Phew! By the time this post is up, it would've been a week since I've finished and submitted Catching Butterflies for the O2A2 2024 jam. By now, I have officially completed 3 fictional works for 3 game jams (/◕ヮ◕)/ which is a huge feat for someone with cracked up ADHD like me~ 

By the way, thanks for 77 browser plays + downloads! It means that 77 users decided to try out this short VN a week after its release, and that's pretty crazy if you think about it. 

If anyone's curious, this is how Catching Butterflies did as of 20/7/24

Thirsty For You! is still my legacy 

for better or for worse

Catching Butterflies! did decent. But why is Thirsty for You still my most popular work??? 

I mean I get it. Most of my views come from people who view the game jams that I submitted my visual novels in. So I have to take into account external factors like where the viewers come from, the tags I use and the number of similar style entries submitted within the same timeframe. The numbers might change in a month or so. 

Now that I'm looking at the both of them, they have many similar elements. Uhh. I'll try to switch up my character design next time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Actual Postmortem

I think Catching Butterflies! suffered from a lack of a clear direction and signaling to the player. It's about a yuri love confession, sure, but the story has too many elements like the presentation, the lore dump about fantasy butterflies etc, even though there's a limited word count. On top of that, it makes it hard for me to pin down what kind of visual novel this is and what is its goal. I had a hard time writing the summary and the tagline for the game because I didn't have a clear idea either. 

Character study or a Love Story?

I decided to focus more on the latter. I cut out Celastrina's backstory and 'flattened' her identity because I wanted to focus on dynamic choices and making variations in the confession scene. 

In short, there's supposed to be a deeper backstory on why Celastrina had a phobia of butterflies and moths. She's in a powerful, tribalistic family that deals with necromancy and runs a family funeral home. Her family's job is to contact spirits and guide them to the afterlife, and their culture is all about embracing/ accepting death. However, after the death of her grandfather, she grew to resent this way of thinking, especially since her family has the ability to contact (and in super rare cases revive) the dead. Since these fantasy moths are attracted to and gather in swarms at funerals, she projects her fears onto them and has nightmares about them. 

I felt bad for cutting out her character depth to create a more lighthearted story, because that was what made Catching Butterflies! unique rather than a generic 'confession simulator'. 

Choices

Another thing I should've done is to signal to players that the choices are meaningful and affect the ending. I think I didn't read the jam rules correctly, and assumed that adding bars and dynamic elements on the screen isn't allowed. If I were to remake the game, I'd add a dynamic element to show that the choices affect the protagonist's personality and relationship with Celastrina. I'm not going to remake Catching Butterflies! right now, but I'd keep this in mind for future stuff. 

End

After this post, I'm going MIA. I'm going to work on my sunofes/ yaoi jam entry this time and it'll be a lot longer. Bye!