A thing I learned making Cyber Punk Janitor: I CAN and HAVE programmed complex video game stuff, but the harder and more complex it is, the less steam I have for writing and art and game design. And so I make fancy game systems and then burn out and don't finish the game.

And when I am making a game that is NOT complex from a programming perspective (and other also from a systems perspective), I have way more steam in me for writing, art, and game/level design stuff. I felt surprisingly calm the whole time I was working on Cyber Punk Janitor until the last day of the jam.

I didn't get stressed out until maybe 6 hours before the end of the jam. THEN I got the sweaty panic. But I've been in sweaty panic mode for two weeks or more for jam (or other) deadlines nearly every time before this.  Maybe I ought to do more Adventure Game / Visual Novel / DIGITAL COMIC type stuff, rather than trying to like finish my complex 3D projects. I could pretty easily use the same workflow to expand Cyber Punk Janitor to more of a "full game" and not be so stressed, I suspect.

I'm doing When Does Summer Begin, my prequel to When There Is No More Snow, but I really worked a lot on some simulation aspects ala Tokimeki Memorial (not dating, tho) and I think that might have been what burned me out on it. Maybe this is another example of the scourge of Scope Creep in a way I didn't really consider before. The issue is not adding more and more features as I develop the game (which is a dumb thing I used to do in the past), but more like developing complex systems that require intense programming brain.

Even if they're not that HARD to implement per se, they make my brain operate in THAT sort of engineering brain mode, which is tiring. It's similar to when I'm making music and I have to really focus to do mixing, EQing, all that technical work to get a song ready for mastering. It really is technical stuff and not creative stuff. Both (recorded) music and video game making are a combination of artistic creative work and technical work. I think if it becomes too much technical work, I get burned out and the project stalls. Music production, especially electronic music focused on production in a DAW is for sure technical. It's not me and my friends hanging around a practice space smoking and playing instruments, it's me in front of my computer clicking with a mouse and sometimes singing alone at a mic. Programming games is also a lot of me sitting at my computer mouse clicking and typing code. Pardon me for using discredited pseudoscience as a metaphor, but it's very "right-brained" activity.

But because music production and mixing and EQing and all that of that follows a series of pretty simple and straightforward rules, the level of complexity is generally something that's restrained. Video games are NOT restrained. They can go very sophisticated, way complicated, really easily. I have done this with games I've worked on! And it's frankly stupid to compare my games, the output of ONE PERSON for the most part, to games made by a team of people, especially a LARGE, WELL-PAID team of people (who probably get laid off when they ship, but that's another problem).

Cyber Punk Janitor is from a game design perspective, less complex than When There Is No More Snow. No Snow is also a visual novel / digital comic / adventure game or whatever, but it's also tracking stats throughout the game. It tracks health, it tracks your relationships with other characters, stuff like that. Cyber Punk Janitor doesn't have any variables. At all. It's basically like a Choose Your Own Adventure book in game design terms. It was a breeze to work on from a technical perspective.

The vast majority of the work on this project was creating art. And the more I worked on it, the better I got at doing it. I kept finding faster ways to do it. By the last week, I was cranking out art of characters in minutes. I basically started the project by trying to make art of the main characters in various poses and close ups of their faces in different emotional states I thought I would need. I did use a lot of that but also a fair amount of it went unused. That was dumb but a lot of extra effort, all things considered. And it was how I learned to streamline the art process. 

This game is my third visual novel type of game, after No More Snow and my game jam collab with Rachel Presser http://sonictoad.itch.io/, Refuse or Refuge: https://whydoisay.itch.io/refuse-or-refuge

Like Refuse or Refuge, I made Cyber Punk Janitor in Unity with the Naninovel plugin. I'm pretty unhappy Unity and don't want to use it anymore, but Naninovel is REALLY good. I keep hoping the programmer behind it will port it to Godot or Unreal Engine or something. I've looked at RenPy and I don't like it. I don't like using Python. And Unity lets me easily export to more platforms, including WebGL and Android. RenPy sort of supports Android but it's not all the features and is kind of a mess, in my experience. Plus the great thing about Naninovel is that because it's Unity, I can still do all the normal Unity stuff which I already know how to do. I spawned particles as is normal for Unity and drew it over the Naninovel screen in Refuse or Refuge. It's just way more versatile than RenPy.

