For the past month, I worked on an entry for Yaoi Jam 2021 and Mechet was what came out of it. Looking back, I'm actually really happy with what I've made. This postmortem will detail my thoughts during and after creation, as well as fun little process shots. While writing this, I got a little rambly so... if you like long posts, this is for you! And if you want to see my early concept art of bunny suit plugsuits, it's here too. 

Overall, I count this project as a success, seeing as it's my first finished game. Which is super exciting and sort of surreal and 14 year old me would be shaking right now... I'm doing it... making games... woah...

Writing

Mechet is... actually an AU of my very beloved OCs. SORRY GUYS THEY'RE NOT ACTUALLY SPACE CADETS! 

The reason I put them in this AU was because of, well, Evangelion. I got hyped from the movie coming out and outlined everything in a fever dream. And because my initial spark came from Evangelion, the depression robot anime, my outline was wild. I cannot emphasize how wild it got. Here are some highlights.

• Sol was a lab-grown dude. Just a guy living in a test tube. BUT ACTUALLY he was secretly an alien! But then he becomes god at the end?
• There were aliens. I didn't want to draw them so I wrote "take pictures of supermarket fish and edit them" for what I should do. 
• The earth was split in half and this was going to be introduced without any context.

Yeah... lots of things didn't make it in the end.

I started outlining around July 22 and writing soon after, as I found out about Yaoi Jam late. Early on, I realized that I was not going to be able to write out my entire outline in a month, not when it was ~2000 words. So it got cut to only the first 400-500 words.

The ship was always BALLS though. BALLS ARE FOREVER!

UI

This was an interesting part for me because I consider myself primarily an artist-writer, not a designer. But UI is so important that it wasn’t something I could go easy on. 

There was a lot of fiddling around... I started with layout mockups, knowing that I wanted both Chet and Sol on the screen always. Inspired by Heaven Will Be Mine’s way of using headshots, I made a quick image for approximate placement.

Then came the above, which really leaned into the sci-fi theme. It was very gaudy though, and probably would’ve been hard to look at for long. So, things got simplified even more into…

When I came back to it with the intention of finalizing everything, I got the files and plugged them into the game. As you can see, it turned out very different, which meant more edits! Yay!

That’s how it goes... hopefully next time I'll have a better sense of what will work from the get-go.

As a side note, I think it’s funny how things kept getting more and more minimalistic… semi-transparent black boxes are really the way to go…

Art

For the sprites, I used the layeredimage function, sectioning off the eyes, brows, and mouth into their separate layers. It was really useful and I cannot recommend it more.

Given that I made 12 sets of “base” expressions for them, I unintentionally ended up with many, many combinations. Which was great! They have so much emotional range. But as you might imagine, it got messy.

The way I kept things organized was to make an expression sheet and number each one. Then, my files were named according to “Name type+number,” with e, b, and m used for eye, brow, and mouth respectively. So the eye used in Sol’s first expression would be “Sol e1.” When coding, I would just reference the expression sheet and pull what I needed, like "Sol e2 b12 m8," for example. 

Where I tripped up was the CGs. I originally planned for a whopping 21 CGs and even sketched and scripted them in. But at that point, it was clear I wasn’t drawing that many images without a serious hit to either quality or my time. Things ended up being cut to one CG, two sets, placed in the end for maximum effect. 

I am a bit sad the others weren’t shown so HERE THEY ARE NOW!

Sol’s so pretty in the last one…………. sigh………

If you want to see the CG that did make the cut, PLAY THE GAME! It’s a really cute one too so… PLAY THE GAME!!!!!!

Lastly, I would like to say…

I’m still sad boob window plugsuits didn’t make it.

BGs

The One Cheap Hack to have background art without actually drawing: stock photos.

After getting my photos, I applied a filter and gradient map to make them cohesive. It worked better than I expected actually, especially given the time constraint. 

BTW, the exact filters I used were Clip Studio’s Artistic Effect - Color only at default settings, then Gaussian blur, again at default. 

Programming

This wasn't my first rodeo using Ren’py. I’ve tried to make games in the past, many times actually, but they always ended up unfinished... my workflow was not very good back then. But because of that, I did have some Ren’py experience. Since I was aiming for a straightforward kinetic novel, there were no tricky animations to implement - unlike my previous attempt, which had people moving and shaking all over. So, programming went okay.

One thing that was new was editing the game menu screens, namely the Main Menu and Preferences. Here’s the menu that didn’t make the cut, or “Chet angrily shakes his fist at Sol for being too pretty.”

Music

To be honest, I didn’t intend on having music at all because I… never play games with the sound on. Ever. So I wasn’t sure if I could implement music in a way that would work well - and I tend to think something done poorly is worse than not having it there at all. But I did my best! 

It was a huge learning experience and I did have fun trying to match the music to the mood. After this, I think I’ll be paying much more attention to how sound is used in games. 

All in all…

I’m glad I managed to finish this game! That’s my biggest success here, putting Mechet out into the world. 

The next project I’d like to do is another SolChet game. YEP, ANOTHER SOLCHET GAME. THE SAME CHARACTERS! But this time… Sol and Chet go to high school. 

With school starting soon, I hope that’s something I can do. I'd love to take what I’ve learnt from this project and GO FORTH! 

Anyways, thank you for reading!