Hello all, and welcome to Behind the Wall: A Velox Fabula Jam Postmortem!

This is my first postmortem, so I apologize if it's a bit… much. But honestly, when it comes to this experience, I have so much I want to share. 

As I'm writing this, Titan Arum stands at just under 800 downloads in ~11 days. There's been streams (Thanks Yinny! Go check out HelloYinny on twitch, she's wonderful), fanart, polls, celebratory art, and I think there's even an ao3 tag now?? It's so much more than I could've hoped for. I want to take a moment to say thank you for checking out our spooky-sweet VN, and for all the support we've received! We're so appreciative and so excited. 

So, that being said, let's jump in! We'll be talking about how the team and Titan Arum came to be, what the process was like, and finally, future plans(!). 

BEHOLD, VELOX FABULA!

At the point in time when I found out about Velox Fabula, I was coming off of a failed attempt at Otome Jam during which I had gotten very close to finishing, but had been unable to get the art and the coding done in sufficient time to submit. The experience of struggling to finish had so thoroughly discouraged me that I had moved game dev from a 'potential hobby' to a 'longshot dream' pretty quickly. 

Then I was scrolling twitter and I saw it:

It took me all of a minute to decide I was going to do this jam, but after reading over the actual jam rules, I gave myself one major stipulation: 

I needed a team. I couldn't do a jam– especially a ten day jam that required submissions to be complete, not demos– by myself. There was no way. So either I got a team, or no jam. 

To be honest, this was my way of giving myself an out. I wasn't confident I could take another failure, and this way it didn't feel like quitting something I really, really wanted to do, either. 

ASSEMBLE! THAT! TEAM!

I put out the call on twitter, and told myself it would come down to that. It felt like a reach to be sure, but it was the only thing I felt comfortable doing.

But then I saw one of my beloved art moots, Minthe, tweet something implying they were tempted to join a jam, and I pounced on the opportunity. I commented on their tweet, and to my surprise, they were open to entertaining me.

When they agreed,  I felt a thousand times better. I knew Min's art well and was fully confident they'd be a spectacular sprite artist. We already got along pretty well, and we had the same taste in hot fictional men. From the moment they joined, I abandoned my 'out'. I was committed, even if that meant I had to do every other role myself (which would have been a spectacularly bad idea). 

We needed other artists. Ideally I also wanted a programmer so that I wouldn't have to lean on my deeply rudimentary coding skills to get us across the finish line (dramatically limiting what we could do), and music in accordance with the jam rating categories– and because in my gaming experience, music was a huge deal. 

I heard from Aiixen and Siyokoy next, for CGS and GUI respectively. I had a near heart attack when Aiixen reached out regarding the CGS. His art is every kind of gorgeous and I felt like the vibe worked so well with Minthe's style, it was better than I could've hoped for. Siyo I was aware of and followed due their project What Remains, a VN that I had absolutely adored and had released a little while prior. He was looking to do GUI, and that leveled me. I hadn't been posting for a GUI artist, mostly because it had never even occurred to me to hope I could make a game of that caliber. I interrupted my spouse's shower to gush about that one, and obviously accepted. 

It was somewhere around here the panic really kicked in, but I was also excited. Like bone shaking, blurry vision, vibrating-for-four-days-straight excited. 

I started adding more roles to my ISO posts, including an editor. The pressure was getting very, very real. I had posted maybe a notes app poem here and there– but nothing significant. Not a single person joining the team had any evidence of my skills, and that was terrifying. I needed eyes on the writing to make sure I wouldn't absolutely tank this amazing opportunity for us all. That's when Vivi joined, and I felt like I could breathe again. Viv edits another game I adore– Dicentra. I knew I was in good hands, and was feeling vaguely delirious with the amount of talent just volunteering to work with me. 

Rapidfire, the next members joined. Siyo mentioned he'd worked with a musician, EJ, for What Remains and he was potentially interested in working with us. I connected with him immediately, and he agreed to come on board as well. He's an incredible talent, and he was willing to write original tracks for the game AND do sound effects. Huge win.

