⚠ FULL SPOILERS OF ASTBTS ⚠

Aaron:

A story told by the stars was released March 17, five months ago today. It is the first official project of A&LGames as a team,  and after almost half a year we thought that it would be a good idea to remember it and give our opinions, not only of the end product but also of the development as a whole.

Lau:

We both are very happy with the results to begin with, but we think it's interesting to share this information about the game for future us or developers who might be reading this.

That being said... Let's start!

0. Original design of the game

Aaron:

At the beggining, Lau and I tried to work on an idea that we both liked. For those that follow us from the very start, that was UniDOS / TWOgether / EmPARellats, which in short was going to be a 2D platformer with different powers. We tried to make the project as small as possible, since we were both busy: I was already working full-time, while Lau was finishing university (including his Bachelor's Final Project) and already doing her internship.

But due to various complications we realized the  scope of the project was way bigger than we could manage. We had started to discuss having a single director for each project and changing between us, so we went back to the drawing board: we looked at different ideas each of us had, and since one of mine was the one we both liked most, I ended up as the director.

Now that I was the director, we looked at our situation again and applied a very specific rule: no matter what, the game would come out 2 months after the start of development. If we had to cut content to reach that goal we would do so, because we wanted to avoid having an eternal development for our first official project at all costs.

Lau:

You know when your job and your hobbies are the same? Yep, that's what happened to me. As Aaron said, I had a lot of things to finish, but knowing that we could make a game 100% ours gave me the energy I needed. It was a hard time for sure, but it was also so nice to count on dear friends who are down to Earth to remember you what it's truly important. Aaron made very good decisions altogether.

Aaron:

Apart from the changing director, we decided to set up some basic rules for all our projects at A&LGames:

1. Both of us had to like the project.Nos tenía que gustar a los dos. 
2. In each project we would try at least one thing we haven't done before (for example, a new mechanic).
3. We both had to survive development (that goes for you as well, Lau 👀).

So we quickly got started, and I created the GDD with a few basic sections and defined ASTBTS as it is known today: a classic visual novel of around an hour, made in Unity and where we wanted to implement two languages (English and Spanish) and accessibility options.

1. Art

Lau:

Something I try to do when I start a project is create a "mood board" with the illustrations (and their credits) of artist which I like or I think their style is more or less what I want to achieve with the game. 

I did the same for ASTBTS, but as I started I made a mistake: I didn't check it that often.

"But Lau, you've just said that-"

Yes, I know, I know... That's what happens when you have to do a lot of things at the same time and time is ticking.

And yes, we planned, but I made a second big mistake after that: I didn't pay attention to Aaron when he asked me: how ya doin?

Well, if I'm honest, I did pay attention actually, but I thought I could do it on my own. That it was going to be EASY (and we all devs know that when you say that sentence, everything updates to harcore mode), so I just answered him: naaahh, I'm fiiine, it's gonna be on time...

You're a liar, past Lau.

Anyway, I went forward without looking to the foreseen consecuencies until it was too late. Yep, I worked on crunch mode. And I'm not proud to say it, to be honest...

I've learned of my mistakes, and I hope that you, people who are reading this, take note and DON'T DO THE SAME. It's not worth it (See Aaron? I've learned my leason, hope you're proud of me 🥺♥).

About the art on ASTBTS: I enjoyed sooooo much creating our boys. I really like the first scenes and the character sheets that we shared on social media (I know I shouldn't have favourites, but Ansel has my heart...  🤭).

I started creating them both and when I had that done, I started working on the different scenes.

I liked that Aaron's ideas and mine about the characters were very similar, sometimes even before talking to each other about what something we'd like to include for one of them.

I also learnt one thing: I hate backgrounds. But nothing that practice won't solve, I suposse.

Between the characters and scenes I worked on the different constellations, and to finish it off I worked on the UI.

In case someone's wondering: ASTBTS is completely drawn on Photoshop from beggining to end (although right now I'm learning to use Krita), and for to help me with the character poses on the scenes I used an online tool called JustSketchMe. Drawing bodies in so many different positions was a challenge for me since I consider myself lacking when it comes to making the characters feel dynamic, so I used this as a help to become more accustomed to it.

This was the process of making the art during development. I could spend the entire day talking about details and tricks that aren't visible to make my more strict and perfectionist side shine when talking about how I did things... But I will not.

Is the art of ASTBTS perfect? Nope. And if an artist is reading this, they can probably see the enormous list of issues that the different scenes have, most of them due to a lack of time on my end.

