Coming off of an exhausting September and having grossly underestimated how much time and effort my point and click game ("Untitled Knight Game") would take to complete (a story for another devlog), I came across an article from Black Tabby Games about marketing Slay the Princess.

It's a great read, but what stuck out to me the most was the little tidbit that Abby Howard finished all the 200 some illustrations for the demo in just six days. 

How much of "Untitled Knight Game" could I do in six days? One room and all of its objects? Maybe two. But in any case, only a fraction of all the work needed for a single chapter.

If you think about it, point and click games are almost like a series of interactive paintings.

As committed as I was (and am!) to seeing "Untitled Knight Game" finished, I knew that in the future I couldn't keep making solo games with such a steep time cost.

What could I do in a short time? Could I keep it interesting? And more importantly-could I keep it visually, aurally and thematically beautiful?

(Yeah, Sam is my own obsession for aesthetics taken up to 11)

Scream Jam seemed like the perfect time to try and make something within those guidelines. It's short, spanning one week, and it's horror-themed, which is the genre I'm keenest to make games in, but still I waffled on whether to devote the time to actually make a thing.

Finally, when the jam timer started counting down, I decided I would just write a couple paragraphs and see if I liked it. If I did, then I'd finish the thing. If not, maybe next time. 

Well, here we are.

It Paints Me comes from an earlier idea for a psychological horror VN I had about a painter who slowly loses his grip on reality, and his wife and former model who achieves everything he doesn't. The player would swap between their perspectives as well as take on "investigative" sections like exploring the artist's studio.

Early concept doodles of Sam and Marie

I thought about writing two routes for the jam in the two characters' perspectives, but quickly scrapped the idea to create a short, focused Gothic horror story about an artist struggling to paint.

Side note on art and suffering:

My own thoughts on the theme is simply that the act of creative expression can be very painful, but is inherently rewarding.

That's not the same as the trope of the artist as a tragic figure who must Suffer!!!!!!! for his art. In reality, it's very, very hard to create when you're miserable and struggling! It Paints Me is a horror game, and Sam's suffering-and that which he inflicts-is supposed to be horrific.

Because I was depending on myself to do all the artwork, I needed to keep it simple, but since I'm me, it had to be visually appealing.

To do this, I went with a dark, hand drawn, Gothic theme for the GUI and visuals, and skipped over any detailed rendering for the sprites and paintings. The shadows were done by using a textured brush and erasing parts of the base layer to create values.

The most difficult piece to finish was the portrait of Marie singing, while the one I had the most fun with was the Icon of Agony--I spent some extra time making him look gross and spooky.

The visuals did end up feeling a bit sparse, but I think they worked well enough. I spent that weekend staying up into the wee hours of the night doing art and coding, so I don't think I could've done anything more detailed without going insane.

I left sound until the last night of the jam, about 8 hours before projects were due. I played through the mostly complete game, making a note of what sfx I wanted to appear at which points in the story. Then I spent about five hours working on the three music tracks, searching for foley recordings or making some myself (still at my desk, with a blanket over my usb mic), then cutting, splicing, balancing and adding effects in Reaper, and then adding everything into Ren'py.

It Paints Me is a fifteen minute game that has more sfx in it than my two hour long visual novel, Kit, but I wanted to treat it as a horror game-and in my mind, sound design is as essential to horror as spooky monsters are! At the same time, it's a game about art and beauty, and I wanted the music to reflect that while still fitting the atmosphere. Luckily, I was able to record the harp and piano in single takes, and from there it was fairly simple to trim and edit the tracks, then layer on strings and textural sound.

Even though I consciously put effort into custom music and sfx, it was largely out of my own stubbornness and sense of aesthetics, so it genuinely shocked me to see It Paints Me get rated so highly on sound design (2nd overall?? How?? I'm just a guy throwing effects on random clips in Reaper AHHH).

After the jam:

During the rating period, between failing to catch up on sleep, I made tweaks for a post-jam build (all the GUI bits I didn't get to include and a gallery feature that I'm glad I didn't attempt during the jam). I was so grateful to the devs and players who stopped and tried my game and left their feedback on this thing that I had somehow forced into existence over a week. (Thank you!)

I was proud of my game, but I'd mostly joined the jam just to be held accountable for finishing a thing. At the time that entries closed there were over 500 games submitted, so I went to sleep thinking I'd be happy if mine ended up in the top 100.

I still can't really describe what I felt when I scrolled to the results page.

I think this jam was aptly titled, because I'm still screaming AHHHHHHHHHH. But seriously, thank you to all of you who rated or commented during the jam. It meant a lot to me to hear that the story resonated with you. T_T

What Went Right? Or Not so Right?

For the most part, I'm happy with It Paints Me. I cut down on scope early on and made a VN that I feel was complete, that had its text, visuals and sound work together fairly cohesively. I'm glad I got to explore a teensy sliver of Sam's story--I definitely want to go back to it someday. 

I would've liked to make the game scarier! When I initially thought of the two routes, Sam would've talked to the player depending on your actions-but this would've been way too much work to write and program. So instead of Sam being glad you chose to visit him in the studio, you get a lovely little sinister chuckle upon hitting start. (Thanks Morgan!)

I personally still think the scariest part of the game, besides the fear of being forgotten or the existential dread of being a creator no longer able to create, is the paintful title, hehe.

And speaking of choices and branching, I ended up breaking my own personal rule about interactive fiction:

Eli's rule of writing interactive fiction: Every choice has to do something. Whether it's as small as revealing what a character feels to as big as jumping to a major route or story branch.

The choices in It Paints Me don't really do anything until you get to the scene with the door. They lead to the same outcome and don't tell you much more than you already knew about Sam. They were truthfully a bit of a last minute add-on just to feel like it wasn't only a long stretch of reading without any player input, but I still don't know how I feel about them. Maybe the meaningless options actually help compound Sam's sense of hopelessness and monotony, or maybe I should have structured the narrative differently. Alas.

What Helped?

There's so much to plan for and so many hurdles that can pop up when you're rushing to finish a game in seven days. What made Scream Jam (mostly) smooth sailing for me was that I was already familiar with the kind of game I wanted to create--a horror-themed visual novel--and the engine I wanted to build it in, Ren'py.

Getting the GUI presentable was relatively painless, and I played a lot more loosely with coding the text--I normally insert pauses in Ren'py during natural stops in a sentence or paragraph, but didn't try to go that in-depth here. And with the time it saves I don't know if I want to go back!

I also had a good idea of the story I wanted to tell in my VN. Sam's backstory was swirling in my head. The themes were very familiar to me. Heck, I've painted in barely heated rooms in the winter.

In other words, I didn't have to learn or research anything drastically new during the jam period, both mechanically or story wise (figuring out a custom gallery and web build could come later), so my main challenge was creating the best possible version of my vision that I could in tight constraints. And finishing it. And also getting sleep.

Currently, It Paints Me has over 700 browser plays and 190 downloads. For a jam game that I didn't think would fly on anyone's radar, that's staggering to me.

If you decided to give this story your time--thank you! I hope that you got something from it, and if you're an artist, that your creative journey brings you joy. It's rough out there, but I believe in you. 

And he does too.

To end off, here's a list of miscellaneous facts and tidbits:

• "Corpse brown" is an allusion to mummy brown, a pigment made from literal Egyptian mummies used by European painters in the 18th - 19th centuries. Yeah. Yikes.
• Marie's white rose is a small nod to La Dame aux Camélias
• Ghost-Sam is still wearing his wedding ring. On that note, did you know that the hand you wear your ring on differs from country to country?
• Is Sam related to a certain other tortured white haired artist?