 Music, check. 

Njike reached out interested in doing backgrounds as well. Their work was beautiful, and my art team was finally complete. 

At this point I was nearly ready to call the team done– but we still needed a programmer.  

Then Rottentief (AKA Gremlin) reached out to me to see if we needed a QA person. I hadn't considered that, but as I was potentially looking at having to code myself (BIG yikes), and we had a lot of moving parts that would keep us all very busy, having a quality assurance role felt like an absolute luxury I'd be wise to indulge in. I agreed, and to my surprise, she mentioned that a friend of theirs was also potentially looking for a team– as a programmer. 

The stars aligned. The chips had fallen where they may. Everything had come together perfectly, and Xenubin joined our team as our programmer. 

To say that I was already pipe-dreaming it up at this point would be an understatement. It felt too good to be true in every sense of the phrase, and I could not wait for theme voting. We announced our team, set up the discord and did our introductions, and I (attempted) to return my focus to my day job and the real world until the jam commenced.

Crescence contacted me a little while after we'd finished building the team, interested in a 'small QA role.' These words would in fact come back to haunt them– which we'll touch on later, and you can read more about in their own VF Jam postmortem (which I highly suggest checking out! Their perspective is very unique, having been on TWO teams that submitted). I, like everyone else, adored Intertwine and had hoped to work with Cres in the future, so I jumped at their offer and brought them on board.

We were now officially a team of ten, boasting a writer/director, editor, sprite artist, CG artist, BG artist, GUI artist/programmer, music/sound designer, programmer, and TWO QAs. Somehow all of these incredible talents who had established themselves as talents had decided to work with me. It can only be explained as them putting faith in me. I was terrified and exhilarated, and foaming at the mouth before we even began.

JAM COMMENCE!

The discord was abuzz once voting began. We all voted separately but shared our favorites, our speculations on winners, and joked about not remembering our own suggestions. 

I got out of work four minutes before the jam theme was announced, and I anxiously refreshed my phone until it popped up:

UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

I loved it, and I had no idea what we'd be doing. 

Brainstorming itself took place over the first twenty four hours. It was chaotic in the way only a chat full of creatives can be chaotic. We'd figured out early on that we were an absolute hodgepodge of time zones, and I decided that the first few days would be pretty sleepless on my part to make sure I heard from everyone, and to get as much of my own work done as possible so that everyone else could start. 

The idea that became Titan Arum morphed and merged several times, with the influence of most of the team involved. We wanted to be sure that everyone could be excited about the premise so we could make something everyone was invested in.

 We landed on an eldritch romance game very quickly, and knew we wanted our MC to be our unreliable narrator. The brainstorming process ended up being more than 24 hours long, with different team members coming in and out to give their pitches and thoughts.

We discussed game mechanics we wanted to influence our story, and I quickly discovered that I had overlooked one aspect of my role in the team: as the director, I had the final call. I had to make decisions, often, and quickly. In the first 36 hours, precious time we really needed, this held us up. Luckily, my teammates were so quick, we were able to make up for lost time. 

Once we were moving, we were moving. I was writing basically 24 hours a day, trying to get all three routes and our common route outlined and then scripted. Our idea involved a lot of crossover, tie ins from route to route, text that interacted with code to create glitches, etc. It was a lot, and we knew the coding process was going to be monstrous, so we wrote in ren'py format for our script in an attempt to save time.

Min was able to get the first character design out very quickly, and the fun really began. Aster was gorgeous, and we knew he was going to be a hit immediately. 

Aiixen followed up immediately with drafts of the CG, and it's fair to say the art chats never really recovered from being truly feral after that. We loved our main LI, shamelessly. 

LI3, who became Oscar, was also quick to appear and very well received by the team. 

