Pippa and Your Phantasmal Problem: Afterword

First of all: happy one year (+ a few months) old to Pippa and Your Phantasmal Problem! 🎃🎉

One plus year after its Spooktober submission, I'm finally able to sit down and finish this Afterword/Postmortem post for this silly spoopy visual novel. Work commitment, traveling and various things kept me occupied, but I made sure to draft this throughout the past year.

Ideation

I wanted to do more things with my character Pippa after Pippa the Witchy: a small and silly comic I did in 2021, and I figured Spooktober would be a perfect place to do it. Witches are in theme with spooky season, and the timing was perfect (had this idea by around June or July I think).

Pippa is a fun character to work with. Being an airhead (not stupid), writing her dialogue was very easy and just flows. I think I'm really just like this type of character hahaha... One problem: I've always struggled hard writing fantasy which I need to fulfill especially the witch part, and I didn't know how to do world-building. I am not adventurous, not quite. My joy lies on reading/writing characters development and banters instead of grand, complicate lore and world-building. Even so, Pippa being a witch is important to highlight, so I brainstormed a little bit:

What kind of magic rules should I make? How would she do her magic? How can I keep the idea of her predecessor's appearance in the comic and carry it to visual novel? My mind went around for a while...

To help me concept everything, I sketched the initial design as following (original post: 2204, 2205):

Updated her wardrobe a little bit. Since Spooktober happens when autumn starts, I wanted to have that autumn vibe: sweaters, leggings and the like. Her outfit is inspired from a pumpkin! 🎃 I think it's very cute.

Sketches I did in August (original post: 2211, 2212):

Now, to the story. The experiment I did with The Ice Cream Culprit with statbars was very interesting, so I thought a magic-based story would work very well with it. I didn't want to create extremely complicated magic rules and lore, so here is what I settled on:

• Magic is available for anyone to learn and use. It's uncommon, but not unheard of.
• Magic works like an extension of physics. To use it, one has to understand – to atomic level – on how physics work. For example, when Pippa tried to levitate a random leaf on the ground, she must understand how gravity and mass work. Magic uses a lot of calories to extend her kinetic force to lift it without actually touching it.
• Some magic skills, such as summoning ghosts and other complicated matters require assistance. Magic circles, diagrams, spells, etc.
• Magic practitioners, witches, or wizards usually have familiars who stay with them in their life, as they usually live solitary life. In Pippa's case, Kitty is her familiar.

I stopped myself here before I get too detailed and complicated. I didn't need all these for the VN itself, it's just a guide to help me write the story.

As magic is consumable, I designed it with a system: it can be spent and refilled. To make things very simple, I made food as its fuel. Pippa is a nomad (established since the comic) so she doesn't have much savings, if any at all. Food is scarce for her. This added the difficulty of using magic to make things more convenient vs. it's hard to keep the magic level enough to cast.

With that, I designed the story surrounding that mechanic. The plot is very light, nothing deep at all. After all, characters interaction and banters are what I have the most fun working on. The biggest struggle I had was with the branching endings. I felt like it's important to have the magic level+food mechanic having a big impact to different endings, so I made two endings; for a what-if situation of her succeeding to solve her problem vs. failing to do so.

Making

The entire VN was made for Spooktober 2024, though the outline and some concept sketches were done a few days before the jam started. When 1st of September arrived, I wouldn't have needed to think about design any more and just draw the sprites all the way, with the sketches as my references.

Writing

It took me 10-11 days to write the entire script, which in the end sat at around 15,000 words. My goal was at 7 day-long writing session and at most 10,000 word-long script, but in the end, it extended a little bit. >.<;; A bit = around 50% longer hahah.

Oh, and I went through three proofreading process! Thank you very much Sebby, ebi-hime, and Wan-chan for sparing your precious time to read Pippa VN. 🙇‍♀️ They were all so kind, even when they were busy doing their own projects and such 🫶 I'm forever grateful.

Drawing

The assets were drawn in between writing, as per usual of my development process. The background took longer than the characters, and I made them extra large for a lot of zooming and reusing. I converted all of the images to AVIF format for compact size.

Old screenshot; this is the background that took me the longest to draw! >:0 Even so, it's still not perfect with a lot of mistakes hahah. I hope it's understandable, I only had a month to do everything else... ;-; I will improve my drawing skill for the next one, I promise!

Coding and Testing

As the writing was done in Ren'py format directly. I took turns between writing and drawing which helped keeping my attention diverse and testing the mood of each scene. My writing process was both the dialogue and narration and also initial scripting in one. So, when I finished writing, all the script was already Ren'py compilable. What took me longest was coding the facial expressions (because characters change expressions every line – because... why not? Lol) and some of the movements they do.

