My submission to this year's NaNoRenO is released! Leave your thoughts and report any bugs you encounter in the comments here or on the main project page!

The following will be my final thoughts about this year's project.

Worries

Some of my worries now that Protea is released:

• Is the visual novel not erotic enough?!
• Is the visual novel too erotic?!
• How many people did I alienate by including ero?
• Will the people I attracted to this visual novel by making it ero even care about the science fiction elements?

I put a lot of thought into the science fiction portion of the visual novel, but it's possible that I'm targeting two different demographics that only care about one of either sci-fi or ero. In my next project, I'll probably drop one and focus entirely on the other.

Successes

The main story is 100% complete, and in line with my original project plan. No main story content was cut due to shortage of time! In the past, I had to cut sprites / CGs due to time, which really bothered me.

Borrowing the UI from my past projects of course saved time, but I added / coded many new features this time. I am particularly proud of my CG Gallery, which I coded from scratch, without using Ren'Py's built in gallery system.

As I stated on Twitter, having an original OST is very important to me as a dev, so I'm glad I managed to compose three original tracks for this project, despite them, I'm sure, probably sounding very amateur. 😅

Fails

While I'm happy with the state of the project, there are some things I wish could have been done / added.

• Original illustrations for the title screen, itch.io banner, and itch.io cover image. Yes, I do know how boring Protea's title screen looks. 😌 I didn't want to cut main story dev time so I sacrificed the title screen and itch.io graphics. In case you are wondering, the original itch.io page banner (if you managed to sneak a peek at it during the month before I changed it) was a tentative image with a now outdated design of Nia. It is now a filtered image of ingame sprites.
• Some bugfixes. They're minor bugs but it's still annoying that I didn't have time to fix them. One is that the skip screen overlay will appear if you hold Ctrl / Tab while the Codex, Log, Save, etc. screens are up.
• Polish. While all planned content is present I'm not 100% satisfied with the final quality; indeed, I had to rush the CGs: if I had more time I'd add more detail to the illustrations.
• This is not something I want fixed or added, but one big fail is redoing the sprites. I didn't like the original sprites so I redrew them, losing about 1.5 days of work.

Future Goals

Not sure what my next project will be, but possible timeframes for it are Halloween 2020 and NaNoRenO 2021. My next goal as a visual novel dev is to learn animations for animated title screens and OP movies. We'll see how that turns out. 😁

Conclusion

Protea could be best thing I've ever written or the worst. Thank you to everyone who tries it or followed my development journey for this project on Twitter! Until my next project, stay cool!