Having art already set made it much easier to write. The visuals on the characters made a huge difference, and I finished the outline of the common route (for the first time) not long after our final LI was drawn out. It was already the middle of day 3, and we had a 13k word outline we now had to make into a real script. 

Meanwhile Siyo was hitting us with drafts of the incredible UI he'd come up with and competing heavily with me for teammate with the least sleep. It was complex, beautiful, carried themes from the stories we outlined, and even had an Aster flower. Seeing the demos of the UI was so surreal. 

We were actually making a game. 

I was scripting as fast as I could, which also created a lot of work for poor Viv, who came in behind me and cleaned up every single line. They were an editing machine, combing over every bit to make sure it was presentable enough to go in any final drafts of the script and ultimately the game. 

Day 4's end was when the crunch really set in, and when Cres' role in the team rapidly morphed from QA to cowriter. 

They were actively going through and giving feedback and brainstorming throughout the writing process– and, most importantly, helping cut writing scope to keep the story a manageable size– but even still, we were running out of time. Coding needed to begin, ASAP. We were almost a full 36 hours behind our original schedule. Xenubin (Max) was coding the skeleton portions of the game, making sure that the mechanics we'd decided on could actually be implemented, and working with Siyo to get the UI implemented. Gremlin was both helping code and helping scope-cut the game overall, from mechanics to plotlines. Viv was deep in the trenches, fine-tooth-combing the common route so we could get it to our coders, ASAP. Min was furiously churning out sprites, EJ had music working, Aiixen's CGs were drafting and Njike's backgrounds were in progress– but we were still deep in the writing process.

So I asked Cres to write an entire route– Theo's– so that we wouldn't have to cut any specific routes for scope, and they graciously agreed.

So began an overnight haul of delirious proportions, during which Cres and I finished writing all three LIs' routes. We stayed up all night, and Cres churned out a terrific 5k words at a moment's notice before withdrawing for 'sleep' (a nap at best). 

Once the three routes were completed, Vivi took over editing the rest– not an easy feat, given the sleepless state I'd been in while writing– and we sent the scripts to be coded. 

The next several days were tagging the routes to show sprite transitions, background transitions, sound effects– things I hadn't considered at all when considering the scope. This was incredibly tedious work, and demanded a lot from Max and Gremlin, who would set the game up and then go back to make sure the tags and transitions matched the game. Siyo was perfecting the second UI transitions, and we were timing these transitions with specific moments in the script as well as code… and honestly, the rest is a blur. It came together very quickly, with music finishing, sound effects, voice effects, menus, text animations, CGs, backgrounds… 

I leaned heavily on my team at this point. I'd been running on hour or two naps for nearly a week, and I finally had to truly sleep. One of the benefits we found of being scattered across so many time zones was that there was almost always someone awake, working– and so for the next few days I actually slept at night.

The final stretch was the most chaotic portion. We'd aimed for a Sunday release, but that wasn't going to be happening. We were behind our schedule, but luckily still on route to finish. All the assets were in, Siyo's god-like UI implemented, most of the major decisions were made, but we still had to finish coding and QA. Siyo was tackling promo materials, making our game page beautiful and designing logos and setting up posts for me to push, and Min had created a beautiful cover for the game. EJ had finished the music, and it was perfect. Max and Gremlin had gotten our coding mostly done, with most of it coming down putting in all the edits and tags. I decided to stay up all night again to make sure I was available to everyone during the last 36 hours for bug fixes, questions, any final calls we needed to make, etc. We were QAing to the final moment, until it got as close as we were comfortable– less than 20 minutes to jam end. 

We pulled the trigger, finalized the game, and submitted. 

It was done. 

HINDSIGHT IS 20/20 AND ALL THAT

One of the most fascinating things about the Titan Arum team was in both how large our team was– ten people– and how absolutely crucial every single person was. The crux of the game was in everyone's lap at some point, and every single person came through. It was an incredible thing to watch. 

It was also the most exhausting, thrilling, joyful experience of my life so far. Somehow despite the amount of work we put in, we were able to joke and laugh and enjoy ourselves along the way. 