But more importantly, I made Cyber Punk Janitor having already made Refuse or Refuge, so there was basically no "getting up to speed" on the engine time. I just started making the game and I already knew how to do it. And even though I could spawn particles or 3d models or whatever, I did not. I just did sprites and text and clicking and it was easy and, dare I say, kinda fun! The only big technical problem was when I tried to make Linux, Android, and especially WebGL builds on the last day. (I had just done Windows builds during the rest of the dev process).

At the start of the project, I just cloned the prototype of When Does Summer Begin and started building Cyber Punk Janitor right on top of it. I didn't have to setup anything. But as a result, I was also using an old version of Unity and it turned out, this version had some security hole Unity found later. As a result, when I tried to build WebGL, Android, and Linux, I found out that I didn't have the modules downloaded to let me do that. I downloaded them but they would not work at all.

The project got messed up and wouldn't build at all SIX HOURS BEFORE THE DEADLINE. It turned out I had to completely uninstall Unity and reinstall a newer version with the WebGL, Android, and Linux build modules there from the start. While my main desktop computer was doing that, I copied the project to my 8 year old laptop with several dead keys. I just finished the game on my laptop and then the next morning copied the "finished" version of the game back to my desktop machine, upgraded the project to the newer version of Unity, and hey, it worked! It popped out the builds I needed without too much trouble. The most important for me was WebGL so that just about anyone could play the game on their computer or smartphone with a modern web browser.

I was extremely wary of upgrading Unity during a project because in the past, upgrading a project to a new version of Unity has completely broken my project. When this happened I was preparing to show my game at MAGWest and the Unity upgrade prevented it from compiling entirely let alone running! It was a disaster and resulted way too many late nights, including my staying up all night the night before MAGWest and programming on the train ride down to the show. This did not happen with Cyber Punk Janitor.

But I also did not upgrade to anywhere near the newest version of Unity, mind you. Then again, it's also a visual novel and not some complex 3D project so perhaps there was less to break. 

The takeaway is: Even though I'm still tired and am definitely taking a break from more gamedev for the moment, developing Cyber Punk Janitor was a pretty smooth process, more artistic than technical, and if all my gamedev was like this, I'd get a lot more done and have a much better time doing it!

I will probably come back to Cyber Punk Janitor, maybe next month after all the Oktrollberfest streaming and judging is done, and implement the SFX and the rest of the music like I wanted to, and if I'm feeling it, expand it with the scenes I planned but cut and maybe more scenes.

Then, most likely in the new year, I'll go back to When Does Summer Begin. Yes, it's more complicated from a code and design perspective but I already DID that part of it. It already works. I just kinda burned out doing it and never went back and made all the art and story and such.

However, like I said before, I DID fly back to Michigan last summer and spent the better part of two weeks (during the times when I was not catching up with family and friends) going to places I used to live at/spend a lot of time at growing up. I took many pictures and videos to use in When Does Summer Begin. The last time I worked on When Does Summer Begin, I didn't have any of this material. I was basically trying to simulate those places I grew up in by staging 3D models and taking screenshots or using the scant few pics I had of my childhood and random photos I took on past trips.

This time I was intentionally taking tons and tons of pics and videos FOR THE GAME. And I know the sort of camera angles I wanted and was shooting with that in mind. When I got back I said to myself, "I'm gonna get started on this immediately," and then spent a few weeks editing video and taking screenshots and got burned out again.

I think maybe it will go better if I work more like I did with Cyber Punk Janitor, which is to say, get the things I absolutely am sure I need (backgrounds for key places) done, and then just start writing and only make more art when the story actively requires it. I think that's gonna be the key to getting When Does Summer Begin done without burning out again! So I have a plan going forward, for both Cyber Punk Janitor and When Does Summer Begin! And I'm not worried about overscoping Cyber Punk Janitor and burning out or delaying When Does Summer Begin as a result.

While Cyber Punk Janitor is definitely poking fun at Snatcher, I'm not trying to MAKE Snatcher. I don't have any impulse to make a game as long or as complicated as Snatcher. No light gun shooting gallery scenes for me!

P.S. My least favorite thing in Japanese visual novels / sound novels / adventure games / digital comics / etc is the "examine every object" "talk to every person" in the scene multiple times before you can proceed mechanic. I just hate it. There's no reason for it other than annoying padding. I am never gonna do that. If that means my games are short, too bad!

I hope you enjoy Cyber Punk Janitor, but also be sure to check out When There Is No More Snow: https://whydoisay.itch.io/when-there-is-no-more-snow and Refuse or Refuge: https://whydoisay.itch.io/refuse-or-refuge