Gar 28 Dating Simulator - Postmortem

A post-jam look at GDS, it's development and the game's final rankings.
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In case you need it: Gar 28

Results

The primary thing I learned from looking at the game's rankings is that it wasn't as good as I had hoped. While there are some reviews that led me to believe it was a pretty good game, it clearly has a lot of faults.
The category it ranked highest in is Stealth (#16), which was initially a bit surprising. Though, looking back at it, it does make sense that it would score rather high in that category. The category I was hoping it'd get a good ranking in is Narrative, which ended up being the game's second highest rating category (#29). The game ultimately landed in 49th place, with the 14th lowest overall score.
Some of the comments the game received during the jam brought certain issues to my attention, which likely affected the game's score a lot. These include:

• No Sex Scenes - I considered drawing stills of the sex scenes from the protagonist's POV and putting them in right before the fade to the ending. Unfortunately, I do not have the skills to draw the sex scenes, nor do I have the budget to commission them. A commenter brought up that I could have put a description of the sex scene on the black screen instead. This would have been a nice compromise... it's a shame I hadn't thought of doing that during development.
• Subpar UX - Since the game runs on a custom engine, it does not feature some of the niceties that established VN engines provide. This includes things such as changing the text speed, quickly skipping multiple lines of dialogue, changing the speed of background transitions, etc. There also exists a save system in the game, but it's disabled in the release version of the game. You can blame clueless for that - she asserted the game is too short to warrant saves. The save system was primarly used while I was still writing the script, to test different options in the same choices quickly.
• The Writing - My feelings on the game's writing are mixed. Some people said the game is pretty well written, though others feel the writing is a bit weird and disjointed. I intentionally did not take the game seriously while wrting the script. It was a sort of balancing act between being satire (insulting the player in the first few lines of dialogue) and being completely serious (the murder scenes).
• The Routes - It's not very obvious the game has 10 different endings¹. Some people may have gotten a single ending and then closed the game, remaining oblivious to just how much content there truly is. I'm not sure how I could've better communicated this to the player, though. Another thing that many people didn't realize is that you can move around the map pretty freely. You can go to Jop's place, grab the knife, backtrack to the ancient area and use the knife to kill Qeamleena instead of the shovel. This is something I accounted for, but it seems that few people ever went this particular route.
• The Graphics - I am aware that the game has a particular style to it - the MSPaint-esque character sprites on top of low-res pre-rendered backgrounds. Some of the charactrer sprites have a slightly different art style (e.g. Har and Nil), which may have made the game's graphics feel less consistent. All of the backgrounds in the game are screenshots from Gar 28, then crushed into a GIF.

Overall, I can understand why the game scored so low. It is my first entry to any game jam ever, so I know it won't be perfect right out the gate. I'm happy that I at least managed to make a game and that at least some people enjoyed it.
I would also like to mention that Cowbeat, the song that plays when you enter Perc City, has been stuck in my head ever since I composed it. It wasn't originally meant to be in the game, but I liked it so much that I just slapped it in there. Otherplace itself has a unique theme song (originally composed for Gar 28), so it only felt fitting that Perc City gets one too.

Development

This game was developed on my completely custom nwge engine². Thus, the development of the game also involved the development of all the VN stuff on top of nwge. This includes all the game logic, rendering logic, all UI code, the entire script system and the scene system.
Despite the amount of code I had to write - the actual scriptwriting was the most difficult portion of development. I've implemented a lexer and parser a dozen times before, I've written nwge code for years at this point (since 2023!), that ended up being fairly simple. Writing the characters, your interactions with them, making sure everything they say makes sense, accounting for the order you do things in (try talking to Laura before talking to Jop) was where a lot of the development time went.
The sprites were taken directly from Gar 28. They were edited (e.g. Saia) or at least touched up (e.g. Jop) for GDS. This made the game that easier to make, as I just never seem to be able to get myself to draw stuff (not that I don't know how or don't want to, I just... don't).
Since this was a game jam project, there was a deadline I had to meet. Because of this I couldn't include everything I wanted. The game still features a rather wide array of cats to have coitus with, but there were plans for a few more to make an appearance. For one, our beloved crackhead Joblice was once meant to be in the game. I never ended up implementing them into the script. They are a character originally devised by quince, and as such I felt I wouldn't be able to capture how they talk or act quite as accurately. Imme and her boyfriend Milian were also once meant to appear in the game. The fact that they're dating would've made the protagonist's conquest of either of them quite difficult. That's where the concept of killing characters originates from - the plan was that the protagonist would be able to kill off one of the pair and then try dating the other (e.g. kill Milian and date Imme). Another pair that you could try this with were Har & Kurt.

Future

After submitting GDS to Strawberry Jam, I considered where to take the game from there. I did have plans for some major updates. One of them is a "Day 2" update, where you would have to meet characters on day 1 and go on a date with them the next day instead. There were also some plans for things such as allowing characters to use more than one sprite - like ones with differing facial expressions. This is a limitation of the custom engine I wrote.
In the end, I'm not planning on updating the game. What I do plan to do instead, is to use GDS's code as a jumping-off point for a future project. This game was created as a promotional stunt for Gar 28 (not a very successful one), and thus I feel my time is better spent working on other things.
An example of such a future would be a visual novel that a friend of mine wants to make. I could start off with the GDS code and modify it to fit the requirements of that newer VN. Is this a better approach than just using Ren'Py? No, but I love my stupid little game engine and I'm gonna god damn use it. This is not the last VN I will make, I can guarantee that much.

If you have formed an opinion about this over the course of reading this page - let me know. I can be reached on Bluesky, via e-mail or (if all else fails) via the nwge game studio Discord sever.

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1. ↑ An 11th ending is attainable if you run the game on Arch Linux or an Arch-based distro. (go into the alley past the apartment complex)
2. ↑ This is quite different to a more contemporary engine like Godot - there's no editor, only code. This is also the reason the game is only available on Linux and Windows - I have not ported the engine to any other platforms. Feel free to compare GDS to Minifish, which runs on the same version of the nwge engine.