I learned a lot, and honestly? There are some things I'd definitely change next year. 

Things I would so differently:

• Scope scope scope; I did not have a good grasp of what we could reasonably do in that amount of time. Even with a large team, we took on more than we should've. It's only thanks to the kind and persistent insistence of my QAs that we cut for scope that we had a game (and to think I thought this was a luxury! HA!)
• Know more about the other aspects of the game; I was not able to step in and assist well in certain areas, like coding, when more hands on deck would've helped, and as a result my poor coders were GRINDING those last few days. It also made me, I feel, a less effective leader when I didn't understand questions.
• MORE CHANNELS. I think just about everyone asked me for their own discord channel at some point, and because I hadn't thought about that beforehand, they often had to wait and then things were scattered from channel to channel. Next time, everyone gets a channel automatically, except Siyo because without using that as a reward I genuinely think he would've stayed up for like 40 hours at a pop.

• Use vacation time: I took off the first full and last day of the jam, but working in the middle on no sleep was torturous. My job is demanding, and if I had taken vacation days instead, it would have been significantly less stressful. 

Nonetheless,  I am so proud of my team and what we made. Perhaps even more so, I'm proud to say we had a ridiculous amount of fun, and got along so well. We joked and made fan art of our own creations, thirsted and commiserated, and lifted each other up when the stress became overwhelming. The experience of being on this team changed how I see game dev, and how I see myself. It was SUCH an honor, I could gush forever.

In this spirit, I want to do a quick shout and appreciation to the individual members of the Titan Arum team (in order of their arrival to the team): 

Minthe: Their art. My god their art. They can make a sexy LI with their eyes closed. What's more, they can connect people with their art, make them feel things for the story. Their character designs were on point, and the expressions of the sprites absolutely scrumptious. Not to mention the sheer SPEED. Min, thank you for speaking my language when it comes to beautiful men and bringing such joy to the team. And thank you for jacketless Aster with his hair up, that was so *chef's kiss.* I could sing their praises all day, every day, on talent alone. Of course that is not the only thing they brought to the team. They were the person I 'knew' best, and I've followed them for quite a while and been a fan of their work, so their agreement to participate with me was a huge part of why I moved forward with the team in the first place! They open their commissions time to time, and I strongly encourage checking out their carrd and following them on twitter so you can get your hands on a slot when it's available! I've commissioned their art personally, and it was a wonderful experience and the result was so amazing. 

Minthe's Carrd: https://t.co/SmARdsIfqR

Aiixen: Again, the ART! If you haven't played all the routes, you should just to see the magic he worked on these CGs. He had to wait on a lot of character AND plot development to get the full info for CGs, and yet turned out amazing, beautiful work that fit each character perfectly. The vibes are immaculate and the art is to die for. He was always open to suggestions but honestly? He just GOT IT. We were so excited for each new CG reveal, and he gifted us with fan art! Such a kind person and such a joy to work with. I enjoy him so much, and HIGHLY recommend commissioning from him. He has mystery commissions which I think are so freakin' cool! Thank you for everything Aiixen. We're going to be doing additional CGs for Titan Arum and I cannot wait to see what he does with them! 

If you'd like to check out his commissions: https://vgen.co/Aixen

 Worm Van 4ever.

Siyokoy: A GOD, and if anyone is throwing themselves down to give benediction it's ME. Creativity and technical skill in one place is always so impressive to me and he's got both in spades. Everyone was involved in multiple aspects of the game, but I think Siyo was in the most places at any one time. I always felt like they knew the next step we had to take, even if I was too exhausted to give direction, and they covered any base I missed. You think the GUI is impressive?? Wait til you hear how fast he made the promo stuff. And that wasn't even supposed to be their job, but holy hell am I glad they did it!! And fan art, and peak humor, and coding support. This is someone whose work I so highly admire and respect, and to have them literally be addressing every loose end during Velox Fabula made it make perfect sense how he creates such amazing works. 

