Hello everyone! First of all: thank you. The reception to this project has blown the whole team - and my itch statistics - out of the water. Thank you especially to Arimia for single-handedly showing the game to around 14k people. In all likelihood, whoever is reading this post when it goes up found the game via your tweet!

This is what the game's stats look like as of one week after the game went live, today, July 7th:

That's 25k views and over 950 downloads in a week. This is bananapants. Again, thank you for your interest and all the kind comments we've gotten so far. I want to talk a little bit about what our dev process looked like from the top down, and some of the speedbumps and serendipitous occasions that influenced our decisions.

For those who don't know me, hello, I'm WhatNames. I've been making games as a high effort hobby for a long time and have been working professionally in games for a little over a year. I want to take this time to reflect a bit on what brought Good Lord! into the world and how I and the entire team went about making a visual novel in a month.

Across the various industries I work in, I've had a lot of huge projects back to back recently, so I went into this knowing that I wanted a process that was short and sweet. I saw the requirements for the Otome Jam where the protagonist had to be female with a male love interest (with the caveat that it could be customizable) and, admittedly, got a bit frustrated by that limitation. I decided not to do the jam... But then I saw that the Trans Rep Jam would be running at the same time, and this idea popped into my head. I posted a pitch into a few private game dev servers I am in, one of which was Game Dev Galaxy, a server where I am a very quiet participant. This was the post:

May 29th, 2024 - Trans Otome - seeking collaborators for a Double Jam Extravaganza

i really want to make a game for the Otome Jam (https://itch.io/jam/otome-jam-2024) and the Trans Rep Jam (https://itch.io/jam/trans-representation-jam-24)

the concept

you are going to a high school reunion for a long weekend at a campsite with your graduating class (it's a decade later so characters are ~28 years old) your high school was all-girls and religious, but when you arrive, you realize you're the only girl who showed up. literally all of your old friends have transitioned.

featuring

you, who is having a lot of very loud feelings all of a sudden the party organizer, who now is a suave wedding coordinator the farmhand, who was a loner in school but now runs a local co-op the evil twink, who was a boy-crazy cheerleader and now is a mega-viral influencer ...and more

engine? timeline?

• the entirety of June (otome jam ends July 1st 5am EST)
• engine wise, i am most comfortable with ren'py, but am actively learning godot rn, so either would be a-okay with me!

who are you? what do you want?

hi! i'm whatnames. i want to practice directing games and i have experience as a solo dev and professionally as a producer. i'd like to produce and direct this game, and supply some narrative design or extra writing, but i don't want to do it all by myself. i've seen a lot of y'all around but have worked with a tragically small number of y'all - let's change that! i wanna make a super delightful gay thing with you! artists, writers, composers, programmers, ui/ux, marketing, qa... any and all of the above are very welcome, and we'll figure out how to fill in holes as we solidify the team. i don't really want a team larger than ~7 people because otherwise it gets unwieldy, but let's see what we can do! (rn it's just me anyway so heyooo lol)

~

As you can see, it was extremely informal, as that's what I wanted it to be! I find that setting the tone you are expecting upfront (and then later reinforcing it) can save a lot of headaches later down the road. One piece that was also extremely important to me is that this was timeboxed. I know I am going to have a busy July and then and even busier August, so I didn't want this to bleed out and turn into a forever project. This is also very helpful when you are looking for collaborators who will work for free! If you say it will be X amount of time and stick to that, then people can make more accurate judgements as to whether or not they have the time and capacity to take on a side project for fun.

So who showed up? Well, of the credits on the submitted game, five (not including me) came just from the GDG server. I made a discord server to work in and we planned out some of what we wanted to see and who had the capacity to do what. Once we had done that, I started reaching out to friends and acquaintances to see if they'd be down to contribute. I brought in two more collaborators like that, and two of the GDG folks brought one person each. This ended up being a pretty large team!

I had the vague idea from the pitch, but we worked collaboratively to decide on the general plot. Since we had three writers, we used an online whiteboard to set the tentpoles that the writers would hit on each day of the story, events that would happen no matter which route you were on, as well as discussing tone and themes for the overall game and each character's route.

This was a pretty lengthy discussion. Both because it's an entire game we were trying to piece together and because we had not collaborated with each other before. I had seen many of these folks' work either in indie dev circles or in some discord or another, but we hadn't worked together. (Working with new people was one of my goals after all!)

One moment I remember distinctly was talking about having 'love points,' that pretty recognizable mechanic where you 'earn' a character's love by choosing the right options. We said 'yeah yeah that's what romance games have, let's do it,' but as we kept talking, the more and more we found we'd have to track and plan around and... oh you're getting a new job? oh you've gotten sick? what the program isn't working as we'd want it to so we have to spend several more hours getting it up to snuff? I realized that they were extraneous to the core themes we wanted to embrace with this game - time passing, meeting (or not) expectations, finding new things that make you happy - alongside a light and familiar tone. So we tossed them out! If you want to romance that guy, Irene will do succeed! This also cut down significantly on scope, as if we had interlacing scenes (more than the bit we do have), then the number of threads we'd have to cleanly tie together would grow exponentially, and given that this was already around a week into the process, we just didn't have time.

These are some of the decisions you have to make when you are working with a large team to a tight deadline: what serves the process, the people, and the product? Ideally, you can hit all three.

Do you have questions about the process that you'd like myself or another member of the dev team to address? I'd love to hear from you in the comments. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the response to this silly, heartfelt idea has meant the world to this entire team. Thank you.

And look forward to updates about Angel and Elias in the near future. Like I said, I've got a pretty busy August coming up, so it sounds like there's another timebox looming if the team's internal postmortem earlier today is accurate. (It is.) We met as a team and figured out the timeline to get these guys to you very very soon.

ttyl -WhatNames