What's this? A third post mortem?! How long are you going to milk your game?! Well…my Voice Actor (VA) director advised me to continue marketing Tears of A Mermaid for at least a month. That and, there's so much to reflect on. You don't stop learning just because your project is over. 

So if you read Post Mortem II, you might remember that one of my mistakes was writing too much. I wanted to expand on this. I got one of my friends to play our visual novel and while she enjoyed it, her main complaint was the pacing. She told me that everything went too fast, and that there wasn't a lot of depth to the story. Now this is a jam game, and it's unlikely I'll write the next Harry Potter book under a month. But this doesn't invalidate her feedback. One of my biggest concerns was that the story's pacing was off, and Jory being bare-chested in the snow… but mostly the story! When I informed her of the jam's deadline, her response blew my mind. "If you only had a month, why did you write a story that big? Why not write something shorter and more compact? You could've then expanded on what you had, and save the bigger story for a project with a more forgiving deadline". And then it hit me, my scope was WAY too big!

Now this isn't to say that I'm disappointed in our project. In fact, I'm VERY impressed at what we accomplished. We really made something spectacular despite the obstacles in our path. But had I tackled something less than 28,000 words, it would've been better. See, you don't just write 28k words, you also have to edit them. I wrote the script, polished it, sent it out to my editors and…

Most of my development time involved the script. And despite how many revisions it went through, there were still typos and bugs that slipped through. It would've taken me much less time to edit a 4,000 word script. In fact, my very first jam project was only 4k words, and looking back, I was both the lead, writer, and coder. I wrote that draft in a day, and had it ready within the week. It freed up time for me to pursue other avenues the project needed (marketing was not one of them so it flopped). Now Tears of A Mermaid had better success, but I believe its quality would've skyrocketed had I limited the scope to 10k words. OnceUponATimeJam suggested we write "fairy tales". In their minds, they meant a stories that wasn't too long and focused on a moral rather than characters. This didn't get my project booted, but that suggestion wasn't meant to gatekeep, it was likely a warning not to overextend. I originally wanted Tears of A Mermaid to focus on self-sacrifice, but that went out the window when the draft was larger than the book it was based on (Yes, I read the Hans Lee book).  

Now some of you might be thinking, "Who the hell would want to write that much anyways?! You're a masochist". The answer is passion. A little secret about this project is that it takes place in the same world as my dream project, Philistine. Yes, Tears of A Mermaid is canon! So that made me want to make it as compelling as possible. Looking back, this might've been a mistake. My first jam project was a goofy Spooktober entry involving two devils struggling to make pumpkin pie for their overlord. And Tears of a Mermaid was meant to be a prequel of sorts to Philistine. I originally wanted to title it Philistine; Tears of A Mermaid, but was advised against this because it might've looked like a marketing scheme. Welp, the jig is up boys! Good thing no one reads these devlogs hahaha…ha… 

Through my experience as a freelance writer (yes people actually hired me), I've noticed a pattern. The projects that weren't visual novels had me jump in the later stages of development. In fact, the last project I was hired on was almost ready for the publishers to look at. My objective was to write the story beats in relation to the levels created, and write the dialogue. I was allowed to have some creative liberty, but I needed to get permission. While narratively speaking, adding a second phase to a boss fight where the player goes super saiyan is a very satisfying and a great way to finish the game. From the technical side, my client told me and I'm quoting him here, "The level designers would kick my ass if I went through with this". That's just one example of how an unbridled narrative can lead to overscoping. As of now, I'm assisting one of my colleagues with designing the outline for his project. However, he recently asked me to step away. Not because I was performing poorly. He told me that my narrative approach was amazing, but that he himself hadn't ironed out the gameplay he wanted for his game. Without a plan in mind, I risked overscoping the budget. Even though I was careful to portage around the design documents, it's that easy to do if you aren't familiar with a game's budget!

Now this error doesn't just happen to writers. Yandere Simulator was in development hell for ten years because the director kept trying to code in new mechanics. I could see an artist wanting too many CGs or backgrounds. Spyro, Enter the Dragonfly was a glitchy mess because the demands of the executives were too much for the deadlines the programmers had. Most games with poor releases are victims of overscoping. Cyberpunk 2077 is a great game, but it took over a decade to make and had one of the worst launches I had ever seen.. Unstable game concepts usually add years to development. While jam games aren't expected to be groundbreaking, setting an appropriate scope is still important. The love we have for projects is never a bad thing. Baldur's Gate III was a love letter to DnD fans, being one of the entries to capture the DnD experience. So much love was put into it that other indie developers got mad at them because of its polish. Red Dead Redemption 2 is another labor of love, but these games had both the compassion and budget, and following said budget lead to these masterpieces. We all want to emulate their greatness, to show our consumers how much we love game design, but this love needs to be realistic, or else we'll do our project a disservice. My next project won't be half as long as Tears of A Mermaid, but I intend to compensate through sound fx and sprite animations. I hope to finish the script in no more than two weeks, and I plan to put more effort into the coding and testing. Speaking of love letters, it'll be inspired by one of my favorite cartoons; Ed, Edd, n Eddy. I better do those creatives well! 

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