And now, for the post mortem I post at the end of each one of my main projects. This one is for Sweetly Sweetened Sweets!

This NaNoRenO has been an absolute blast!!!! You may already know this, but I planned on participating in this jam the moment I learned it was a thing back in June 2021.

I also met so many people online along the way :D
Thank you for your comments and replies; you guys made me so so soooo happy to share my progress <3

✨ Game Stuff ✨

Fun Fact: Many parts of this tiny slice-of-life were inspired by events that have happened to me in real life! For example, at the beginning where Aq says her drawing "looks like garbage" but then Myx's drawing looked even worse... Yeah. I used to be Aq in that situation a few years ago. Please don't throw away other people's compliments :') (I figured that since I couldn't get a complete lesson or story out in this demo, at least I have a bunch of tiny little lessons sprinkled throughout, hehe.)

Another thing is... I personally do not like the slice-of-life genre.
...
"omg what a hypocrite" IKR? The most I can do is tolerate it in hopes of funny and cute scenes. This is the main reason why I was so nervous about releasing this demo; it has ZERO action and almost ZERO lore compared to my other games.
"Aren't demos supposed to be exciting?" I thought as I washed my hands before going to sleep. The full game is going to have tons of lore and action, so it didn't seem right to me.
But, If you played the game, you can see I try combatting this with Easter eggs and the little message you get when you exit the game :)
Who knows if it works though owo

Doing this during winter quarter finals in college was not a good idea, but I had no choice. Spring quarter just began for me as well, so I also had to rush a little bit to get this out! I'm extremely stressed about going back to school in person right now, but it's alright so far.

NaNoRenO really does fit the "fire lit under our butts" (word-for-word as they say in their description) kind of jam. It truly was THE BEST jam experience I've had so far!!! So many people from so many places have the same goal of finishing a visual novel on time to the best of their ability. It was awesome seeing the projects of veterans and newbies come to life.

(Personal) Numbers, Statistics, Marketing, and the Algorithm 📈

I would like to be transparent with numbers since I like seeing other people post theirs. It helps me gauge where I'm at, but it might not even mean anything; in that case, I would like to simply have it logged. Honestly, I religiously track my analytics. That can't be healthy x.x

Twitter (posted and tagged nearly every single day):
After/During NaNo: +38 followers (now at 124 followers)

itch.io (posted devlogs every week):
After/During NaNo: +16 followers (now at 64 followers)

(Note that there are a ton of other factors that influenced these numbers and is not necessarily a measure of success.)

The graph below shows the views of all of my games. The peak at the very right is the second day of release. It sort of went down after that lmao

With this release, my entire visual novel life so far has never looked so minuscule in comparison XD I can conclude that it's definitely the yuri tag and NaNoRenO's doing from itch.io's analytics. Traffic from Twitter was also really good! Near the end, I made sure to make an interesting looking GIF as the thumbnail since I think they're fun to hover over :D

This time, I tried having a separate page for my progress updates. I did this since I wanted to test if it affected the algorithm of itch.io, and it indeed does. Making a brand new page WITH the game is more effective than having a page sit for a hundred years and then slapping a game on it. In that case, my other two pages for The Dose Makes The Poison are only for show right now...

(Holy damn, my heart jumped and I was so flattered when I saw this 😭 And the fact that they chose Pippy's "character card" as the banner was ASEFLAKDJKFJKL--)

From all my marketing and progress sharing, people on Twitter, itch.io, Lemma Soft Forums, and even some coming from Reddit were saying they were excited to try out the game once it was released. I've NEVER had so many people say this before. (Side note: It's interesting that they're/you're all VN/game devs. How does one market to the consumer audience too? Does anyone know?)

Then, VN Game Den made a small article about four visual novels that were going to be released during NaNoRenO, and one of them featured was mine, so I really had to step up my game.

I played through my own VN at least  ten times and fixed every little error I saw. (There were also some parts that were just plain weird and didn't make sense, so I cut those out and replaced them with different scenes lol.) The pressure is quite the motivation, eh? Maybe. Making games honestly feels like playing a game itself 👀

Marketing at the same time as creating assets for the game was a good combo IMO; it helped push me to think about what to do next so I could share my progress and finish the game on time.

Dealing with Ratings and Reviews (warning, I get pretty angy here) 🙃

Why? Please, just TELLLLLLLL me why ;;

I swear, these kinds of reviews are the most annoying, not just as a game developer, but as anything. A lot of us want ANY feedback. Some of us WANT  to improve, damnit. If you say you "just didn't like it" and can't give me an ounce of reason, I have no respect for you. This is not cool. (If it's not your taste, that's different. That's still a reason, so just say that.)

I think all creators deal with this at some point in their time. I'm more upset it's not a hate review because they don't even let me know what I did wrong, or if I did anything wrong. It leaves me (and my game) a little hurt and constantly wondering if they actually played my game/not and if my game is worth anyone's time...

* I highly encourage you to give literally any kind of feedback when rating something poorly (especially if that something is a bunch of NaNoRenO games, as I was seeing this person do). It would do literally everyone absolutely splendid! 🥰

... But you know, I'm not too beat up about it as long as I'm not banned from getting my games, lessons, stories, feelings, and characters out there! That's my main motivation, mwahahaha :D

Always remember your main goal :3

And I seriously thank everyone else who leaves awesome honest feedback and reviews, not just on my games <3

This may be my last post on this progress page and last update for a while...
... So, thank you for reading this :D

Check the game out and let me know what you think: Sweetly Sweetened Sweets 🍩

- MintGlow