days of saturn postmortem

i recently released Days of Saturn, a game i made in four days for velox turbo 2. i've been interested in the velox fabula / turbo jams for a while because i wanted to challenge myself to make a mini visual novel in a very short amount of time. i've previously done this with pre-made assets (2/29 was made in one day on 2/29 using art from irasutoya) but i've never done it while making the art as well. since i had a lot of fun doing it, i thought i'd write a postmortem!

i was actually already kind of wanting to make a game for the tokimemo dating sim jam as well as the winter novel jam & thinking i could do two birds with one stone by making a winter dating sim... but then velox turbo's theme reveal happened & i pivoted into a weird saturnalia not-dating vn...

keeping scope tiny!

since i only had four days, i had to keep the scope quite small. i decided that i would use music & sound assets from pocket-sound (& actually considered having no sound if i didn't have time - i left the sound searching for the very end) & for the game bgs, instead of drawing them, i used photos that i took while in austria & bratislava this summer & filtered the heck out of them 😆 thank you clip studio!

i kept the character art at a minimum as well - i only use one sprite (one expression) per character & only two of the main four characters have sprites.

the palette is also limited to four colours because i find it helps me make the art faster if i don't have to worry about colours! i chose two shades of red & two shades of green to be 🎄festive🎄 & also made sure any one asset only ever had two colours showing at a time for contrast.

i also decided early on only to have the in-game schedule very short & have the player loop through to unlock more story. originally i was thinking about just making a cute christmas-themed dating sim for tokimemo/winter vn jams but then velox fabula 2 had a fun theme (eye of the beholder) & also ended right on saturnalia so i knew what i had to do...

the tokimemo games usually go for three years (to cover all three years of high school) & have many many romanceable characters but i cut that down to a little over two weeks & only one true ending. (well, there are two fake-out endings & one true ending that you can only get after dying a few times.)

for the japanese translation i left that till the very end since i planned on releasing it in only english if i didn't have time. fortunately i finished the main game early on monday morning so i spent the last full day doing the translation & making the itch page look pretty.

why the fake ds?

the ui was pretty simple to put together because i already had a base to work off of it's pretty much tokimemo girls side lol - i really like the aesthetic of how tmgs looks on ds with the split down the middle, & i thought about how to do it for a while... in the end i decided i would just make a fake ds to go on top of it too & have that be part of the whole aesthetic. i really liked the idea of having a game console as a frame for the game after playing She no longer comes to the surface. so i thought this would be a good chance to try it! (unlike my game though She no longer comes to the surface. uses an actual virtual console/emulator thingy & it's very cool!!)

you can 'press' the ds buttons but the abxy & d-pad don't really do anything (as they didn't do anything in tmgs either). however, you can press start/select to open settings & stuff! just little touches. tmgs3 & hotel dusk/wish room are two of my favourite series on ds & they both have you hold your ds sideways to play the game so this is my tiny tribute to them haha.

i always like games that use hardware in weird ways so i'd love to make more games that are just controlled strangely.

as a note, the 'screens' are the actual pixel size of a ds game as well. i had to think about where to position stuff for backgrounds because anything i put in the middle will be hidden by the ds hinge.

why saturnalia?

in case you're not familiar, saturnalia is a roman festival held on december 17 that started off as just one day but gradually expanded to cover more. since the jam ended on december 17 i figured why not make something in the spirit of the holidays?

in my opinion, the most interesting thing about it is that acts that were normally not ok in society were ok during this festival (though to a limit). that didn't mean that you could do anything you want - after saturnalia was over, everything would go back to normal, so even the rule breaking was done under societal norms as such. many of the customs have since spread into traditions people might now associate with christmas.

to go with the theme i use the classic roman way of reading dates (this is left in latin in both english & japanese but since most people probably can't read it i also have a regular countdown date in the tooltip) which i think is really fun! in the roman calendar there are the kalends (1), the nones (7 or 5) & the ides (15 or 13), & you read dates by counting up to the next big date. if it was the last day of november, rather than writing november 30 you would write the day before the kalends of december (prid. kal. dec.), for example.

but anyway, this game itself is not in anyway historically or mythologically accurate though so if you are interested in saturnalia please do your own research 😆

you can play the game for free on my itch so check it out!