Hi!

I originally wasn’t going to write a postmortem for Tidal Wave, but after seeing some developers detail their process, I thought this might be something that could benefit me especially with Tidal Wave being my first game. Two months late but better late than never, right?

There WILL be spoilers for all routes in the game, so I highly recommend you finish the game first.

It all starts with an idea…: Tidal wave was an idea I had for a good while. Back then, it was a story about Avery coming to visit Tide in their hometown for the summer. Some parts stayed the same (e.g. them being childhood friends, Avery getting caught in a house fire, Tide being transgender). Except that Avery was revealed to be a ghost by the end. Tide’s mother was going to play a bigger role in the story as well. Avary and Althea never existed in this story, though. This story didn’t quite stick for me, I think it was because it felt “too safe” in my eyes. I personally prefer writing stories about things that aren’t discussed about a lot, so that’s my guess as to why I just couldn’t get into it.

So how did I end up incorporating the idea of AI into Tidal Wave? I watched someone play Love Angel Syndrome and thought the idea of codependence on AI was something interesting to explore. I played around with the idea of Avery being an AI chatbot and eventually created another character to fill out that role. Thus, Avary was born.

Before I settled on making Tidal Wave a visual novel, I considered many other mediums. Comics, regular writing. I ended up getting into visual novels in my late teens and I started considering visual novels as a plausible format. It seemed like a happy medium of balancing visuals and writing that I decided to go with it.

Writing: Arguably, the hardest part for me. Straight up. I’m struggling with remembering how I did it because I kind of blanked out for most of it working on autopilot. Even writing 200 words feels like a feat to me. I feel like this might have been the game’s weakest point. (Sorry.) I did follow the original idea of writing each day in a month to section things out or at least make it seem more approachable.

I didn’t quite know how to approach it so in Avary’s routes, I wrote from my own experiences with living and surviving. Honestly, I felt like in this route, Tide seemed kind of melodramatic in a way. I felt like I was unearthing the angst I had in my teenage years. Despite the fact that Tide doesn’t have his own sprite in this route, he became the focus of it.

As for Avery’s route…I really can’t remember much of it. I was pretty much balling with each word I wrote. Even after two months, I consider the writing for Avery’s route weaker than Avary’s. Which is a shame because Avery’s my favorite character in the game.

Tidal Wave was originally a kinetic novel, then it had two endings and then it somehow ended up with four. That’s the beauty of life, isn’t it? Things are always changing. I’m not too hung up about not writing well because Tidal Wave was a test run for what I could do. I was aiming for 10k words minimally but I ended up going over with 18k instead.

Art: Art in general isn’t too difficult for me, just tedious, since I’ve been drawing regularly for at least a decade now. Which is why I usually strive to finish an art piece as soon as possible. I remember once talking to a friend about how I got 2 artworks done in a day and couldn’t help trying to get a 3rd piece in during the same day too.

There were 4 characters present in Tidal Wave that have designs, Tide, Avary, Avery and Althea. Tide and Avery had various designs before I really did anything with them. Between the two, Tide went through more changes. Avery was all covered up even then. Avary’s appearance was based off of butterflies, the most obvious part being his little coat’s design. One part that didn’t get shown is that Avary actually has no shoes and he’s constantly standing on the tips of his toes, looking much like an insect’s legs. Althea’s design was probably the only one that used her first design as her final design too. I read And Another Lovely Day and when I saw Zarina’s design, I immediately knew I wanted Althea to look something like her. Avery’s design is definitely my favorite of the bunch, he looks like he’s on his way to having a lifechanging trip.

For sprites, you’d probably notice that the characters only have 1-2 poses maximum. I was still new to game development so I didn’t want to confuse myself with having too many variations while coding, especially since I had limited time participating in a game jam. Though, I hope I can do more sprite variation in the future! I had the chance to try my hand at it as a sprite artist for Laureli.

For the CGs, I definitely had the most fun at this part. I really like creating art pieces in general, so I’m really happy that I got to do this for my own game. Though I did notice that the art style did look a little inconsistent in some parts, this might’ve been because I was still new to this. A lot of people seem to find them pretty, so I’m glad at least!

Coding: I…definitely underestimated this part, considering I had to upload a hot fix a week after the game’s release. I thought it would’ve been fine since there wasn’t much gameplay and choices but fate seems to have their own set of plans too. I’m still new to Ren’py so there’s a lot for me to learn. I do have a background in programming but I didn’t really do much python in my life. Things like assets and add-ons have really saved me. Watching the game come to life is so, so rewarding, though.

I mainly handled the general scripting of the game, which meant majority of my coding experience is typing things like show Avary furrowed smispk side at center. I think I ended up seeing lines like that in my dreams during development.

Game performance: Tidal Wave definitely didn’t do well compared the other ones that were submitted for Yaoi jam 2025. It only reached about 30 downloads as of the time writing this. I think that was partly my fault, I didn’t do much marketing, even after post-release. Even when I posted about the game, I think I didn’t quite promote Tidal Wave right because I didn’t get that much traction. I did get some…interesting visits from websites such as chatgpt, some random website about environmentally friendliness and some person’s IP address (I hope I didn’t doxx them).

I did have the opportunity to watch someone play my game, as they were going through entries for Yaoi jam 2025. A big thank you to RJMercy for giving Tidal Wave a chance!

Afterword: Tidal Wave did have a rather small scope for a project, but it still had its own kind of obstacles. Things you don’t anticipate to go wrong, might go wrong. There’s definitely room for improvement for me, in coding, writing, marketing and even in art. I’m very surprised that there were people who were touched by Tidal Wave. It’ll be nice if they could remember an aspect of it, whether its the writing, art or music, even later in life.

I’m not really one for remakes and sequels/prequels but I might consider making a Tidal Wave remake in 10 or so years. Don’t hold your breath, though.

I’m hoping to stick around as a visual novel developer so I’ll see you again someday. If I have another project, I’ll definitely announce it in a devlog.

Cheers and have a great day!

A big thank you to:

• Otoke Neko, for helping translate my GUI design to python code and leaving a comment
• Vico’s Piano, for enhancing the mood of the scenes with her beautiful piano pieces specifically created for the game
• RJMercy, for livestreaming my game and bringing more attention to the Yaoi jam entries
• And you, for playing and giving Tidal Wave a chance.