Phew...

The month’s out, and I managed to submit something in spite of a handful of setbacks!

To be honest, I wasn’t even supposed to enter this year; I always wanted to, but this wasn’t meant to be it. While I had ideas and settings to put to paper and have stared longingly at the NaNoRenO page for the past two years or so… some personal troubles hit me hard late last year and kneecapped my will to write. It wasn’t entirely some great push of will and determination to keep going that got me here, but more just not wanting to let this opportunity pass me by for another year. Unfortunately, that realization came a mere five days before the jam started.

I hadn’t really put my ideas on the table, and I had very little time to plan. What’s more is that I would be going at it alone; the person who wanted to help me with programming for it had become exceptionally busy as of late after picking up a new job, and the person who wanted to do art for me, we had a falling out. I spent most of those days picking out and downloading all the free assets I could and trying to figure out what might and might not work. I didn’t study up on working with Ren’Py and Python like I should’ve if I were more properly looking forward to this. Threadbare as this whole thing was, I had to wing it.

From the starting pistol, I wasn’t doing so hot. While I had the thought in my head of what I wanted this prototype to cover, I didn’t have a handle on my scope. The first week went well enough– I wrote what what felt good at first, and tried to branch outwards as organically as I could from there. I figured I would write out the whole of the script and then plug stuff in later. I was hitting some kind of flow and I didn’t want to interrupt it.

Life still came at me a little too fast, however! Every week after it seemed like there was something new. Between stomach flu, insomnia, and unmitigated allergies causing intense brainfog, I lost roughly half of the days of the month to various forms of not feeling well. The deadline neared and I had to adjust in the face of it, to my own detriment. Scenes got squished and rushed, the pacing got all messy, the art I chose wasn’t cohesive, and I wasn’t able to do more of what I wanted to do with the half the month I wish I had. When I tried to push through the brainfog instead, I could still barely think. On top of all that, what happened the prior year made me doubt myself more often than not. Everything I wanted to present is still here but not in the best ways they could be. Well, I joked about it being “2% skim” on the main page for a reason!

I’m a little disappointed how it turned out but I’m happy regardless that I was able to submit something playable by the deadline, especially with only an effective two weeks to work with! There are parts of me that feel like I’ve made a poor first impression and that I shouldn’t have bothered, but I don’t want that to get me down.

I have a clear plan of attack for how I want to tackle the rest of the year, that being a blend of reading other VNs to see what other people are doing, practicing with personal projects, and learning more about Ren’Py and Python so I’m not stuck with just the absolute basics. Then I can fix Bouquet to be more like what I would’ve liked, or better yet, start working on the fully-fledged version!

With all that said, I want to thank everyone that gave me a chance, and I hope I’ll have more to show someday in the future!