Some ATLs were very frustrating; especially the scene where Ollie ran around. I spent the last two days of Spooktober fixing it.

One really huge sprite...

It took so many hours to code this scene... Gahhh!!

GUI

GUI was not high in my prio list, so I put it off until the very last few days. I could have done more with it for the jam, but I didn't want to break anything. I really want to update it at some point...

I did make time on the second-to-last day to prettify the menu choices though!

Before:

After:

Soundtrack

All of it was composed by Dalton Attig! He composed such fun, quirky, spoopy and kawaii soundtrack – I absolutely adored them all! The first time I heard Pippa's main theme, I thought I could hear her voice singing: la~ la~ la~ aaah!!! XD too cute!!! Love it!!! Thank you so much!!!

Playlist:

Fun things: I am very proud of them!

• Pippa is a very fun character to draw and write, so I had a lot of fun interacting with her in my writing process. Looking back, I think I write a lot of airhead characters hahaha...
• Some scenes were really fun to make overall! Postal bird, Miss Ester and Grim-chan are my favourites! These happen to be the ones with some visual directions, and I had to compromise a lot between my visions vs what I can realistically code within the jam period. The direction was very simple for now, but the experience of going through outline -> ideas -> script -> art -> putting all together was really inspiring. I hope to do better next time!
• Drawing for the entire VN overall! I put restrictions on myself: very limited colour palette, minimally-viable cut-ins, and keeping the art style cohesive with simple rendering helped me save so much time in art. By doing this, drawing for Pippa VN was the highlight of my jamming process! I absolutely loved doing it! ;w;
• Working on this every day; it was actually quite fun?? I didn't have a break for the entire month, and I even slept late in the last few days of September to finish coding their expressions. Looking back at my notes, I really did a lot... Woah! *self pat in the back* I needed a lot of time to recover from the jam pressure, but the feeling of finishing this project, and many other devs who were going through the same, it was a really good feeling...! I wanna shout: "Make visual novels, people! It is very fun! Go through the process, it will be very rewarding in the end!" Even now when I'm not actively working on any VNs, I miss those devving days fondly. I want to return soon...!

What can be improved...

• Even more detailed planning: I thought I was very prepared. I already had the entire outline settled from the beginning to end right before Spooktober started, so when September 1st arrived I just went all in with the writing, art, and all sorts of development. I didn't have any spare days left for a break. D: Literally worked on this the entire September haha...
• Visual bug: Ollie's running around animation bug (which I spent the last few days of the jam fixing, day and night). Now, one year later, I still have no idea what was wrong. 🤷‍♀️
• Last-minute script change: food's value tweaking and how the dialogue follows up, it was a plot-hole-like flaw which made the multiple ending 'game' felt wrong for me. In short: in the original script I 'forced' certain ending to happen regardless of the choices picked, and that would make the choices meaningless. I was able to adjust this and made the choices more meaningful.
• Staging and directing: I have this tendency to write my script with a lot of visuals in mind. I do not write a lot of descriptions, and many times think: "I'll show this scene through visuals instead: staging, CGs, cut-ins, etc." Looking back, I ended up not implementing many of the staging and directing I planned when I wrote. I didn't even write any details about it, and completely forgot what I wanted to show. Without the descriptive narration and any visual storytelling, it feels like many of the scenes fell flat. This is my bad, I'm sorry. 😔 Me reading the VN overall felt complete because my brain auto-complete what's missing as I wrote and drew all these, but I figure for everyone else who played, it felt lacking in details. I'm sorry about that D: it's a great lesson for me to consider more. As I tend to write less narration and draw more, I hope to convey more of the details in the story in staging and directing for future VNs. With Pippa VN, I ran out of time to revisit this aspect 😔 but it was a nice experience to gauge my power limit, and perhaps for future jams I may partake, I can have more extensive planning for this aspect!
  (I spoke with several people about this point and they brought this feedback up to me. Thank you so much; I definitely needed all these! 🙏)

What's next?

If this question was asked to me last year post-Spooktober, all I wanted was to rest haha 💦 though work didn't let me to 😔 but I understand the nature of this question, so: what's my next project?

Well, I have more ideas! Yaaay! I have some drafts I'm very excited about, and they are really long, so I want to cook them well. I also have some fun, shorter ideas that would be really fun to work on. I hope to be able to work on them actively, but I want to take my time brewing them slowly...

Meanwhile, in addition to working on my own projects, I'm also open to drawing for other projects. At the moment, I'm drawing for Re:Curse. A mystery, time-travel VN by Else/Papertrail Studios. The Kickstarter page just concluded in October; and we're funded! \o/ You can try the demo on itch.io and Steam as well! ✨

See you on my next project!
- Konayachi

(This post isn't proofed so if it doesn't read well, I'm sorry in advance. 🙇‍♀️)