--A collection of postmortem thoughts and insights during the production phase of "What Grows in the Night".

Completion of the Game:

 This game was for the Spooktober 2nd Annual Visual Novel Jam by Devtalk+.

#The Concept of the story:

All about autumn nights and the theme of Halloween!

Few people probably know that the idea behind initially was that a scarecrow farmer had to take care of a baby monster veggie as food for a vegan vampire. But apparently, it wasn't fleshed out much. Having made some tweaks and changes, the story about What Grows symbolized a new beginning in its animated life. (And, in some way, relates to our first time working with a team in a jam).

Although, there are hidden backstories of each characters symbolized by some details in the art and hints in the game, we made the story more focused on Scarecrow as a first-person narrative. It’s a simple visual novel that can be found in other VNs. In What Grows, we just focused more in bringing stories and our imagination into the medium. Our passion, plus simplistic narrative choices is what we aim to achieve in this jam.

Week 1: 

#Introducing the characters:

Scarecrow was originally a male. But thinking about it, the character suited more as a female, too. We didn't think much about gender options at the time. 

Amara wasn't an immortal before. But it seemed like it would work well for the story and the changes we implemented. (No more vampire Amara although that'd be cool, too.)

Noel's character was pretty consistent all throughout his concepts. He seems to just mesh well with the plot, it seems. We wanted to have the feeling of Wizard of Oz in one of the characters. So that's how we came up with the design of Noel as a werecreature.

Yves. Good 'ol Yves. His character wasn't fully fleshed out until the later stages of the writing. He's a mysterious, albeit chaotic character. Much like Amara, he has potent magic. 

Art direction + Style:

The final art for the sprites was to have a Tim Burton style. Dark, but hints of eccentricity and of the whimsical. Most of the GUI and sprites were finished for week 1. We had a little schedule over at our discord group, segregated into different weeks. We didn't know what to expect yet with the VN. Concepts were provided but the mood is not there yet. We try to get a feel with it through mood boards and our concept art.  Looking up whimsical spooky music to channel our imagination. 

The Background:

Prioritizing the background wasn't the initial plan of our teammate, but they feel it would be better to start rather than waiting (It is also their first time in doing cg and background work for a VN). The writer for our team had a good, detailed outline so that helps, too. The background had been a bit of a challenge to work with. But through effort, we were able to make it fit better. 

The cg was in the back burner for now. All in all, our time was spent getting inspirations and not forcing the ideas to come.  The composers did a sketch of the music. While the bg artist was closer to finishing the art for the background.

--That’s end of Week 1.  Stay tuned for our next devlog!