Devlog - October 2025

For probably around ten years or so now, by my reckoning, October has been known as the spooky season, as opposed to an ordinary month that just happens to have a spooky celebration at its end. This is by no means a bad thing, as I greatly enjoy the Halloween atmosphere, but for me this year, things were turned around a little. September was my spooky month, and if you’ll keep reading on, you’ll find out why.

The reason, of course, is that I had that most terrifying of prospects: a project, and a deadline to finish it by. Said project was the game for the Spooktober 7th Annual Visual Novel Jam, Creating Paradise. If you haven’t played it and think that a story involving religious horror and gaslighting might be up your alley, then please do so! It’s a little over 10,000 words, and should be able to be completed within an hour.

I’ll try to keep my thoughts on the jam and the process of developing the project short, since last time that I wrote down my thoughts on project development it spilled out into an entirely new blog post. Let’s keep it short with some dot points, both to keep myself restrained, and to allow me a less formal way of writing, yes?

• Holy crap, I hate drawing sprites and backgrounds. I spent a lot of time in one week drawing, and the majority of work needed additional updates later on for one reason or another. I don’t know what the next game jam entered will be, but it will almost certainly involve a dedicated artist who isn’t me because drawing is just far too exhausting for me.

• I would have loved to have had a way to play the game through the character Ben’s eyes, but there wasn’t really time to implement it, and I also don’t really know what the story would have involved that could have justified its inclusion. Still, it’s a fun idea; maybe I’ll come back to it down the line when I need a break from another project.

• I also would have loved to have included a joke ending, or some sort of comedic mode after you’ve gotten both endings, but again, I didn’t really know what I could have done and didn’t want to experience scope creep. Such is life.

• When I was planning out the game, Fiona’s death in the corresponding ending would have had her burned at the stake, but I decided to change it to a drowning once I actually wrote it out since I didn’t want to have to draw flames. Of course, both the church and forge scenes ended up having fire in them anyway. Go figure.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the game - I was worried that some of the scenes with Fiona showing Ben around hurt the pacing a bit, but upon asking my playtesters (i.e. friends who I rope into playing the game for me) what they thought, all of them thought that they added enough to justify their conclusion. I do feel like after the opening scene in the cell, the game lacks a good bit of punch until the ending, if that makes sense, and I definitely cheated a bit by going, "Wow, look at how ominous this big door is! Spooky spooky spooky!" But hey, that's why we're making these things - so that I can try and improve, and fix flaws like those.

If you have played Creating Paradise, I hope that that little bit of behind-the-scenes information is engaging, and if not, then I hope you were engaged nevertheless! Finally, if you have played it, a vote for it in the jam would be greatly appreciated - every bit counts!

As you can probably imagine, the majority of September was spent working on Creating Paradise, but that isn’t everything! There’s also been some work done on updating an existing project, which will hopefully be finished by the end of October, right in time for Halloween. Yes, I said at the start that September was my spooky month, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t still have some things tie in with everybody else’s. As always, keep an eye on our socials, fill out the contact form if you need to, and have a great month!