Devlog - August 2025

A month ago I posted that I was entering the O2A2 Game Jam, producing a visual novel with limited assets and a maximum of 1,000 words. At the same time, I warned that the next month’s dev log (i.e. this one) would probably mostly consist of discussing what I’d done and how it turned out, using the literary technique known as foreshadowing. I’d hate to make my past self a liar, so let’s get into it!

As I began drafting this post, I was originally anticipating discussing the development process of the game, but once I got into it I realised that I actually had quite a bit to say about what was involved and how I get to an idea, so I’ve decided to make that discussion into its own, lengthier blog post that will come later in the month. For now though, I’ll just describe a brief overview of the game: One Last Chat is a visual novel about what you can do when the end of the world is coming and there’s no way to stop it. As you might guess from both the title and genre of the game, it involves talking about things, and coming to terms as best you can.

Simple, right? The game is free to play on itch.io and shouldn’t take more than about five minutes to get through. If the concept intrigues you, I’d highly recommend that you give it a go. While I wouldn’t call it my magnum opus by any means, I am overall quite pleased with it - I feel like it gets across the message and story that I wanted it to, and it hopefully stirs the right emotions in people that play it (if you’ve played it, please comment with which emotions it stirred in you). Yeah, in an ideal world, it would be a bit more polished - I drew the art myself so you know that it’s not exactly world-class, and the logo is about as rushed as anything - but I don’t feel that any of that detracts from it that heavily. If you have played it, thank you, and I’m doubly grateful to you if you rated it when you were done.

Other than developing One Last Chat and procrastinating the writing of this dev log, here are some other things that I’ve done over the past month:

• I’ve made some small updates to the website (as in, the one that you’re reading this on). The most notable one is adding in a section to the games page to separate out commercial and free games, but the load speed of the site should also be a little faster, albeit probably not noticeably.

• I purchased the game Baldr Sky from Steam in the most recent summer sale, as I like cyberpunk stories and I was keen to experience a classic, lengthy visual novel. I’ve been playing Baldr Sky over the last few weeks and, uh…let’s put it this way, I’m glad that visual novels have evolved to the state that they’re in these days. I might put together a review of it if I can get some coherent thoughts together, and explain why it’s such a frustrating game.

• One game jam is down, but another one’s coming up soon: Spooktober! Obviously I can’t do too much preparation before it, otherwise it’ll just turn into development before it’s supposed to be worked on, but I have been toying with the idea of drawing my own art again, and practicing a style for it. Any thoughts on the following?

   

  

   

Anyway, that’s all for this month. As always, thanks for reading, and I hope to see you here again next month.