Am I, however, proud of the result? Tremendously proud. And I've learnt a lot of things that will come handy on the future.

Aaron:

Lau is the artist between us, so we decided that she would handle the entire art of the project (which is something that we want to change in the future). I won't add much more because everything has mostly been said already, but it's important to specify that I failed as a director not giving her stricter limits. It is true that I asked her how she was doing and she said she was fine, but I should have stood my ground and told her to stop burning out.

Luckily, just two weeks before the release, I snapped out of my stupor and sat with Lau to do something that, in retrospect, probably saved the project from being delayed: in a day, we planned all the scenes left to release and cut everything we could. Lau tried to negotiate a couple of things with all her might, but after I saw how exhausted she was trying to get to the finish line? Sorry not sorry, you're not destroying yourself anymore 😈.

Looking at it now, I can say with confidence that specific moment made me a better director; not everything is "I want to do this, I want to do that". Sometimes you have to make difficult choices.

Lau:

I want to add just one thing to what Aaron said: I tried to negotiate right until the very last day. Literally when the game was going to release that day and we still had two scenes left to do. And he stopped me.

"If I allow you to do this and delay the game even a single day, I would be giving you positive reinforcement for burning yourself out. We'll go as far as we can, but the game will be finished." That was his answer.

And he was right.

FINISHED IS BETTER THAN PERFECT.

With time we'll get better results and more complete art. For now, with ASTBTS we've finished our first visual novel, and we're very proud of it.

2. Programming

Aaron:

Being the only programmer of the game had two sides: on one side, I didn't have to worry about coordinating my code with other people and having to take into account what they were working on and how; on the other, if someone failed, I was the only one to blame.

So I focused on making code that was understandable, allowed for a lot of variability and, more importantly, that if something failed I would know where it was happening.

In short: quick and effective, like being shot 🔫. (L: Noooo 😭😢)

To start, I re-used as much as I could from previous projects to save time: from my Bachelor's Final Project I yoinked the base code for the dialogue and the tool Dialogue Maker (created by myself) that allows us to have different versions of the same dialogue, perfect for multiple languages.

After that, I made sure to let the code handle a lot of variations, always following a simple basic functionality. In our case, the code mostly waits for "events", and those can vary from forming a constellation to interact with an element on the scene, which allowed us to always have a clear idea of how everything was working, even if later we piled up things over that.

And to finish, I made sure that every scene was autosufficient with itself as much as possible. While elements like the save or the audio system could fail because they were initialized at the start of the game, adding fail-safes for those cases allowed us to basically be able to play any scene and make sure the text and elements were working properly.

But as you can imagine, even with those considerations we had trouble. I remember one where the text size wasn't being adjusted properly because the code that made that happen was happening too fast (which we fixed by waiting a couple frames before grabbing the size), but another one that drained my sanity was related to the lines that connect the constellations. Basically, the LineRenderer works on World coordinates, but the stars you connect are set on a Canvas, which is drawn directly on screen... 🙃.

Lau:

I don't have much to add since Aaron's the one who took all the workload, although be both tested things. I'm very proud of his work and of how fluid the game feels to play thanks to everything he did "behind the scenes". Programming work is not appreciated enough, but I can say that it took blood, sweat and tears to obtain the final result you see on screen.

Aaron:

🥺

3. Story

Aaron:

I made the concept for ASTBTS  a long time ago, and in that the story was quite different: the two protagonists where a prince and his bodyguard, it was set in medieval fantasy...

But after talking with Lau, we ended up doing a near future with the youngsters that you all know and love, Mark y Ansel 🥰. I must admit that although the general idea was easy to come by, I put a lot of effort into portraying their relationship since it's the focus of the story and we only see a few gimplses of it. Furthermore, Ansel does have a more "enjoyable" personality and can come by as a nicer guy, while on the other hand Mark comes off as quite the asshole, especially at the beggining.

Luckily, seeing people's reactions it seems that there's fans of both of them, and I think that a big part of why Mark isn't hated is due to the fact that we see everything from his POV. It wasn't something that we planned conciously, for a lack of a better term, but it did end up a nice detail.

Lau:

What Aaron means is that his favorite is Mark. It's okay fella, you can say it outloud. It's not like the characters will be alive to fight over who's the best between the two of them... 😅🥰

And for those wondering, why that ending?

My answer is simple: Why not?

Honestly, writing stories with a touch of drama tends to be more fun to tell, and although both of us joke who people should blame for the ending, it was something that both of us agreed to, so we carry the blame together 🦾.

