Mukja: Toby's Adventure [NaNo 2020][Comedy][Cartoony]

[kohdrams]

Mukja: Toby's Adventure (Working Title)

Mukja: Toby's Adventure is a short, silly visual novel about a Bigfoot named Toby who is obsessed with sneakers. He'll do anything to get the latest, most hype kicks. And his friends are there to watch the trainwreck.

Characters:




Toby: A bigfoot who loves sneakers, he's a goofy guy who keeps getting his butt kicked by life.





Takeshi: Sort of suave, kinda clever? While he's proud of his looks and fashion, Takeshi is just as lost in life as his friend Toby.

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Real Meta Talk:

My idea going into this is "What if Spongebob Squarepants made a short one-off VN?"

I have tried to participate and make a completed novel in previous NANORENOs, but failed every time. I go into these thinking "I"m gonna make a great short story." But a satisfying short story is actually really hard to write. My downfall is that I didn't set a work schedule or have the discipline and accountability to make progress on the novel. And my other weakness was taking a simple story and turning it into a mega-complex Lord of the Rings type of gigantic world that would be so much work. Inevitably, the result was that the novel would never be completed. I made this mistake many times and I have also seen others on the forums making this mistake as well.

So I've been constantly telling myself. SIMPLE. SHORT. THREE CHOICES, FEW BRANCHING, FINISH THE GAME.

To keep myself accountable, I'll be making daily update posts on my thread of what I did and what went wrong. My bigger goal is to make a bunch of these visual novels and then make an ULTIMATE tutorial visual novel for beginners.

Thank you so much for even reading this to get to the bottom of this post. You're amazing and I hope everyone else works hard on their VNs for NANORENO2020!

[kohdrams]

March 3/9/2020 Work and Progress:
My LSF thread intro page is ugly but I'll update it the more I work on this game. Currently, there is no writing or a strong idea of what I want the characters to do, but I will start writing tomorrow. I have drawn two sprites of the characters in default and set up a splash screen in the game.

I have been trying to kill the perfectionist within me b/c if I let her loose, she will drive this game into the ground and halt all progress. The sprites were made quickly, the splash screen is ugly af but it does its job and I can worry about a prettier logo and splash screen for another game.

My rough idea was to start by giving the player four choices. They can pick and choose which character they want to play from A, B, C, and D and each character has their own adventure and route. But thinking this over, that is too much work and might turn into a multi-headed monster that requires too much time and resources. So that idea will be saved for another month when NANORENO is over.

The starting idea is the player will play through the eyes of ONE character only, Toby, and go throughout the episode through his perspective.

Yeah, it's going to be boring and not anything innovative but the ultimate goal for myself is to have a completed game, set up itch.io for it, let people play it for free, and build my own confidence and discipline. Completing an actual finished visual novel will be a step up as both an artist, writer, and game developer.

[Zelan]

This is a really cute idea! (: Good luck on your project, I'm sure you can complete it since you're setting limits and being aware of your perfectionism. Looking forward to reading your updates!

[kohdrams]

This is a really cute idea! (: Good luck on your project, I'm sure you can complete it since you're setting limits and being aware of your perfectionism. Looking forward to reading your updates!

Thank you so much Zelan for your encouragement! It gives me strength that someone actually read my long, long word barf post and wrote a thoughtful comment back. Much love!

March 10, 2020 Progress:
I started on the writing, opened up a google doc to lay down the foundations of the story. I'm gonna go for something short and charming like I've seen in very cute indie games like Montaro, Neko Atsume, or something like NomNomNami's visual novels. Not quite as cutesy as those games but something similar to giving the player funny choices like... what type of garbage youtube video parody do they want Toby to watch? Something like that.

Writing started coming naturally once I just focused and played some music on youtube. I avoided trying to make a youtube playlist b/c that's honestly procrastination. I just played classics and music I wanted to listen to without stressing about "being in the right mood" and I was able to start building a strong idea of where I want my visual novel to go. The more I write and start pumping life into this game, the more I can express this in a clearer way.

So today was a good start. Tomorrow, I can flesh stuff out from Google Docs into Ren'Py.

[kohdrams]

March 11 2020 Progress:



The script is a little more thought out and things are going smoothly but I got stuck on the main problem. "How Do You Structure a Short Story?"

Found this nice youtube video that breaks down a short film and the short movie structure:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMqIQcTMlA0

I will later check out Dan Harmon's 8 Step Story Circle.

Tomorrow I will be watching an episode of a cartoon (maybe Spongebob, maybe Catdog) or something like a Pixar Short and break down each step. Then I'll see if I can translate and replicate that into my own visual novel.

[Zelan]

"Time for breakfast at 2 PM" is an ENTIRE mood lmao. The script looks funny so far. ^_^

[kohdrams]

"Time for breakfast at 2 PM" is an ENTIRE mood lmao. The script looks funny so far. ^_^

It came from my own experiences when I was a lazy college bum, haha!.

March 12 2020 Progress:

Doing some really quick research today, I want to get past this phase quickly because procrastination by thinking "I have to do more research" is a real problem for fiction writers/creators and has destroyed my attempts at making games and comics before. So today I jumped into looking at Dan Harmon's 8 Step Story Circle.

The main breakdown of the story circle is this video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XGUVkOmPTA

But there's a counterpoint to using the story circle in this video, which brings up good counter-arguments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoUSX4Y_WS0

These two above youtube videos explain how to structure a long-form story/visual novel. So outside of NANORENO, these two videos are great. But while we have only 22 days to make a VN, I found an absolute gem of an article. It breaks down Harmon's circle straight from his own writing staff's sessions for making Rick and Morty episodes:
https://medium.com/fictionhub/rick-and- ... b79d6fe43c

This was so much more helpful for me to understand short story writing. Now, there are a lot of different story structure narratives to follow and do but for this VN, I'm going to strictly focus on Harmon's structure and just get the ball rolling and be done with the script so I can move on.

I did a quick story structure breakdown of one of my favorite Regular Show episodes, "I'm Eggscellent". And I will be using that as my reference and Harmon's circle as the foundation.

Finished the breakdown, I've already got ideas for jokes and interactions to fill in the dialogue. Hopefully, I can just pump that script out ASAP tomorrow and have it done so I can move to art assets.