Hello, anyone who's decided to read this! I'm well aware that it's been five months since I submitted this entry to the Dream Diary Jam, but I figure it's better late than never to discuss what I've created, what I've learned, and what comes next. The last time I wrote a postmortem was for The Academy's first iteration, and it felt good to have a list of improvements I needed to work on for the future. I also just like talking about my old projects, and here we are I guess. So let's talk about what I set out to do.

After I failed to get even one week into last year's jam due to juggling work and an obnoxious injury in my hands, I debated on joining this one at all. After all, work aggravated my hands more, so it would be dumb to throw away months of progress on a game jam I likely wouldn't see through. And then COVID happened, I was laid off, and my plans for May/June were suddenly open. With the DDJ still two weeks out and the world refusing to un-screw itself anytime soon, I figured, "couldn't hurt," and jumped in. To save my hands some stress (and ease myself into learning RPGM2k3), I used a Yume Nikki Fan Game template from Clockwork Prince and limited my hours I could work on the game. The main goals that I had were...

1. Release a game before the deadline was up without sacrificing personal health to achieve it.
2. Practice pixel art and spriting.
3. Learn 2k3 at least enough to make the necessary changes to the template.
4. Redeem myself for my embarrassing DDJ 2 entry, in which I used a brush tool to outline pixel art, added a menu you couldn't get out of normally, and deployed it with massive lag and loading times.
5. Related to the above entry, I wanted to release a game that wasn't 500 mb, but I also didn't want to people to have to download another 200 mb of RTP to play it, meaning I had to find a way to get the game to run without RTP.

In terms of what went right, I'm most proud of the pixel art: it's far from perfect, and I still have a lot of learn about shading and depicting different materials that aren't matte, but it's a marked improvement from both of my other games currently on Itch.io. In the future, I'd like to find my own style instead of copying Kikiyama's, but I'll take this for now. Additionally, it feels like a YNFG now: the original entry was just kind of a weird adventure game, with less focus on exploring odd environments and more focus on collecting things, making it through small worlds, and getting the endings. The current entry is less original, but it's more grounded in familiarity: there's a teleport maze, looping worlds, NPCs and chasers, etc. I also managed to figure out how 2k3 works to a useable extent. The template helped, but I was able to use my existing knowledge of RPGM to combine effects, make events, and code two endings. And finally, I used Nulsdodage's tutorial on releasing games without the RTP, and have yet to run into it not working. Thank you, Wavy!

On to what I still don't have right, my grasp of game design principals is pretty iffy: I used the same popup for effects and items, leaving to think that one was the other (see: FlareBlitzed's ten minute playthrough). I also made an effect that stops NPCs, but it was found in an area without them to demonstrate. I'm still not entirely sure I was thinking with that, because I deliberately put two other effects in areas where they would interact with the world and teach you how to use them. Additionally, I wasn't super clear with font I used in the instructions menu, which made the "9" key look like a "g" key. I had assumed anyone playing would have prior knowledge of YNFGs and just be able to guess, but this was straight up naive. There's also a lot of backtracking: you need to have this effect to go here, which you need this item to get to, which is all the way back here, and oh, if you die in the final area, you get catapulted back to the Nexus to do it all over again. The next YNFG I make won't be ending-focused, at least not yet, which might mitigate this issue. That, or I'll make it so it isn't a giant pain to get back to where you need, like having the door to the endings located in the Nexus or the first two worlds. Finally, while it was very helpful, it felt like I was cheating by using a template, especially as everyone else on the Discord Server made their own systems. The template worked against me in a few places, too, because I had to disable events and effects I didn't want: extra work that wouldn't have happened if I had just made it myself.

I'm sure I'm missing some things, but I've written all I can think of at the moment and have already been distracted about five-ish times in the process. I had a lot of fun this jam, and if next year's permitting, I'd love to do it again! I likely won't update this version unless there's a big game-breaking glitch, so Version 0.00 will stay locked in for now. Thank you all for reading my weird ramblings, thank you for (potentially) playing my second foray into YNFGs, and thank you for all of the downloads! Please go check out the rest of the DDJ entries and the original Yume Nikki if you haven't yet. 

Stay safe out there!