Hellevator (NaNoRenO2020+ Version) Postmortem

Greetings from Team Abyss! Ready for a ride on the Hellevator (NaNoRenO2020+ Version) Postmortem?

For this year's NaNoRenO2020+, we developed Hellevator, a parody of horror/mystery Visual Novels that never takes itself seriously. It tells the story of five individuals who find themselves trapped inside an elevator and have to face the unsettling fact that the Devil may be out there to kill them all.

Our inspiration came from a discussion* about the movie called “The Devil” (2010), written by M. Night Shyamalan and Brian Nelson. We started by using the premise of the people stuck in an elevator and getting offed one by one...and ended up discussing parts of the story that were, to put it frankly, quite unintentionally hilarious.

(*consists of shad telling Yoru to watch the movie and the latter trolling the movie with screenshots)

And that eventually brought us to Hellevator! Now, shall we get this Postmortem started?

Learning from the experience of our NaNoRenO2019 entry, we designed a simple game that wouldn't require too many resources in case problems that occurred last year came back. And what premise would be simple? Why, a story that lasts in an elevator for 90% of the time, of course.

But when it came time to recruit people to work with for NaNoRenO2020+, so many talented people joined the team! We were blown away by the quality of work that our team members delivered throughout the jam, to the point where we were wondering: how in the world did we get so lucky?

First of all, we have the art team. Bringing Hellevator's characters to life is Dave Zhang and whatever magical (digital) paintbrushes he has in his arsenal. All of the characters are so distinct and unique that we can't help but get attached to them at first sight! Have you looked at the sprites?! Can they be any more awesome?!? This man doesn't need any more compliments other than our eternal gratitude and firstborn children*.

(*it's alright, we can just pull a Rumpelstiltskin when the time comes)

Next, we have Maria_Prism, who is the reason why the elevator (and the building where it's running in) exists in the first place. She drew the backgrounds, helped with the expressions...and you can hear her playing the piano in some of our music! Thank you so much for going over the line of duty!

Lastly, we have kohkii, who said "I love drawing gore!" at the beginning of the project. And the CGs couldn't have a better artist for them! Unfortunately, we can't reveal here because they're obviously spoilers, so go play the game to see what they look like!

There are three writers for Hellevator—and yes, that's us folks from Abyss Team! How could we ever produce such a lengthy work without the help of our editor, Benjamin Kleman? Thank you for putting up with our writing (and the crazy drafts we keep churning out) and not succumbing to despair!

And what would our game be without the coders*? HarukaNami, who worked on the GUI design and implementation. Thanks for putting up with us on our lack of GUI vision. And WudgeyDev—we miss you! And apologies for anything we did to you... :(

(*a pile of unfulfilled hopes and dreams, probably)

We can't leave without mentioning the audio team, though! On the music side, we have Blake Hussey and Larry Jones who composed Hellevator's tracks—yes, including that one annoying (and annoyingly appropriate) Muzak-style piece. Thanks to Mister Hussey for the slick intro track, and to Mister Jones who made the death march sound funny!

And on the sound design and VA line editing side, we have Edwyn Tiong. Our love, adoration and devotion to him! Thank you very much for working your magic on all voiced lines in the game, and putting up with our last minute requests! How did he even manage to do all the sound effects and ambiences and edit 400++ dialogue tracks in one month*?

(*we suspect he can predict the future; his delivery time is insanely fast)

To top it all off, we even got a large cast of voice actors and actresses on board the elevator ride—something that we didn't consider at all in the planning phase is having partial voice acting implemented in the game. Will miracles never cease to happen?! Let's go over the cast list so you know who those awesome voices you hear in the game belong to...

Chintarmanya Vivian, who voiced the overworked and underpaid Narrator. Her performance was so good we couldn't pick which tracks to use... So we added them both, because the world needed to hear it!

MikeYoungVO, who voiced the other overworked and underpaid Narrator. Oh boy, did he nail the voice! Plus, the extra acting and ad libs brought this quirky Narrator to a whole new level. Thank you so much!

Jordan Bonn, who voiced the protagonist—a very nice guy. Our apologies for cluttering your life even more than it was... Hope that you now have time to breathe, at least!

Katie Otten, who voiced the other protagonist—a very nice gal. Always available, and always efficient! You were amazing to work with!

Red Aller, who voiced the fervent believer of Brahmi. Sorry for making you scream and voice such a demanding character. We hope that, at the very least, you had fun! :D

Christina Costello, who voiced the creepy kid with an even creepier doll. Nailed the creepy kid and creepy laughs to a T. Jack wouldn't be as awesome without Christina's performance!

