December comes and rolls by again like clockwork. It’s the capstone month, the month for tidying up loose ends and getting ready for a fresh start in January. You wrap up what you’re working on and release your game to the world – you did release your game this year, right? Right?
As I procrastinate finishing Canvas Menagerieāwhich releases in 4 days as I write thisāI wanted to talk about the incredible miracle of actually finishing and shipping indie games.
starting is hard…
Taking the first step to start a new game is a tough one. Do you start with concept art? Outlining? Character bios? Mood boards? There’s really no bad way to start making a game other than not starting. However you want to go about it- as long as you make that first jump – is up to you.
…but finishing is harder.
They say the last 10%āwell, really the last 5%āof development is the hardest, and it definitely feels true when you’re in the thick of it. Play testing, bug fixing, small edits you pushed off to laterāit all adds up.
What’s worse is that you start running off of fumes rather than fixation and can lose steamāand love for the projectāthe longer it drags on. How can we avoid burning yourself out before the project is released?
know your project
Really, truly, know your project. What are you making? Why are you making it? What is your goal with it? Knowing your project in and out is the first step to being able to actually finish it.
outline
Is your outline up to date and accurate? An old outline can throw you off course it you use it as a guide, but an up to date outline can highlight parts you missed.
When I’m getting ready for a demo or a full game release, I make a list of all the assets the release will need. This can include:
- Character outfits
- Backgrounds
- Scenes left to be edited
But it can (and should) be as granular as:
- Niko needs an angry eyebrow expression and a pouting mouth
- Sunset variation of the cafe background
- Choice hover image
- Sword strike sound effect
- Chapter 5 scene 2 proofreading
An asset list of what is left is great but its entirely useless if its not detailed enough to actually tell you what is left. “Music” is not helpful but “2 romantic tracks, one slower and one faster, both around 2 minutes long” is. “Formal wear for all characters” is somewhat helpful but “suits for Niko, Ren, and Rose” is much better. The more specific you can get, the better.
If you don’t know what is actually left in the game, then how will you actually finish it?
play your game
This was a piece of advice provided by my friend Vimi when I asked him how he’d advise someone on this. Basically, he said you should play your game. A lot.
Get in the habit of frequently playing your game – don’t be afraid to launch it. Go through it and take notes on things. How does it feel to play it? Does it feel stiff? Fluid? What actually needs changing versus what you want to change? Do you really need to update the character art or are there more pressing matters to finish? How will players feel while playing it?
Looking at your game objectively can be hard, but at the end of the day if you stay in a spiral of constantly trying to update parts of it, you’ll never finish it. A game that’s released can later be updated and expanded upon, but the important part is that it’s released.
know yourself
set realistic expectations
Being able to set and meet dead lines is an important part of being a team lead and actually finishing things. It’s okay to overestimate and not always hit your deadline, but you have to take that experience and adjust accordingly. How long does it take you / your artist to finish a character sprite and how many are left? How long does it take for a scene to be scripted?
If you don’t know how long it takes for a part of the game to be done (for instance, how long it takes for 1 CG to go from concept -> fully drawn), then time yourself / your team. If you look back at your messages, did it take the artist 1 week to go from a sketch to fully finished or 1 month? Those are big differences, especially when you multiply that time with the amount of work left to do.
What happens if there are set backs? What if someone gets sick, or their computer gets corrupted, or they’re without power? Do you have backups for the project in place, such as version control (like GitHub) and alternate plans for how things can get finished? There is rarely ever a timeline that goes perfectly.
At the end of the day, it’s up to you, the lead, if the game gets released or not.
don’t leave everything for “later”
Later will always come sooner than…later. If you want to actually publish a game, then you have to tackle that “later” eventually.
Don’t put off everything for later, because chances are you’ll either run out of time for it or completely forget about it in the first place. If you see something is off about the way the GUI transitions from a set of screens, then note it down to look at or ask someone on the team to tackle it.
There are some parts of game dev, like setting up the Steam page, that you absolutely cannot push off for later (did you know Valve recommends a minimum of 6 months for your page to be up before release?), so be honest with yourself when you push something off. Is this something you can actually leave for later or is it something you need to sit down and get done now?
scope knife now
You’ve left some things for later, but what are things you shouldn’t focus on at all? Does your game need 10+ different types of customization for the protagonist, or can you do it with just a few varieties? Should each love interest get a different background for every single one of their dates, or is it okay to reuse some backgrounds & locations across routes?
The scope of the project is the entirety of it. All of the art, the writing, the programming, every single capsule artwork Steam asks you to remake in 3429573290 different sizesāevery aspect of the game is part of its overall scope. A visual novel with 4 love interests with 100k+ words is a much bigger scoped game than something you can feasibly make in a month by yourself, while a visual novel with 3 short endings and only 5k words is a very small scoped game.