If you haven't played What Remains, Siyo's project for Otojam, please do so! It's one of my absolute favorites, linked here: https://siyokoy.itch.io/what-remains

Vivi: Saved my skin a thousand times over. While I speed-ran writing a small novel, Vivi was the one who made sure our words were actually words, our sentences were actually sentences, and that we made any kind of sense. The suggestions were impeccable and they never made my voice not sound like mine, but instead polished it to a shine so that it could actually make sense. They also made some VERY clutch narrative suggestions, not to mention being a huge part of developing the actual plot for the entire game. Genuinely there is nothing as reassuring to me in the writing process as a great editor, and Viv is a great editor. 

Vivi edits for Dicentra, an amazing game by Saffeine, linked here: https://safffeine.itch.io/dicentra

They are also the founder of Blood Citrus, an amazing indie multimedia brand that showcases the stories of Southeats Asian (SEA) creatives, an absolutely amazing and inspiring project.   

Njike: I gave Njjke a rough outline of two settings with like three different versions for each setting needed and basically no guidance at all. This was an issue I realized existed several days into the jam, when I was reading over what I'd outlined and realized I included several descriptors of the spaces. Njike had already begun, but when I sent them the adjustments I had so far, they immediately changed direction so it would fit better. We asked a lot with so little instruction, particularly in regards to the **spoiler** bloody versions of the room, and they absolutely nailed it. I'm obsessed with what they made and how quickly they pulled it together. We were split down the middle between people who'd never made a game/done a jam before, and people who had experience, and Njike was on team New To This– but you'd never guess it with the incredible work they did or the quality of those backgrounds. 

Rottentiefs: Imagine you're working on a project, arguably a dream project, but you have a super tight deadline, and no sense of time. There is a member of your team who is actively working to help you stay within reason, even if that means occasionally telling you, essentially, no. And now imagine that this person is basically the human equivalent of a happy lightning bug with butterfly wings and pixie magic and a foul mouth, and you somehow end up walking away from each instance of "probably shouldn't, you can do that later <3" feeling encouraged and empowered. Now throw in spontaneous memes and fanart, jack it full of coding finesse, and you have Gremlin. Not only did they consistently step up to every possible situation they could, and provide support needed in basically every category, but they did so while being an endlessly positive influence. Which is saying something, honestly, because with a 14 hour time difference between us, Gremlin ALWAYS got the overtired versions of me. Grem also was the primary programming QA in the literal last 24 hours and stayed so calm and cool, and even got on voice chat and walked me through submitting when I became so frantic I forgot how to read. 

Check out Rottentief's other amazing projects, Online at the Perfect Time and Going Out Out! https://rottentief.itch.io/

Xenubin: Max was immediately my hero for coding alone. Honestly he could've done absolutely nothing but basic transcription and I would've kissed his feet because please dear god don't make me responsible for this. I was a humanities major. HELP. 

And then Max appears and not only does he bring coding knowledge and pictures of his tailless, extra-toed kittens, but every time we had some wild and entirely half-cocked idea that would absolutely be a nightmare to code, he can either do it or is entirely prepared to Figure. That. Shit. Out. He brought things from previous projects, worked with Siyo and Grem to implement pieces of their code for specific ideas we had, and tirelessly attacked the giant coding quest marker with FERVOR. If there was a way to make our game better with code, Max was gonna do it. And all the while, he was such a pleasure to work with, bringing straight hilarity to the server. 

You should absolutely check out Max's projects, LyteLove and Finality, linked here: https://xenubinstudios.itch.io/

I feel the need to say that Max, Gremlin, and Siyo worked Titan Arum like a coding rotisserie chicken: one of them was basically always working on it, and they were a wildly successful team, and came up with a lot of the little touches that make the game really immersive. They taught me that the coding is really what connects the game to the story and makes the cohesive magic that really draws a player in. Round the clock work on this game was such an asset, I can't even tell you. I didn't even miss sleeping, it was too fun watching stuff happen. I learned so much but I still don't understand 80% of what they did. 

