Postmortem

Hello. This is Altila.

First and foremost, thank you for playing [My Beloved Microwave]! I can't believe we managed to reach 1000+ plays in a week! In this post, I will talk about the production process of the game. If you are reading this and haven't played the game yet, please consider playing the game first to avoid spoilers. Sorry for the messy English and writing, by the way.

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Before Jam

This game is actually one of the two ideas that I got in February, with another one being [The Last Date].  My self-confidence was at its lowest, and I predicted that I would be busy around May-June, so I decided to recruit some members. At that time, it wasn't decided which one we would make. However, after some considerations, I decided to go with the microwave game for otome jam. I know, otome jam every year is filled with cool games and demos with pretty art and handsome guys, but I can't help but to treat this one particular jam as my time to experiment with weird things. Dating shape-shifting laptop, soul balls, and now a microwave! Still, I can't believe I ended up becoming the game's writer and didn't draw a single picture, haha.

To ensure everything went smoothly during the jam, I made a list of the things that my team members should draw. I have a certain technique that I have been using since November last year. Instead of just listing the assets that I want to be present, I made some tiers: 'compulsory', 'optional', and 'only if there is time'. Compulsory are the things that are absolutely essential for the game. Optional is below compulsory. The game can work without those things, but it's preferable that they exist. The tier below optional is like the very best scenario to make a more polished game. In this case, I only made compulsory and optional. This was never an ambitious project in the first place.

While everything was set before the jam started, we did almost everything (everything, even) during the jam's time frame. In my case, I was working on [The Last Date] before this for Nanoreno.

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During Jam

Time-wise, almost everything is on schedule. Overall, the production process was smooth.

Since I'm in charge of the writing, I will be talking about the writing process here.

I have to admit that writing is not my strong suit. I have almost zero confidence in my writing skills. My English has been slipping a lot too. If you enjoy what you played despite that, I'm truly thankful.

About the story, there were some things that I changed (mostly changed one or two weeks before the deadline lmao):

- The MC was planned to be a renameable self-insert type. I changed it to use the default name instead because I didn't want to make an input name screen. Also, when writing the story, I felt like I hit a wall with a self-insert type, so I gave her a little bit of personality and background.

- The MC was originally an anime otaku, not a drama or Silver Goldmine fan. Silver Goldmine didn't even exist at first.

- The story was planned to be just a short and cute story with some probably not very funny comedy. As I wrote, my brain couldn't accept that kind of story and ended up asking many things, like 'why specifically Mr. Rich and June?' or 'why should June help Mr. Rich?' or yeah many things. So I ended up writing 14k words, longer than planned, to cover up the things I questioned inside my head. Which also led to the other change...

- There was no scandal at first. At first, Silver was non-existent, and the aunt was just a drunk troublemaker. After that, I added him as a regular idol and added their scandal. Originally, Mr. Rich was abandoned by his family for his incompetence and attitude. But, I thought with 7 days time frame, it wasn't enough for him to redeem himself for the family, and if I did that, I was afraid he wouldn't be likeable (at least, I wouldn't like him), so I made a lot of change regarding his circumstances.

Haha. I had a bad habit of changing my story as I edited it. At least, it's better now.

I think maybe people noticed that the spells sound like keysmashes. Yes, they are. I did keysmashes, but made the words barely pronounceable and kept some original syllables or homophones of the colors.

By the way, June disposed of her collections of Silver Goldmine's merchandise after the story ended.

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That's all from me. Thank you for reading! 

If you enjoy the game, please consider leaving a comment or review. And please check out my other works!!