Hasugotchi Postmortem

Hi, this is Wisty.

I made this game in 10~ hours today for a friend's birthday. Let's just say I feel really insane completing this game without anything breaking, but I feel almost almost invincible to be able to work on a game jam again in the future. Adrenaline aside, here is my postmortem for this game.

What Went Right:

• Ren'Py: I have a love/hate relationship with Python as I've only been self-taught and only through Ren'Py for over 15 years... I never really sat down to extensively learn the program or code, but I appreciate how easy it is to pick up and create, and for that, I will always recommend this lovely free software to everyone who wants to start off making a visual novel. There's so much information and helpful tips to work and create something you imagined with it.
• Story: I will be honest that I jumped onto this project with no idea on what to make/create and much less knew how the story would go. Thankfully, I told myself to make this really goddamn simple to not give myself constant headaches. The story was simple: get through a work day without letting your Hasugotchi die or getting in trouble with the boss. It was really simple! Now I wonder why I cannot do that for all the other ideas I have in my mind...
• Music: I'm very appreciative for the free music I found through this website. Big thanks to TERNOX and zadmin. I would highly recommend checking out what they've made too!

What Went Wrong:

• Programming in Python: As stated above, I have no coding experience besides being self-taught. There was a lot of fine details I wanted to add, but I ended up having to bloat the code so I wouldn't be lost in the sauce of what I could or couldn't do. The clock on the top left (2nd screenshot) is actually just two photos connected together and manually changed as time passed. I couldn't wrap my mind around coding an actual clock, but this worked so that's that. Another issue was getting certain point systems in the game to work and it definitely didn't help that my code was becoming spaghetti from trying to finish this within the day. Also, getting labels to be called and returned to got a lot crazier than I imagined, but I felt like a genius when, at the end of it all, everything worked just as I planned. Unfortunately there is almost 1000 lines of code, on top of having almost 2000 files... So I think if I get the "OK" to post this publicly, I will do my best to clean this up to not throw almost 100 MB at you guys...
• Art: I know in my previous postmortem I was flexing about my art skills, but with how focused I was on the coding this so the game wouldn't break on launch, I only had 1 hours to try to create sprite assets. Thankfully, I found non-commercial usage Picrews  by うにつ団子 and tsukikodot that fit the style I needed. I did some editing on each sprite, but all the heavy lifting was thanks to them.

With all that said and done, I do apologize that I will not be making this publicly available unless the presenter and presentee feel comfortable about it. If I ever join a Visual Novel game jam, I feel fairly confident I can make something playable at least!

Thank you for reading.

Wisty