What I learned

I'd really like to thank the Queer Menhera Gamejam for giving me the motivation to finish my first game—there's nothing like a deadline and a great prompt to force some follow-through, and now I've checked a major goal off my bucket list.

"Towers are Hospitals" is a spinoff of my passion project Terminal Status, which is also  meant to be a visual novel—so I'd at least begun looking into Ren'Py in preparation for that, but there hadn't been any pressure to truly dig my teeth in and learn all the skills necessary to make a game start-to-finish. Completing Towers are Hospitals meant teaching myself a lot of new skills, and I'd like to list those new skills for posterity.

•  I familiarized myself with the bare basics of code.

When I began making this game, I was a complete novice when it came to code. I'd poked around at RenPy and HTML a little bit, but never with any real intention to understand or learn. But "Towers are Hospitals" meant I couldn't pick-and-chose coding knowledge with the same freedom, and out of necessity I actually had to study the things I'd been putting off.

The only part of Ren'Py I'd explored was the script code, which meant GUI, Screens, and mapping assets were all new to me. I also learned to add music and sound effects, more creative ways to format text & pacing, and better understand the skills I already knew.

I also tackled menus, which I'd only had the vaguest understanding of how to use before, & while I wouldn't say I actually improved much those limits helped me come up with a creative way to utilize them. I hope to get more comfortable with menus in my next game, so that I can actually offer choices and variables (I already have an idea in the works!).

• I created a workflow for finishing game art.

While trying to draw everything in the one month deadline, I had no idea whether I'd be able to finish the ambitious number of CGs I had planned—much less make them look good. I was very worried I'd spend too much time polishing a few illustrations and have to rush the rest, resulting in a sloppy product.

This inspired what quickly became an extremely satisfying workflow: first I'd prioritize drawing all of the CGs utilizing the "finished, not perfect" approach, completing everything with the minimum amount of quality required to be in the game. Only once everything was drawn did I start polishing them all, adding shading, gradients, and color corrections.

Not only did this help me notice errors because I'd been forced to let the art sit, but I wasn't running into inconsistent art because I wasn't forgetting/reinventing my coloring style between illustrations. And I knew exactly how much time I had to work with at the end, AKA how much effort I could afford to put into each individual CG while keeping them consistent.

Also, I learned you can make characters look like they're being seen from a distance & at a bird's eye view by turning them into tiny amongus.

There was a lot of missed opportunities involved in this, too, with plenty of ideas ending up on the cutting room floor. Honorable mentions include:

• Us seeing why Lacerae disappears from his tower (an explanation which ended up distracting from the thesis of this game, but I'll happily reuse for a second Towers are Hospitals spin-off)

• Adding zoom and slow pan to create a Lacerae glamor shot (I could see myself fitting this back in if I make a 2.0 version).

• A few lines of prose I really liked but didn't naturally fit the flow I wanted, including:

      ° I wish that each morning greeted me like a kiss. Instead, every day is a sledgehammer.

I just finished this game, but I'm already anticipating my next short-term project and what I want to learn next. I still need to improve my sound design and get more creative with how I incorporate audio; I also want to better utilize menus and GUI. Maybe animations/visual transitions too?

But I know whatever I make next, I'm still going to be writing stories about disability and mental illness, preferably with some cool aesthetics and some queerness thrown in. I look forward to continue growing as a game developer, using this as my jumping off point.