.

That's probably what I can share. Thanks for reading!