EJ: The game music had me stressed because I am one of two people: either the gaming music becomes a comfort sound, and I will literally listen to the OST or put the game on in the background to enjoy it, or I mute the whole thing. There is no in between. I really wanted our game to have the first experience for gamers. EJ made that happen with not ONE, but TWO amazing tracks, and then additional versions of those tracks as well! I am so obsessed with the music in this game. It captured everything I could've hoped for, and I am just so impressed and so honored that he made something so wonderful for us. Then, not only did he do that incredible work, but he maneuvered around some of my truly delusional plans and developed voice effects that captured each character perfectly and gave me so much joy! AND provided sound effects! I got downright emotional hearing all of those for the first time. I couldn't believe I was so lucky as to be directing and writing a game that has such amazing tracks. I could thank him a thousand times and it wouldn't be enough. 

You can see more of EJ's work here: https://bio.site/ejtanmusic

Crescence: I genuinely don't have words to describe what it's like to admire someone and adore their work and then have that person join your team and brainstorm with you, write alongside you through the very literal wee-est hours of the night, support and encourage you, and throw their all behind your project. I knew working with Lem would be amazing because Lem's work is amazing– it was a pretty foregone conclusion. But to have this person become a friend? A supporter? No words. Lem is kind and absolutely hilarious, and was a human safety net for me personally during the entire process. The fact that I was able to hand off a route to them and they not only took it and ran, but made something amazing? Their scoping out our script and clever ideas to work around the plot so that we could have a higher impact with less time was life saving. They're so multi-talented I could scream, and the fact that they're such a wonderful person as well makes it even better. 

If you haven't checked out their other projects, Alaris and Intertwine, you should absolutely do so! https://crescence-studio.itch.io/

This team was amazing for so many reasons. The talent and capacity for work, the dedication everyone showed, the teamwork– that is a huge part of it. My favorite part, however, was how easily everyone got along. How genuinely we all interacted with each other, and were able to laugh and get frustrated and struggle and overcome together. The indie dev community is so new to me, but I was drawn to it because of how welcoming it is. This was something else entirely, however. The fun made it all possible. It made us want to keep doing this.

So, we decided we will. 

Which brings us to the final portion of my postmortem! 

('Ahh, finally!' The captive audience sighs from the dark corner. It's been days. There's been no sunlight. There's tallymarks on the wall to show the passage of time–)

FUTURE PLANS AND UPDATES

The version of Titan Arum we released had some bugginess to it, but was generally the version we wanted to release for the jam. We busted our asses to make it there, but we did get that done.

What it isn't, however, is the full version of what we came up with, and what we'd like to execute. 

So, on that note, here's a short and not comprehensive list of future plans we intend for Titan Arum: 

• The bug fix update: This will likely be the first update we release post jam. This will be to clean up bugs we missed, to set up some framework for mechanics we scope cut but still want to include, and polishing up the existing game
• The additional content update: This will include updated assets, including updated backgrounds, additional CGS and sprites, and more bonus content– like dev team fan art. 
• The unlockable content update: Very excited for this one! This will include additional bonus story content, including new 'chapters' for each LI including new art. This will also include our updated features and mechanics through the games and additional endings. 

And, perhaps the most exciting of the updates: 

THE VOICE ACTING UPDATE!: We are in the process of setting up FULL voice acting for the game! This will likely be the last update, and will get its own announcement with full details later. But for now, just know… we're very excited. 

If you have somehow made it to the end of this, thank you for reading! This was my first post-mortem and it was really hard to parse down all that I wanted to say into one concise piece… so I didn't. This is not concise.

Thank you for all of the love and support we've gotten for Titan Arum! It's amazing to see people love it as much as we do, and to see this thing we made with our blood, sweat, tears, and laughter exist out in the world. 

Until next time!

<3

Cath