If you haven't played it already, here's a link to the game I'll be talking about. This Postmortem WILL contain spoilers for the game.

Riddle Me Sweets! was a game idea thought up by yours truly, Gracie and Tanix (whom at time of writing unfortunately doesn't have a social link).

The conversation took place when Tanix talked about wanting to make a cooking game, and I, someone who adores cooking games thought. "I'm totally going to regret it if I don't pitch in now."  and so begun our initial conversation (with Gracie joining in the conversation shortly after) about the game mechanics, story concept and more.

My first idea was something sort of a recipe restoration game, inspired by this one lady I saw on YouTube who made it her career.  Gracie chimed in and Tanix showed us the basic prototype of the baking game we'd eventually make.

To be honest, the idea I had after that was to have a riddle like recipes and have the player try to guess what would give "sour" aftertaste or what the recipe could be implying by it's words. This ended up being the ancestor to the idea when ended up going with. Originally I said we could have the player character go "Hm, that's not quite right." if the player messed up the recipe. Of course we didn't go with this part of the idea.

Alternate game cover design that Gracie made

Another concept I'd made up was a one shot of the MC being tasked with preparing a family meal after the previous housekeeper quit, Workaholic MC can cook but looking at the recipes and trying to understand it is hard.

Gracie talked about an idea about luring out mice! To help you bake all Cinderella style, which was an idea I quite liked. Then I got the Hansel and Gretel idea where the two siblings would open a bakery post-the-original-fairytale where the old owner was a paranoid person afraid of their recipes getting stolen so they wrote it all in riddles! (Plot twist, the previous owner was the witch who'd gone mad and tried to eat them as children!)

But then, like magic. Tanix had a wonderful idea. His "crazy idea" (his words, not mine) was to combine Cinderella and Ratatouille. The MC would be an orphan excluded by the Step Mother. Working in the restaurants owned by that wretched woman, forced to work hard but dreaming of being a Chef. And then a fairy mouse comes to save her...

And if you've played the game you know we did what a lot of games do. We threw these ideas in a blender, picked out what didn't work and used what we had to make the story.

We decided to make it a Hansel and Gretel Cinderella hybrid story, with a dark comedic twist. With the addition of the fairy mouse, I decided, huh, what if we play into that for the beginning of the story? But let's get back to the story later.

As the writer I had the responsibility to write the whole script, and as someone who's only ever written 1k or shorter fanfiction before with no Real plot... This was a grave I'd made and I'd lay in. But jokes aside, this was my first Game Jam. The only other projects I'd worked on was a personal one which I uh, haven't finished. So in short, I did the worst thing by learning as I needed them. I'm honestly surprised my team was so pleasant, not a dig at them of course but as it was my first Jam I was really afraid folks wouldn't like my ideas and such. So colour me shocked when Gracie and Tanix were okay with the ideas I brought to the table and if they did have issues we were able to talk it out.

Gracie worked on the UI design, feel and flow of the menus and basically prettied up the game. And also helped debugging! Tanix worked on the actual minigame and I.... Was still writing the script.

Good End CG from Riddle Me Sweets! (Drawn by our CG artist FoxyTheMoron)

I eventually contacted our two artists, Foxy for our CGs and Zalle for our sprites. And I honestly couldn't have been happier with what they'd brought to the game. Without the sprites that zalle made,  the game honestly wouldn't have shined as bright.

Design sketches for our main characters! (Drawn by our sprite artist zallestars)

Not to mention the CGs!? I adore Foxy's artstyle and I'm glad they joined the team.

Sprite sketches (By zallestars)

In the end we decided to go with a strike system to make it easier for the player to go through different routes. I had, on the other hand, severely underestimated how hard it was to write for a VN without proper outlining. Though I'd eventually figured it out, it's definitely a mistake I'm not willing to make again, especially for a Game Jam.

The other folks on the team seemed very used to the haste and no-time-to-waste part of Game Jamming, and here's where I messed up seriously.

Old Menu design

Current Menu design (Props to Gracie! and me, I drew the assets excluding the logo and actual cakes within the game!)

As someone who lives in Asia, foreign time zones aren't really something I'm used to. So in my haste I misread the timezone and realized that we had all the assets but hadn't had the time to put it into the actual game. It was a very very hectic moment when I'd realized this whilst on a call with a friend. And the only reason I noticed at all was because Gracie pinged me and went "Hey uhhh I think we only have an hour left?" and so realizing I had messed up severely and I just kept working on the script (since it was finished the night before) and adding the sprites into the scenes. My buddy, soup calmed me down saying people submit unfinished games all the time and many great games start out as unfinished jam projects. And hearing that honestly made me feel a lot better.

I decided as it was my error I'd ask the admins of the Game Jam if we could submit it as I misread the timezone and being the damn saints they were they did allow it. Afterwards we kept working on the game and debugging the hell out of it. In fact we had a bug with the mini game then and I don't even know how we didn't notice until way later. It somehow kept directing the player to the Bad Ends even if they got the mini games right which honestly was weird because every time I tested it before... It had worked perfectly. So we quickly notified Tanix who worked on it in his free time. Gracie fixed up more of the GUI, added a credits menu. I drew up the fairy mouse (who didn't have an actual sprite for a while.) And finished adding the backgrounds that Gracie edited, and then came my biggest challenge.

Screenshot from the game featuring the baking mini game Tanix coded, the GUI Gracie designed, and the sleeping mouse I drew

See one thing most beginner folks going into VN Dev won't think of besides the obvious, Visual = Art, Novel = Writers, is the damn SOUND. Honestly it's hilarious how I never caught up with folks going around calling VN's Sound Novels occasionally. A VN without sound is like cake without frosting. It works, sure, but it'd look better with it. Sound builds atmosphere, suspension of belief and generally helps your player be more invested in the story if you do it well enough. Which is why I was severely hating myself for not finding someone who had experience working with audio since looking back at the choices... I could've done better. The sound effects were Okay at best and I feel like I could've chosen... More subtler music.

There was also another hiccup, namely. My devil of an internet connection. At some point in the project I apparently had branched off from the GitHub repository Gracie and Tanix were using. So for a solid few days they weren't getting the updates I'd been committing at all! Gracie was nice enough saying stuff like this happens from time to time in development but I was still sour since I genuinely thought they'd been seeing my work as I did it. Fortunately it only took me about 20 tries and one screaming into pillow to get things synced up again! Work continued as normal afterward.

Fanart I did of our two main characters during development

But all in all, the team worked GREAT together. As a first Jam project I'm already excited to work on another Jam already!

Signing off,

Robyn! (With cake!)