Otome Jam 2022 is coming up! Since there are so many new jammers this year, I wanted to do a writeup of my experience developing Yrsa Major last year, in case it helps someone else figure out how to plan their jam project. I'll try to sum up the takeaways and give more general advice and suggestions in the "Reflections" section below, so skip down if you only want that.

Some notes before starting:

• Yrsa Major is my first complete VN, and this post is as much a review of the mistakes that a new dev might make as it is a look at my process. It is definitely not a "do it this way" post.
• This writeup describes the work done by a solo dev using royalty-free BGs, UI, and music. Multi-member teams could do a lot more things at the same time in parallel, but will have different challenges.
• Do not use this post as a reason for making your team members do crunch. :|

Overview

This is a very brief summary of what I ended up doing each month before and during the jam. I'll go into more detail in the next sections.

April 2021 - Before the Jam

• Game concept developed
• Character designs (rough draft)
• High-level plot (very rough draft)
• Established themes

May 2021

• Wrote for a month, 30k words

June 2021

(Note: This is super detailed for reasons explained below.)

• Rough sketched sprites/CGs (3 days)
• Finalized sprites (1 weekend + 2 days)
• Finalized the royalty-free music I was using (1 day)
• Scripted game in engine (1 week for 30k words)
• Bashed together UI with royalty-free assets (1-3 days, including bug fixing)
• Finalized/Colored CGs (6 days)
• Finalized UI and last bug fixes (1-2 days)
• Trailer for marketing (2 days)
• Itch page setup (1 day)

April - Before the Jam

"I want to write a prologue to my fictional universe about romance with a cute old man, and the MC should be a cool buff woman."

That was basically the initial concept behind Yrsa Major, which I spent roughly a month thinking about before finally deciding to commit. By the time the jam started, I'd outlined the following points.

• Yrsa and Uribel's personalities
• Very rough plot
• Emotional themes
  
• Character designs
• The title
• Names

Some of the original design drafts for Yrsa and Uribel are presented here, to show what I had before the jam started. Since I like doing quick iterations on character designs, I did a lot of sketches for each of them to compare and figure out which one I liked the most.

But art and character design aside, I'd still never finished an original story before Yrsa Major, and was concerned about whether I was good enough to write a full romance arc. I'd also gotten a lot of advice about not over-scoping projects from fellow devs, and had previously entirely failed to understand how story outlining actually worked (the first draft of Heart Sigil Elchemia was trash). So I did make an effort to keep Yrsa Major's story simple for otome jam, by trying to avoid complex political details, worldbuilding, or magical drama while focusing as much as possible on the relationship between Yrsa and Uribel.

Nevertheless, I still ended up scoping a bit too much in my original planning process, and this would bite me in the ass in June.

May - Writing

This was the first month of the jam, which I just planned as "writing month" for two reasons.

• I felt that I needed to see how Yrsa and Uribel acted on the page, as characters, before I could draw their final forms. I felt more confident in their sprites once I'd actually established their existence in the script.
• I also knew writing would end up being the most difficult part of the jam for me, and so I wanted to finish it first (I'm that kid that ate all of their spinach before dessert).

Additionally, I basically had no idea how much polished content I was capable of writing in a single month, so I thought that a month would be a reasonable enough time to take to finish the story, and the second month was "probably enough for everything else". Ultimately, May worked out fairly well for writing. I used a cycle of write-think-write-think to give myself time to think over each plot bit before I wrote the script, and despite having to move house halfway through the month, managed to finish a first draft by the 31st.

June - Oops, Everything Else

I'd thought finishing by 5/31 would give me enough time to finish everything else before the end of the jam. However, I hadn't ever actually sat down to figure out what "the parts of VN development that weren't writing" actually included.

