A Night at the Office #1

Given that I started this project back in the summer of 2020, it's taken me absolutely ages to get around to preparing my itch.io account to actually devlog, promote and (finally, hopefully, soon) release a demo of A Night at the Office. It was inspired by Abigail Parker Winthrop, the political wheeler-dealer character my girlfriend created for a game of Vampire: The Masquerade (Chicago By Night) set up by one of her friends, and played fortnightly via Google Meets during the UK Covid lockdowns.

The first draft was a simple story about - you guessed it - a night at the office, in which Abigail has work to do before a meeting with the vampire elites of Chicago, but she's interrupted by another character who could throw a spanner in the works. What follows could be described as 'negotiation', or just plain lewdness. Also, since she's a vampire, there's some blood-drinking.

The idea was to use the project to learn Ren'Py but, along the way, it developed far beyond the initial concept. The basic text component went from about a 25 minute read time to closer to 45 minutes as I added new dialogue, background worldbuilding, branching paths, etc. and I ended up with ten different endings and a handful of additional characters beyond the two originally planned.

Along the way (late summer 2020), I suffered a hard disk crash and, since I hadn't been particularly scrupulous about backing up my work, I lost several other projects and had to restart work on ANatO using a compiled version of the game... which caused more and more problems as development continued.

Much as I wanted ANatO to be a solo project, I quickly realised that the work involved in making Abigail as expressive as I wanted her to be would be far too onerous for me. I've barely done any sketching for more than a decade, largely due to depression, and my every attempt to draw her ended up looking crap in myriad different ways.

I contacted an artist who was offering their services via the LemmaSoft forum back in 2022, and had a working Abigail sprite just a few weeks later. For one reason or another, development started to stall later that year, and it wasn't till the start of 2024 that I was in a position to commission another couple of sprites. By this point, I'd decided to break the project down into a short demo (returning to the approx 25 minute read time featuring a random choice between two tertiary characters and just one ending) and the full story, which would focus on Abigail's interaction with the dangerous interloper. The idea being, completing the demo would mean I could release something and gauge interest while I worked to complete the full story, as well as develop ideas I'd had for follow-up stories featuring Abigail and some of her acquaintances.

Unfortunately, the artist wasn't so reliable the second time around. For whatever reason, it took two months to get even the initial rough pose sketches out of them, the 'final drafts' before polishing and adding the expressions were completed just days before the PayPal dispute window was set to expire... and then I never heard from them again. What's truly bizarre was that I was being ghosted on a simple job of a pair of $40 character sprites, after the same artist provided excellent service on a far more complicated job of just one character with dozens of expression components, weighing in closer to $130. The artist seems to have since changed their online identity - their previous profile/portfolio/galleries still exist, but a new one has been set up to follow their own VN development.

Depressing and frustrating though that was, I wasted no time in approaching other artists - via DeviantArt, Reddit and Fiverr - to get a replacement sorted out. This also gave me the opportunity to change up the look and the vibe of the game, in terms of the sprites, the background images and the UI... Much as I liked the original Abigail sprite, it wasn't quite the ideal representation of the character. A lot of artists these days seem to want to communicate via Discord and, Luddite that I am, I don't really use Discord. Thankfully, most were able to offer at least one other means of communication, and I ended up commissioning a new style of sprite from one (ostensibly for Embracing Christmas, the first follow-up to ANatO) and a character portrait from another.

The latter - organised via Fiverr - turned out so well, I quickly went back to that artist and asked for a layered Photoshop file with all the necessary clothing and expression components, so that I could start switching out the Abigail sprite ASAP. Not only is this new artist faster than the previous, but the quality of her work surpassed all my expectations. Fiverr's setup additionally seems to incentivise reliable service and frequent communication in ways that commissioning via PayPal cannot, so the chances of any given artist choosing to simply ignore a paying client are that much slimmer.

At this point, the demo is about 95% complete, text-wise, and maybe 50% complete in terms of visuals. I still need to commission the two tertiary character sprites, and then storyboard the ending so I can discuss with the artist how best to proceed... It's either going to be static images, or partially-animated... but I can't make any real decisions on that until I've completed the text element, which I've been rewriting and adding to intermittently over the last few months. My aim, now, is to publish the demo before the end of the year.

Once that's out of the way, I still have quite a lot of work ahead of me on the full story... I'd been reworking the middle to make it a bit more interactive - you can go as deep down the rabbit hole as you like, and will get a different ending based on choices made during the main conversation and during the finale. Most of the endings thusfar have been varying degrees of good for Abigail, but the most recent one I added was a very bad end. Her antagonist will likely be at least as complicated, sprite-wise, as Abigail herself, while the handful of other tertiary characters will be far simpler...

But then there will be ten endings worth of storyboarding, and then art to commission... So this 'quick learning project' is turning into something rather more significant.