Production
As we were planning to submit this project to the NaNoRenO game jam, one of the stipulations is that we couldn’t go into production until the start of the official game jam period, which was throughout March 2024.
So with the precious little preproduction time now done, we barrelled straight into building The Ouroboros Express from scratch…
The Tech Stack
Having come from a marketing background with extensive experience in automations and operations, having the right tech stack is always at the top of my mind.
The good news is that we always knew what our budget was. The bad news is that our budget was always zero.
Luckily, there are several solutions now to facilitate collaboration that are free or incredibly cost-effective!
Discord - Where team discussions, chats, and top-tier memes are shared.
Zoom - For more formal meetings that needed to be recorded for members who couldn’t make it, or for workshops.
Ren’Py - The engine we used to build The Ouroboros Express. Design specifically for visual novels, this was the perfect choice for our team as we’d gained some experience in it from Santa’s Secret and were able to push the envelope more.
GitHub - How we collaborated to build the project and implement various fixes from QA.
Google Suite - Docs, Sheets, and Drive were all crucial to storing various assets.
Notion - Our all-in-one knowledge repository and project manager.
Sublime - Used for coding.
Team Collaboration
Love them, hate them - meetings are still at the heart of every team project.
I’ve been through my fair share of badly run meetings so I feel passionately about ensuring a high standard for running a good meeting which are:
Clear agendas that members can see ahead of time
Clear objectives to meet by the end of the meeting
Moving the momentum along and ensuring that all members are sticking to the agenda
Balancing communicating information versus a town hall setup to hear from members
We held weekly team-wide meetings called ‘State of Affairs’ where I would call upon each team lead to give updates and let us know if they had any blockers and how we could help.
My personal tip would be to ensure that there is always someone facilitating the meeting and keeping all attendees on task so no time is wasted. This is especially important to us at Small Loan Studio as we operate as a volunteer cooperative studio and try to be mindful of our members’ time.
Fleshing out the narrative
The Ouroboros Express clearly had a larger scope from our first project, so I tried as much as possible to illustrate the concepts through visuals and mental models.
One thing that became more apparent as we completed preproduction was the idea of the story not being a loop but rather, a spiral. I created a quick visual for the team and they quickly understood. This spiral motif would be further reinforced not just in the narrative but also in the art direction.
I worked on this flowchart and together with our narrative lead, Salvador Bas-Folch, we presented the overarching plot to our team of writers.
I’d created the bones - but now it was down to our narrative team to begin fleshing out the narrative.
To assist them, I did some prior research on the stages of grief, which became our story chapters, and what they normally look like for people.
By creating prompts and asking questions, our writers were then able to ideate upon the nitty-gritty of the story and gain ownership.
This was especially important for our character experts - they would be the guardians of truth for their assigned characters and would know best how they would react in any given situation.
Next came the assignments - divvying up who would be writing each of our scenes?
I created a Notion database, which included descriptions of what happened in each scene, setting a logical naming convention, locations, and characters.
It was then down to our lead producer and narrative producer to assign the scenes and start writing!
In terms of the order we approached writing, I asked the team to follow this order:
Act 2
Act 1
Act 3
It did throw a lot of our writers off which they expressed in postmortem, but I knew that we needed to get the meatiest part of the writing out of the way first.
Additionally, we had 4 variations of the same game loop in Act 2, so I needed to see a prototype of one of the chapters to see whether it actually worked in practice!
By the time we got to Acts 1 and 3, they were a breeze because we knew where our characters started and where the story finished.
📌 One tip I cannot stress enough for other game devs is to ensure that each of your teams has its own producer.
Having a narrative producer freed up our narrative lead to worry about story problem-solving, vision, and editing without thinking about the team's logistics, such as scheduling, tech, and onboarding.
As you can see from the image of our narrative tasks in the notion board, producers are key to keeping the documentation up to date and checking that all of the tasks are being recorded correctly.
And just in the nick of time, about a day before the game jam deadline, we submitted the game and celebrated!
But there was still one thing left to do - our team postmortem…