Managing your scope goes hand in hand with setting an asset outline and not adding to it. If you’re constantly adding things to be finished, then the game will never be finished. At some point you have to draw the line in the sand and say that this is all you’re going to work on.
At the same time, sometimes you need to realize when a feature or a part of the game isn’t necessary for the entire project to be finished. Not every project needs a glossary of terms. Not every project needs a new CG for every chapter. Cutting down on scope is a life-saving measureāif the scope is never trimmed back to a manageable size, the game will never be done.
The great thing about this though is that it doesn’t have to be permanent. Games aren’t like books where they’re rarely updated past the first release. Visual novels can be patched just like any other kind of game, and with that means you can always go back and add additional features, art, story lines, and more to your game. If there was a feature you really loved but couldn’t get it down to a manageable size before release, you can always tackle it later after you see how people respond to the first release. Visual novels don’t have to be a one and doneāyou can always come back to them later.
learn to prioritize
What is truly important for the project to get done? Do the backgrounds all need to be replaced, or are they fine as-is because most players won’t be looking at the game with a magnifying glass for months like you are? Do you really need to adjust the CG for this scene or is it fine like it is?
If you don’t prioritize some parts over others, the game won’t come out. You’ll be stuck in a cycle of working on different partsāor worse, not finishing any partsāforever.
One thing I prioritized while making Canvas Menagerie was having a wide variety of outfits for the cast, as they’re all professional actors. Very few characters have multiple arm poses, but the main cast has 5+ outfits each, with some having 10+ outfits. Some of these outfits are simple recoloring with slight modifications like jewelry, but I knew having a variety of outfits would make things more interesting and be easier on me to draw than a few arm poses, as the characters would need multiple outfits regardless.
Your characters may not need multiple outfits depending on the situations they’re in and scope of the project. It all depends on what you want to prioritize.
how do you do it?
Now that we’ve reached the ending, it’s the 22nd as I write thisāI released Canvas Menagerie a few days ago. It took me 3 years to make it on and off by myself as a labor of love (until I got laid off earlier this year). I’ve outlined most of the ways of how I was able to finish it, but here’s a few extra points to cap things off:
- I knew my project.
- From the beginning, I envisioned it as a 3 Act set-up, where each Act would have it’s own mini story and partial resolution but tying into the overall narrative. I wanted each Act to be around 50k words with a heavy focus on romance, though the 2nd & 3rd Acts would focus on a growing relationship while dating rather than the meet-cute in Act 1.
- I knew the cast would be a medium size, but most of the attention would be on the main couple, Niko & Ren. Everyone else was a supporting character for both the show and their relationship. However, I limited the cast and only added characters as I went on if they would be able to provide a push & pull for them, such as adding parents into the mix.
- As I was doing everything, I prioritized drawing things that would best illustrate what I wanted out of each scene while also making the programming easier. A bar CG helps illustrate a break from the norm better than just having character sprites and also is a lot quicker to script than character expressions changing and such.
- I knew myself.
- Canvas Menagerie was not the 1st visual novel I’ve made solo nor the 10th. I know my approximate work speed when it comes to art, writing, etc. and can estimate deadlines around that. However, even then I’m still prone to overestimating my speed. Be patient with yourself but also be honest with yourself.
- When it wasn’t my fulltime job, I tried to do a little bit of work every week on it. Sometimes that was drawing character outfits, sometimes that was writing a scene, sometimes that was fixing the GUI. There’s a lot that needs to be worked on to finish a visual novel, but the important thing is that you make yourself work on it. Sometimes you have to push yourself to open the files. Find something that you feel like working on that day and stick to it.
At the end of the day, you’re the only one who can see the project to the finish line. How will you do it?
I felt like this would be a good article to cap the year off withāan article summing up what I’ve been doing the past few months while also hopefully being of aid to others. Finishing games is hard! It never ends up being what you thought it would look like, but that’s okay. The fact that it’s done is what counts.
This was the “capstone” of finishing my 3 year long project, Canvas Menagerie. It still feels weird to call it “done”āI jumped around to various other projects during its development, so in a way it still feels like I’m doing that. But the game is done. I was able to release an artbook with it at launch and have no plans on additional stories or contentāmaybe a free side story in the future, but nothing right now. I even made physical copies for it by hand!
2025 will be my first year being a fulltime visual novel developer and freelance marketer. It’s a bit scary thinking about it. I’m still figuring out my plans for next year and will share them in my yearly wrap up post next week.
Happy holidays and merry Christmas!
ā Arimia