Nathalie Ferare, who voiced the most annoying character in the game. Omigod, like, do we even need to explain how awesome her performance was? Like, totally not! Just go listen to Anita's lines!

Juwan Royal, who voiced the definitely-not-a-detective. Kudos for awesomely hammering that ham! Stay hammy, good sir.

Nick Anne, who voiced a certain secret character. He got the most awesome character in the story, so he should be the one thanking us! ...Just kidding. Thank you so much for the effort you put into this mysterious character voice. We're working hard so that the whole world will hear it in the game's full version!

Lastly, a big shoutout to @AimeeSmithVA on Twitter for spreading the word about us looking for VAs. We never expected to get such a great response!

    2. Finishing the script early.

Because of the involvement of many VAs, we aimed to finish most—if not all—of the game's narrative by the end of NaNoRenO2020+'s second week. And, lo and behold, we did finish most of it by that time with the constant support of our editor!

Afterwards, the three writers immediately moved onto other tasks, which was a great help especially nearing the end of the jam where things start getting a bit...hectic, to say the least. We were able to support the rest of the development team because we had finished the writing portions. Huzzah!

    3. Good teamwork and communication.

Yes, we learned our lesson from NaNoRenO2019—communicate better with the entire team! Because we were rather active in discussing various aspects of the game's development, assets got delivered promptly and everyone was motivated to complete the game as best as they can. We can't stress hard enough about how important this is!

How about what went not-so-right?

    1. Underestimating the story's length.

"Hey, this game is going to have around 12k words!" Fast forward one month later and we have 50k words in the full version's script...

...As you can imagine, this was one of the things that got wildly out of our hands. Sure, we had a flowchart detailing all the possible combinations of events that could occur throughout the game (courtesy of Yoru and his gargantuan game design flowchart)—until we actually got to writing the scenes, that is.

Who knows how we managed to churn out 15k words in the course of a weekend...*

(*desperation)

As a result, we didn't manage to implement the entire game. In fact, what we've submitted for the jam is less than half of the content we've written. All those wonderful endings; a Rock-Paper-Scissors minigame that would've spiced up the story a bit more; and a certain character's presence couldn't make it into the NaNoRenO2020+ version of the game...

Lesson learned: do better word count estimations or suffer from sleep deprivation and last-minute grievances.

    2. Lack of direction given to some of the VAs.

This project was the first time we worked with VAs—and such a large number of them, too!—so we didn't really know what to do... As a result, we didn't really give them directions on how their characters and lines should be voiced. Thankfully, the VAs used their expertise and figured it out magnificently! ...But we're very sorry for making you do line retakes and adding to your busy schedules...

Still, we've learned a lot from working with the VAs. We'll be prepared next time!

    3. Voice blurbs need expanding.

Ah, the voice blurbs. Gotta love these little snippets of voiced expressions—they save a lot of time and are easy to reuse throughout the game without needing to make the VAs do too much voice-over work that'd stress them out. Unfortunately, we didn't expect that they'd be so useful (i.e. we used them everywhere—think of Fire Emblem Awakening's Support Conversations), so we didn't list down a lot of them to be voiced...

...And oh-so-painstakingly, we combed through other voiced parts and did a bit of Frankenstein's work with them. We definitely managed to finagle a few extra blurbs, but it would've been so much better if we had anticipated these blurbs' usefulness and gave a larger list of them for the VAs to voice. Something to consider next time we have a partially-voiced game!

Conclusions

What a phenomenal jam this was! With the COVID-19 situation going on around the world, NaNoRenO2020+ became a 6-week endeavour—and boy, did we need all those 6 weeks!

There were a lot of positive moments that we felt while developing Hellevator—mostly because of the people that worked alongside us. Once again, our numbers are massive at 21 people in the team, and each and every one of them were a pleasure to work with!

We're extremely proud of Hellevator—and the fact that we actually completed the entire narrative this time round! Although we've only released a demo version of the game for NaNoRenO2020+, we're currently in the process of implementing other parts of the story so you'll get to play the full version soon. Be prepared for some new mechanics and exciting things to see in the little box of steel suspended in the air by many metal wires...

We're aiming for a late-May or early-June release, so look forward to it! In the meantime, stay safe and wash your hands properly, everyone! Thanks for joining us on this roller coaster ride of emotional distress—well, it's really just an elevator ride—er, it's actually just a postmortem... you get our point.

...Oh, before we forget...
Praise be our sweet Lord Brahmi! The joy that keeps us going!
...And that's all, folks!

-- Abyss Team