Hi, this is Altila.

If you already played the game, thank you for playing! If you haven't, please give it a try.

This game jam is quite an experience and I think maybe I can share it with you guys. It has been a while since I wrote a postmortem, so please bear with me and please forgive me for my messy English.

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[The Witches Saga: My Dahlia] is made for Velox Formido 2024. It has a duration of 36 hours. However, I actually made it on a whim and finished it in around 5 hours. I was scrolling on X (Formerly known as Twitter) and saw someone mentioning the game jam. I got curious and checked it out. At that time, the remaining time is 12 hours.  When I checked the themes, I felt like I could make one. Still, it was due in 12 hours and I had to go out in around 5 hours. Actually, that motivated me and I was like "Okay, let's challenge myself and speedrun this game jam!".

Oh.  By the way, I'm a solo dev of this game. 

Well, so... since I had to finish in 5 hours, I decided to do something very simple for the story. Just narrates everything like a monologue, that was what I planned to do. I'm the type of person who makes rough plans in my head and starts with the art first and the story later. In this game jam, it was also what I did. The rough plan was done, now to the art.

As for the art, I decided to go with full CGs instead of with sprites. There were reasons for this, actually:

• I didn't want any dialogue, so I thought using a sprite didn't quite fit.
• Drawing a sprite actually takes a lot of time compared to a simple CG, at least for me. I had to finish in 5 hours, so I had to draw efficiently.
• I would need BGs if I used a sprite which required time to search for the suitable ones.
• CG could convey some things, like an atmosphere, that a sprite couldn't do.

To be honest, I was feeling inspired that day and didn't do much planning for the CGs. My plan was to draw Edmund (the male) as a sweet person and the variation of him went 180 degrees. To save time, I only draw bust-up and simple coloring. I shaded with the same color with multiply layer mode on the top of the base color's folder. Those CGs were the only ones I planned to include. While I was drawing, I was also picturing the story and I felt like I had to add some more. So, I added the dahlia flowers with empty spaces. Not for dramatization but because I didn't know what to draw and what to include. I also wanted to add the CG of Collette (the girl). My original plan was to add a CG of her smiling with flowers to correspond with Edmund's first CG, but when I looked at the time, I thought I probably couldn't make it, so I added the gray CG of her for the ending instead. Oh, about that one... Edmund didn't imprison her for real, it was just the representation of her emotional state. Once again, time constraints! Now, write!!

There wasn't much to tell about the writing, though. I had Edmund and Collette's profiles sitting on the draft of the TWS universe for years. It's not even a profile, though. Just 2-3 sentences about them.  I think I wrote Collette got Stockholm syndrome on the profile.

Edmund was a prince, somehow taking an interest in Collette the witch and wanting to take her as his fiancee in the pretense of loving her and trying to bridge the relationship between humans and witches. Humans and witches at that time were at odds but not that bad. However, on Edmund's mother's side of family, there were a lot of humans that despise witches. Collette's family was a family of reputable witches despite having no noble status. That kind of Edmund chose to pursue Collette. Sounds sus? Yes. That was why her family against her wishes to be with him. I decided to leave out the details because I wouldn't make it in time if I included those.

So, the monologue was on Collette's POV, how she fell in love with Edmund and how Edmund betrayed her. Collette didn't know anything about what Edmund did behind the scenes, so you didn't too. 

About the theme, flower representations, I kinda made it up on the spot. Collette was actually represented with white lily, not white dahlia. But then I remembered the thing about dahlia when I did some googling for TWS: Drown in Purple material and I thought white dahlia and black dahlia might be suitable representations for those two. White lily and white dahlia kinda similar in meaning (purity) and black dahlia means betrayal.

Welp, so I managed to finish it in 5 hours and I uploaded it because I didn't know whether I could make it home in time for uploading. But then, on my way with a bus,  I realized there was a voting system for the game jam and one of the criteria is music. You know what? There was no BGM in mine :)

Luckily, I managed to get back home before the submission was closed and added the BGM.

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Thank you for reading and playing the game!