Routine.

Visual Novel submission for the NaNoRenO 2024 Game Jam. Made using Ren'Py. While NaNoRenO runs all of March, our team only had the last couple days of the month to work on the project. What you see here is three days of work. We're proud to have completed it in such a short time frame.

A major point in this game is that you can do anything you put your mind to. How well that comes across may vary person to person. Due to the relatively short dev cycle there wasn't exactly a lot of time to refine the process of getting the point across. But that's completely fine, as the project's existence itself is kind of the point.

Created by:

• Carmints
• seburoh

Behind the Scenes:

If you feel like you want to see how this project kicked off, either out of curiosity, or just to try to motivate yourself by seeing how a project can start, we did leave the original draft of the game intact and playable. When asked for your name, input "Totaka", and the game will switch over to the original draft. If your name actually is Totaka and you encountered this by mistake, whoops!

Additionally, the source code (and history) of the game is available on github. If you're unfamiliar with the platform, it's for something called version control. That means that you can go way back and actually see what the first version of the game actually looked like. There's a lot of files listed on that page, but all that we actually worked on at that point was in the script.rpy file.

Letters:

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This game started as a retrospective of sorts. I've been in a routine before that left me feeling stuck at a dead end. The core experience was to tap into that, and try to convey what me now, would want to have told me back then, to try and inspire past me to move forward. Because of this, most of the events in the game are loosely based on real experiences. Which may impact how they connect (or don't connect) with different players who have had different experiences.

That's enough talking out of me. Go, be awesome.

- seburoh

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me: "Look, it's NaNoRenO! I want to be a part of it again... I wanna make a meaningful story with this symbolism and these detailed anime girls and all these things but I have no ideas and we'd only have a few days and... :("
seb: "It's okay, we can do anything, even drawing stick figures is okay!"
overnight: seb has an idea and stick figures were born. Thank you seb.

I've made many visual novels and games before, but stopped for a while. I actually started to loathe myself for not making games on my main account, having no ideas I saw worth developing, and feeling tired a lot of the time. I told myself that it was okay to not make anything ever again, but deep down I knew I wanted to continue making impactful things... just, how?

With making this game, it felt weird not being able to proof-read every single sentence, felt strange to not have the time to draw or create an elaborate character story. But in three days, I drew all those stick figures minus the one at the start, made that UI, and I'm proud of it. It's slightly different, but I made a thing again. I broke my own routine.
Which is why I genuinely believe you can too.

- Carmints :3

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