My name is mlkrn, and I love deadlines. I also hate deadlines. I am a very complicated individual.
So, tonight I wanted to share my experience in making Nowhereplatz: what went well, what went wrong, how to copy and paste from Stack Overflow. 

But before we can talk about Spooktober 2022, we have to talk about...

Spooktober 2021
For Spooktober 2021, we... attempted to make Nightbringers, a game of many adventures, dark comedy and such. Now in retrospect, it was an impossible project to make in a month: the final script (which I wrote completely by myself in a month) was 92k words, with a cast of more than 20 characters, more than 10 BGs, etc. Both me and my lead artist were so burnt out by the end of last September, Nightbringers still make me feel burnt out. Even though I am proud of the script I wrote, and I still want to finish the game one day.
Another thing Nightbringers taught me was to code myself. It's a bitter lesson but I feel more secure knowing my own limits. 

Thus, Nowhereplatz I had to code myself, as well as limit the scope drastically (no more almost-a-hundred-thousand-words-script). 

Oh Berlin, how I hate to love ye
I've been living in Berlin for three years. 
Before that, I was living in Moscow. And Moscow subway is well-known for being a work of architecture (and a shitton of money Stalin dumped into it to flex on people). Berlin subway, on the other hand is...
kind of depressing. 

To those who know Berlin, you also know that life is a lot about which railway station is the closest to you. For me it's Nordbahnhof, from where I take the subway to Postdamer Platz, and to BRLO the beer garden... Heh. Anyway, on Nordbahnhof there is an exhibition dedicated to Berlin ghost stations. Back when Berlin was divided, the trains would stop at the Wall, and won't cross to the East Berlin territory. 

Did you know that Wikipedia article on ghost stations speaks about Berlin ghost stations first, and only then about "all the other ghost stations" in the world? Yeah, that's how big the deal was. Most of them went back to being functioning after the re-unification of Germany.

Both Potsdam Pirsch and Genshagener Heide remained abandoned, though. 

Moscow subway is fancy, and kinda like a museum without windows. Berlin subway is dark and gloomy, giving me this liminal space vibe, that's why Nowhereplatz is about Berlin U-Bahn and the very specific feeling I got from it, and the history of abandoned stations behind it. Not in an educational sense - in more of a feely-moody kind of sense.

The Triple Goddess and the Dual God
In August, I had this concept in mind: the player is waiting for their train on Halloween night, and meet various urban fantasy monsters with very specific first world problems. I wanted the problems to be read as both a problem of modern times, and a problem of supernatural origin. 
The idea of a vampire woman who wants to have a child was the first one I got. I like the duality of the interpretation: a career woman who wants to have a child but not risk her career is the modern approach but the vampire who wants to have a vampire childe is the supernatural approach. Then I thought, how can I reasonably narratively limit the encounters? So, the Triple Goddess came to mind, and determined other characters, and the nature of the protagonist.  U3 in the title also is a play on the U-Bahn and the way Berlin subway declares its lines, and the Triple Goddess. (Alexanderplatz, the real station Nowhereplatz is named after, is on line U8 though). 

The Narrator was inspired by The Narrator/The Ancestor of Darkest Dungeon. And The Crone // The Maiden are deliberately age-reversed to put an emphasis on that visual age doesn't matter, it's the feeling and... the age of the soul. Eh, juxtaposition much. 
And lastly, the Horned God, the husband of the Triple Goddess, have two interpreations: sometimes, he also has three personas, the Warrior, the Father and the Sage; sometimes, he is both the Holly King (the king of Winter) and the Oak King (the king of Summer). The Narrator, jaded, cynical and knowing, is the Holly King, and the protagonist, confused, is the Oak King. 

Additionally, I was afraid of being too-much-of-a-Persona-5-Mementos-copycat, so I tried to double down on surrealism and supernatural to avoid that. This is why the script deliberately never calls The Mother a vampire, The Maiden a witch, and so. In my personal opinion, it works for the surreal atmosphere: show, don't tell but also assume the player understands what's going on while never explaining clearly what's going on. 

AI generated images
mossinasi, my artist, was originally planning to make 3D station model but then didn't manage to overcome 3D textures. Having little time left, we AI-generated the background, using Midjourney, then editing it manually. When The Crone talks about AI-generated images, she nods at the background: acknowledging its AI-generated origins. 

Code, script, minigame
I like the Simon game. Originally, I wanted the items inside of the vending machine to move around with every iteration, playing on how the machine messes with the player but ran out of time and opted for having a simple Simon game instead. 
The code is partly based on some code from LemmaSoft forums, and partly on the Simon game exercise from Angela Yi's Web Development bootcamp from Udemy. 

GUI
Taxi yellow is the main color of Berlin subway IRL, and my favorite color, hehe. The real U3 line is turquoise, though. 
The edge-y and clear GUI decision is based on how real subway stations' design elements look like. 

Real Alexanderplatz. Photo: Ingolf

My favorite joke is that both Nowhereplatz and Nightbringers have the same main black-and-yellow duo color scheme but they give off a different vibe. Maybe, next time I'll make a bee-themed comedy and make a very whimsical and comedic round-y design decision, while keeping black-and-yellow color scheme. 

Also, I want to make custom GUI for all other in-game menus but... no time, such shame.

Voice acting
This is the first time of mine working with VAs, and it was very fun, albeit kinda hard! Due to personal reasons, I ended up finishing the script on Sept, 28th and the editor looked through it on Sept, 29th so VAs had very little time to record their lines, and I am very glad and grateful all of them managed to do it in time (especially Alan as The Narrator, as he had stunning 298 lines to record in a day!). 
Next time I decide to use VA, I def need more time and maybe, even a specific person to manage audio, because voice lines ended up being at completely different loudness, and I only managed to partially fix it with the next patch coming on Oct, 2nd. 
Special shoutout to my friend Leon, who is a musician and an audioperson, and managed to completely confuse me with his advice to "compress and normalize the audio peaks to -1dB" when I sat there dumbfounded being all like what, what are you talking about, I know peak is something from Chinese high fantasy genre. 

Endings and achievements
I love achievements in games. I know a lot of people dislike minigames in VNs, that's why losing or winning a minigame doesn't matter much: it's only there that the player can get the vending machine achievement, and the "all achievements" platinum achievement. 
The Human ending is my favorite one, and I think it's the best one, which is also sort of a juxtaposition: it is the default "bad end" after all, but it is the best one. 

From the very beginning, I knew I don't want any "bad endings": Nowhereplatz is a metaphor for self-discovery, and there can't be anything bad in being yourself. Both answers the player can give to every character are valid in their own sense, and that is what makes the question hard. 

NO CREDITS
Very fun fact about how rushed the last minutes were:
in the current build, there are no in-game credits simply because I forgot about them and haven't had time to make... a credits screen, haha. 

See you next time
The first build was rushed and not a competitive entry. But it was a hard year for me personally, so I am still glad we were able to make it real. 
Next time, I definitely need to start coding and bringing the whole game together earlier than Sept, 30th, though. 

And at least, I uploaded a ZIP archive with an .exe file this time! 
Last year, the first Nightbringers build wasn't compiled and didn't have an executable file at all...

Happy Spooktober, and thank you for reading! 
mlkrn