On the other hand, the game has two languages... and translating it was a breath of fresh compared to doing the art, I'll let you guys know. I find Aaron's dialogues very funny and with a very direct style, but translating them to Spanish was harder than I anticipated since I had to keep that essence and still have them make sense... 

If you've played both versions you'll notice small differences on the text, mainly due to the fact that I tend to add flourish to my language while Aaron is more flexible writing in English and as stated above writes more direct narrative.

Either way, I think it was a good idea to have it in both languages, and I think both of us learnt a great deal out of it.

Aaron:

Lau helped a ton translating a big chunk of the dialogue to Spanish, but nearing the end of development she had to focus on finishing the art, so I took the task of translating the last few chapters...

...which ended up with some hilarious results, since I'm not used to writing in Spanish. For example, we had a very funny moment with the end scenes, particularly the "Nu-cu-ler" bombs. Thankfully, Lau offered to revise the dialogue and the next day we patched these errors with a 1.1 version of the game.

4. Sonido

Lau:

Neither of us have a single composer bone in our bodies, so we ended up using the help of the usual webpages every developer knows by heart when we have no money to pay for even a simple sound (although if someone out there does make music and wants to lend us a hand, feel free to contact us).

Aaron:

As Lau said we don't have any musical talent. We are, however, quite capable editing audio files, which helped us in making the game have less of that "stock-file" effect some games tend to have when they just plop the assets and call it a day; for example, we made the music on the second scene sound muffled so it sells more the feeling of Mark and Ansel being outside the building, which sells the scene a bit more.

And if I don't remember wrong, I would say that most of the game's file size comes down to sound assets, since we added quite a lot of them.

5. Extra 

Aaron:

An important reminder: polish your games.

Tons of the details that make ASTBTS feel so polished aren't exactly complex or difficult to do, but they do give the game that extra feel that make the experience much more cohesive and complete: not using default Unity assets, making a simple transition between scenes...

As a detail, the level selection that gets unlocked after completing the game was done in just a couple of hours, when I was trying to re-use some assets Lau had done but we weren't able to fit anywhere else. I promised her that we would try to use everything we could, after all 🥰.

Lau:

As Aaron says, at the end the small details make all the difference. For me, considering that we were making a visual novel I'm very happy we managed to implement certain accessibility options, like the text speed or the multiple fonts, as well as the chapter selection at the end. They're very small details but they improve the experience a lot, as well as help people who might have trouble enjoying the story otherwise. In the future I would like us to develop tools to simplify the implementation of accessibility in our games;  it's 2023 my dudes, it's time to make the games reach more people.

6. Resultados

Lau:

The results we've obtained with ASTBTS are, in our humble opinion, pretty good:

Not only for all the people that came to play it here on itch.io, but also because we were able to display it in a bunch of smaller events, like the A3 (an event organized by us and some other friends):

Or "Bengala", another similar event promoted by "La Madriguera LGTB+", where the ASTBTS trailer  shined in the sea of stars that is the indie games sphere.

Most of the objectives we put for ourselves in the GDD were reached, we released the game we wanted, and we managed to tell Mark and Ansel's story. That's a victory in my book.

Aaron:

We got more players and visits than we expected, and both friends and people outside our circles were very happy with the game.

But my first experience as director has been far from ideal. It's undestandable since it's my first time, after all, but it's also a fact that my management at the start caused us to lose both assets and hours.

But the important lesson I got is that not only is it important to be comprehensive, since as a director I need to be assertive as well. Is something I'll keep in mind the next time I'm in the role 🦾.

Lau:

Don't listen to Aaron, he did a good job (?). But seriously now, I think we both learnt lots of lessons making this game, and I'm happy that we think of it as lessons. It wouldn't be the first time a team disagrees over work ethics or stuff like that and stops working together, since it's no small feat working together with someone, hanging with them and meanwhile having the pressure of finishing the project in a state you'll be proud of (those of you who work in a team will get me).

Remember to always appreciate the work the rest of people do, and be sure to let them know ♥. A team is like a scale, and you need to keep a good balance (in Aaron's words, our team is more like two dogs grabbing the leash of one another and trying to push in opposite directions lolololol).

Well, with everything said, we hope you enjoyed this little "behind the scenes" of ASTBTS, and in case you read this before playing the game... why. Now you've spoiled everything.

Thank you for playing our game and learning Mark and Ansel's story.

As to what do we have in store?

More games, that's for sure... We're already planning and thinking a bunch of ideas, but you'll have to wait until September/October to get more information...

Remember to follow us on social media!

Lau y Aaron say goodbye! Over and out 👋