Overall, we're really happy with how March of the Emissaries turned out. This project was an ambitious one; a trial that challenged us to make a compelling story in under 20k words. Our last project, Tears of a Mermaid, fell victim to scope creep in it's production, and I feel that it's quality suffered as a result. This project appears to have accomplished its goal, and aside from readers bringing up a slow start, the game hit its mark when it came to the action scenes. I've always preferred media that lean towards action, and I've found that this isn't too common in visual novels. While dark topics aren't unheard of in the industry, I as a consumer have struggled to find a story like March of the Emissaries. And when one of our reviewers compared it to an anime, my heart fluttered! Before I even began writing visual novels, the idea of producing an anime got me into writing.

            However, this release was not perfect, and that's okay! Making a groundbreaking release in the span of a month is difficult even for a professional team. One review commented on the sprites being stiff. He wasn't wrong, we had more sprites planned. In future builds, we hope to add neutral sprites for both Persephone and Griswyr alongside more expressions. Perhaps if we recruited two artists, we might've pulled it off. In the case of jam projects, however, I prefer to prioritize functionality over perfection, and I believe many game developers should practice this!

                 For the past seven years, I've been writing my magnum opus. It was a dark fantasy title, much like this one, with a grander story behind the wheel. However I was so terrified to release it, because I wanted to fine tune the build into oblivion! Something about releasing your baby into the hands of merciless reviewers online made me paranoid just to talk about it. At the time, I had minimal experience releasing games, and this fear made it hard for me to talk about it, let alone promote it. I was stuck in development hell, and I know several people who are stuck on their perfect project even today. This stagnant era taught me many things; the most important being to sacrifice perfection for a finished project.

            I've told my teammates over and over, "It's a jam project, we'll fix it after release". We do have plans to implement voice actors, but we chose not to direct them until after release. While voice actors breathe a lot of life into a story, they're also an extra hurdle for us to get over. When making Tears of a Mermaid, I was under pressure to finish editing. I was fortunate enough to have a someone to direct them, but that didn't absolve me of having to find references for them, provide keys for hard-to-pronounce words, approve of candidates, and so forth. I was fortunate to not have any of them leave mid-production. Had that happened, especially if it was the main character's voice actor, it would've been disastrous! And seeing how I plan to eventually make a steam page for the game, I figured this release would focus on the fun of development first, building a fandom second.

            Regarding the future for the game, the story and mechanics will remain the same. So if you have enjoyed the project before the updates, you haven't missed out on much. These updates will be more quality-of-life, focusing on adding more sprites, improving the UI, adjusting lore entries, and voice acting! I might expand on bits and pieces of the story and will likely adjust the beginning to make it less backstory-heavy, but the themes itself will remain unchanged. Once our project has reached our expectations, I plan to show it to consumers. While I am content with our jam project having an imperfect release, the paradigm changes when trying to impress casual gamers. English Visual Novels (EVN) unfortunately do not have the best reputation, and while I have no plans to appeal to the Japanese Visual Novel audience, I want them to see our best. With deadlines no longer being an issue, we have little escuse for a shoddy product, especially when we market it on Steam.

A fallacy of relying on jam projects is that the consumers are mostly other developers. I'm not saying that developers can't be your fans, but that other developers tend to be more forgiving and unrepresentative of most consumers. Not only that, but a lot of developers might not stick around long term. When I play jam projects, I do so to show support, provide feedback, and take notes for my future projects. I also am unlikely to become a fan, because most visual novels aren't my cup of tea. I wouldn't blame anyone for treating me the same way, it's just part of the hustle. You can network and make great friends along the way, just remember that consumers usually buy more games than other developers.

Overall, I'm very happy with how our project turned out. Seeing reviewers fall in love with Caius rather than Griswyr was very cool. That negative review I received reminded me of the importance of legibility in visual novels, and it gave me a taste of how some people might dislike our projects. It also taught me how to mediate scope creep, while being a good test of curbing perfectionism. It is always a privilege to work with such talented people, and I look forward to seeing just how far we can push this project from here.

We plan to cover our mistakes and our successes in our next devlog. If you enjoyed the read, please remember to leave a comment and check out any of our other projects! It means a lot to me, and it reminds our team that someone is reading these devlogs!