Charm Studies - postmortem (Patreon)

the patron release was only yesterday, but i thought i'd write up the postmortem for this game tonight while it's still fresh in my mind. apologies if this post is a little scattered in places (and for posting it kinda late, oopsie).

this post contains SPOILERS!!! so make sure to play the game before reading.

let's go~!

a new life for an old project

around the end of 2021 i was invited to make a game for a bundle with some friends with the theme of MAGIC SCHOOL! it sounded like fun, so i started planning a prequel story about cassia, since she was an unexpected fan fave after the release of starry flowers. BUT, 2022 went completely off the rails for me, and i decided to drop from the bundle... which was ultimately for the best, both for my mental health and because that version of the game wouldn't have had picross!

i've played A LOT of picross in my spare time (luna story 1 and 2 on android, and more recently miku logic paint S) so i was excited to try to make it myself! i already went into a lot of detail about coding it in a previous dev diary, so i won't re-explain all that here. i'm just glad that i was able to make a picross game so quickly, cuz i really didn't know if i could get it to work when i first started!

here are the character designs i drew in december 2021:

sidenote: i actually couldn't decide whether younger cassia would have long or short hair, because both were so cute... so i decided to make it a plot point that she cuts it during the story. the original plan was that this would've been something she did by mistake (like casting a spell wrong and ending up with short hair) but that plot beat didn't really fit anywhere after i designed the puzzles... so i changed it to be her decision. a little reward for the end, as a symbol of her growth :)

i love that cassia and senna are very opposite in their designs, being light and dark with a mix of round and square parts, united by their uniforms... in retrospect, they tie in so well with the picross grid despite being designed before i decided to make it picross! stuff like this is what makes me feel like sometimes my games come together entirely by fate.

production and worldbuilding~

this is my fourth time doing nanoreno, the annual game jam where you try to make a renpy game in one month. her tears were my light and Contract Demon were nanoreno games, just to give you an idea of the scale of what i knew i could make in that time. this game feels bigger than both of those, and it IS, by about 2k words. but in terms of assets, it's tiny! only 2 characters, and small, simple drawings for the backgrounds... i purposely planned to keep the art workload light, since that always means i'm more likely to finish in time (even though i can draw fast! it just gets draining to clean up that much art in a limited time frame.)

i spent the first week of the jam resting a bit from having just completed Sex Advice Succubus. it gave me time to solidify some lore decisions, like specifically deciding on the names and explanations for the different types of magic, which i had started planning back in 2021 and expanded on slowly as i kept thinking about it over 2022. i'm REALLY GLAD i gave it so long to cook in my brain (so to speak), because i'll be referring to it going forward as i keep making more games about witches :)

my original puzzle idea was based around a magic circle with 6 points on it, which then turned into 6 picross puzzles (plus a final one that has the whole circle). when i first made my personal wiki in notion last year, one of the things i did was try to categorize all my witches by magic type to make sure that they were evenly distributed:

there are more categories (like truth magic, as senna mentions ingame), which is why there are some characters not listed. this is also subject to change, i've moved a few characters around a couple times tbh... but the point of having a more rigid structure to work within, is that it forces me to make decisions about what a character's magic can actually do, which helps generate ideas for story stuff!! even if it's small stuff to toss into my webcomic. i'm glad charm studies gave me the excuse to do all this :)

anyway, i had a basic outline of what i wanted the story to be ever since i decided on the original game concept, so i focused on other parts of the game before even touching the script. i actually finished the ui and some of the music first (aside from prototyping the picross stuff), which felt like a really odd order to do things in for me! but since the puzzles would directly relate to the story, i needed to finish them before i could write the script... and the songs were something i was making for fun without planning to use everything i made (luckily they all fit!)

i included some ingame commentary about the music, but i gotta reiterate... it was so easy to knock those songs out. i'm still shocked, honestly. i'm super happy with all of them, and never got tired of listening to the soundtrack during development :)

the first build was ready on the 17th, which included the main story (no epilogue yet!) and all the puzzles and songs, but still rough art. the busts only took one day to do!! it was awesome!!! my reward for deciding to do small busts with no extra poses!!!!!! the backgrounds and illustrations were done over the next two days, too...

this might be disappointing to include in the postmortem but i'm mentioning it anyway--i thought about drawing illustrations for all the puzzles (to show when you finish them), but i decided to only do it if i had the energy at the end of development. and it turned out that i'm VERY TIRED!!! so i abandoned the idea... it's a jam game that i already did a heck of a lot for, so i think it's best to just leave it how it is. sometimes you can't put in everything you want for a game, and that's ok!!!

design stuff!

as mentioned before, my experience with picross is based on luna story and miku logic paint (actually i played murder by numbers too but i don't know if i recommend it, i never finished it lol). so i looked to those games when deciding on ui + features!

one of the first things i did was add a button to hide the timer, because i really hate being timed on these kinds of puzzles (sudoku too!)... it's just so stressful. i wanted the game to be more relaxing, which is why you're allowed "win" even if you click every wrong tile. players tend to want to follow the rules anyway, even when there's no consequence for breaking them! it feels like the pressures in this game are self-imposed, which goes well with the story since cassia is worried about passing but you only play as her studying and not taking her actual test, haha.

there were a few struggles with designing the puzzles--some ended up having multiple solutions, which meant they needed edits, or had to be totally redrawn. the one for spatial magic had a few iterations, meaning i had to change the script after writing it, because the shape had to change... i didn't mind testing and retesting the puzzles though, because i love doing picross! it's very meditative to me, so i hope others get the same feeling out of it.

by the way... i was worried about having to write all the 1's and 0's for each puzzle's code myself, but then npckc found a site that would spit out numbers based on uploaded images! they really saved me a lot of time!!!

during the story you can choose different responses to senna's questions, which i wanted to include to make the story parts more interactive, and to add some replay value. i made both the story scenes and the puzzles skippable to let players engage with the game in the way they wanted... i'm glad i did all that, cuz it made testing go very fast for me too :) but i played and replayed a lot of the puzzles anyway, because again, i just enjoy doing them... i'm so glad i could make my own picross!!!!

the end...

i had a lot of fun writing this game. but i wrote the epilogue right after finishing all the art for the story, and that's when i started to feel the burnout setting in...

the epilogue script ended up lengthier than expected. it came out feeling a bit meandering, like it's trying to stay in a moment as it's about to pass--which is why that turned out to BE the story (cassia not being ready for things to change), and i think suits the lo-fi aesthetic a lot... this was the only part of the story i felt really uncertain while making, but it fits somehow, i think.

usually i would try to end on a stronger note, like building up to another cute cg, but i didn't have it in me to draw something new (except the closed book at the end). and this isn't a love story, so i don't think it needed a big payoff either...

all this to say, right now when i look at it i feel like i probably could've done something better? but i'm still pretty satisfied with how it turned out overall. again, this was a jam game, and i did a lot, and i've BEEN doing a lot all year, so now it's time to rest! gotta let my creative energies fully recharge before tackling the next one.

i hope everyone will have fun with charm studies on launch day :) thanks for reading!

<3 nami