It's been a week since Office Rivals initial release! Now is the time for a development post-mortem.

In this post-mortem, I will talk about:

• Background/the initial development of Office Rivals
• Story development
• Designing the love interest
• Development hell
• Progress: what work and what didn't
• Guilt and anxiety

I want to keep my post-mortem accessible and "friendly" to hobbyist, or new developers who want to get more insights into VN development. I still consider myself a new developer, there's a lot more to learn. So, I hope this mortem will provide valuable and helpful information to you.

Background

Initially, I wanted to make a point-and-click dating sim with multiple characters. One of the core gameplay involves a lot of pin-up images. However, the scope was too ambitious, so I decided to make a short VN.

Story and Narrative Design

The initial version of Office Rivals is very short (I still a copy of it), with 2 endings: a lovers ending, and friends-with-benefit ending. But I wasn't happy with it, because it was too short and did not have enough space to show characters' back-stories. So I ditched it, and forgot about the VN project for a little bit. When I returned to the project, I decided to start from scratch, and the result of that was Friendly Favours.

An early Office Rivals CG, and a CG from the final build of the VN (a scene in Chapter 1).

There were only 3 characters in the initial version of Office Rivals, namely the MC, the Love Interest (Nanako) and a minor character (Seon, their boss). Even then, Seon's role was barely significant.

However, I realized that side characters could liven up the story, as well as to further support the relationship between Nanako and the MC. So, Seon eventually was given an actual personality, along with the creation of Gee and Michelle. Their interactions with the MC and Nanako further shed some light on the personalities of these two.

Early character designs.

Not only that, I began to implement the world-building for the scrapped point-and-click project into the VN project, and this resulted in th creation of the Heart City anthology. From here, things start to take shape, characters start to have background stories and personalities, like actual people influenced by others, circumctances, and the world around them.

Designing Nanako

Nanako is one of the earliest characters I created for this project, alongside Kazue and Yuka, taken from this practice illustration (link to image). Initially her design was inspired by to be the archetypical angry office lady, you know the ones with glasses and jet black hair tied in a bun or a ponytail.

Eventually her design became more distinct, particularly thanks to her hairband and her side-part bangs. Nanako's character design development is an entirely different story though. As you can see, she went through numerous redesigns.

Development hell

Now that there's a story, and characters, it's time to put in the work! After Friendly Favours was done, I was excited for Office Rivals.

However, as mentioned previously, it was easier said than done. Originally, I was aiming for a late 2022 release of Office Rivals. I'm always cautious on being overly ambitious, and when I did become ambitious, my caution was proven right: there was no way I could release the VN that soon!

2023 came around and life got busier. My irl career had its ups and downs, and I experienced heartbreaks and guilts here and there, too. Time-wise, I could only spend a few hours on some weekends to work on the game.

One of the most challenging tasks at the time was creating animations. Oh boy, frame-by-frame animation is no joke. I hadn't, and haven't even developed good drawing skills yet, and already was jumping into animation. But it's already promised as a new feature in Office Rivals.

My VNs are rather vanilla and short, and therefore doesn't really have much appeal. So, it has to set itself apart from most short VNs: good frame-by-frame animation is the way to do this.

Like it or not, I had to suck it up and learn to create animated scenes.

Progress: what work and what didn't

Learning to create frame-by-frame animation is a lot of pain, especially as someone who's still learning digital art. But it taught me one important lesson: there is a difference between something I'd like to call "indirect productivity" and "direct productivity".

Lesson #1

I learned that just because you put a lot of work into something, doesn't mean it will be in the final result. This is what I think of as "indirect productivity". For example, I worked on the missionary scene animation for over 1 month. In the end, I had to scrap the entire thing. It was as if I never worked on anything at all. There was nothing to show for. It felt like a waste of time.

The scrapped version 12-frame animation, and the final version.

However, lessons from it could be applied to future animations. As a result, whenever I started to make new animations, the process got smoother and smoother, and a lot of those animations ended up in the game, which is what I think of as "direct productivity".

So whenever I have to scrap a sprite, a background art, or a CG that I worked a long time on, I no longer feel too bad.

Lesson #2

When I started to divide my tasks into chunks, the progress got faster. I was thinking, "I should've done this earlier!". I think many developers out there use this way of visualizing their progress. Here's an example of mine from November 2023.

Guilt and Anxiety

Everyone needs motivation to do something, and motivation can be affected by a lot of things. For me, guilt and anxiety were a huge part of it. Fortunately for me, my project and Patreon is very low-key. Barely anyone followed my project. However, the project's first patron at the time was very supportive, and went as far as making the highest pledge.

When I couldn't release the VN as quickly as I hoped for, I felt like I was ripping people off, eventhough at its peak, there were only 3 patrons. Weirdly enough this made me more appreciative of their support, and therefore I got more anxious as development went on.

In a way, I was glad that the project is quite low-key. But I do hope that the VNs can reach as many people as possible, especially the "wholesome" and "vanilla' crowd.

Closing

Anyway, I hope this post-mortem can give you a little insight into the development of Office Rivals. Specific aspects like character design, story design and work flow would require their own individual posts, so I did not include them here in detail.