So when June rolled around, I suddenly realized I needed to do:

• Character sprite designs (3 main, 3-4 NPC)
• 12 CG designs
• Music and where to put it into the game
• SFXes
• Drawing all the sprites
• Drawing all the CGs
• Scripting
• UI design
• Polishing and clean-up
• Making a trailer
• Marketing

I can't really explain my resulting June any better than this calendar does.

To fit everything into the month, I had to cut a few things.

• At least 2 CGs were removed from the original draft, including a ballroom dance
• Some side characters were made offscreen-only to avoid having to animate them
• I decided to not fix a specific bug that no one noticed anyway
• I spent just barely enough time on the UI to make sure it didn't suck
• Yrsa's dress sprite is just her shirt with a pattern attached and flowers in her hair
• Uribel was originally supposed to have a "formal" version of his robes for the festival (that's gone now, so the setup of "ishim can change their own appearances" made no sense at all)
• Uribel's "ice shield" was never added as a particle effect

Other things to speed up the process included liberal use of free brushes, tutorials, patterns etc., and combining all of this with a "production line" method to quickly render CGs. I'd sketch all 10, then line them, then apply base colors, then cel shading - and the incremental process helped me not hyperfocus on making any single CG perfect. As a result, the CGs in Yrsa Major are much simpler and flatter than the CGs in Heart Sigil Elchemia, my main game in the same universe.

In the end, while I did manage to finish Yrsa Major a couple days before the end of the jam, it required at least one all-nighter, some intense emotional ups and downs, losing all of my non-work free time for a month, and a lot of sleeping afterwards. I would not recommend scheduling a month like this to anyone else.

Reflections

Even despite my efforts to simplify things, I still ended up over-scoping Yrsa Major in the end. It wasn't any single thing I could point to; the CGs were necessary, the 3 main character sprites took a TON of time but it wasn't like I could remove any of them, scripting took a long time but that was because I insisted on animating action scenes and I didn't want to remove those either, and despite the length of my script it still felt a bit rushed... and so on. Essentially, the combination of all of these "I want this game to be cooler and fancier so I NEED to do this" bits ended up making the month of June very nuts.

However. Despite how stressful parts of the process was, I found the full experience extremely helpful for me to better understand VN development. Having to learn everything as a crash course gave me the confidence I was missing about whether I could finish projects, and the experience of writing a complete story taught me a lot about how to outline and write more effectively. This allowed me to revisit my main project, Heart Sigil Elchemia, with a much clearer idea of what I wanted from it, and go full steam ahead on its development.

Last Takeaways

If you're new to VN dev, I'd absolutely recommend you start with a low-key jam game as well, just to get a taste of the process. Jam games are bite-sized ways of improving your VN development skills rapidly, and completing a whole game in 1-2 months is an invaluable experience. However, I'd also recommend keeping the following tips in mind.

1. Start with the absolutely simplest game idea you can that still feels like a meaningful story to you.
2. Take out every character, outfit, feature, and scene that isn't vital to the story. Every character or outfit or pose is an extra sprite you have to draw, every feature is something you'll have to code, and every scene is extra words you have to write. Don't do that to yourself (or your teammates).
3. If you try to finish half of your game in the first half of the jam, you'll run out of time. Estimating what "half of a game" means is almost impossible in the first place, and there are a lot of things that come up in the later half of a jam that you need to account for. Aim to finish 60% - 70% of a game in the first half, and that'll give you more room to breathe.
4. Talk to your fellow devs, listen to their advice, and build relationships. Dev experience from people who've gone through this is invaluable.
5. No matter how much you plan, be prepared for unexpected things to happen during development, and try to accept and laugh at them when they do.
6. Celebrate the work you did, whether or not you were able to finish the game! You've gained experience about either your own skills or working as part of a team, and the time spent is valuable regardless.
7. Also, take time to decompress after a jam and just do nothing at all "productive". Goof off. Play video games. Relax.
8. Please. Burnout is bad.

Anyway, as appreciation for reading through that whole wall of text, here's a look at more of the original in-progress designs for Yrsa Major!