Hello! My name is Solaris. I'm the head behind Featherquill, and as I'm releasing one last quick little update and putting this project to rest, I wanted to talk a bit about how it was behind the scenes for me. I figured this might be interesting to at least some people, so you know, why not try this whole dev log thing?

In any case, let's get started, shall we?

Pre-Jam:

So the idea of wanting to make a story centered around Hatate and Satori goes back to around August last year. I really liked the chapter of Cheating Detective Satori where the two interacted with each other (you can see some references from that chapter in Featherquill!) and wanted to create a fic based off some musing thoughts I had about how the two might interact if given more time with each other. This led to a scrapped project under an entirely different title and focus, that I never really entirely clicked with while trying to write it. I had the WIP on hand when this jam was announced, however, so I took another look at it, and came up with some ideas for starting from scratch. This would eventually lead to Featherquill, which I went into the jam writing with only a few cursory notes from reviving the WIP on mind.

Most of the team recruitment process also started within the first week of the announcement, and I could very quickly tell that munchea, historyleaf, and Saishoo were a perfect trio for the project's audio/visual work. They're all very passionate about what they do, and it shows in how they all multi-tasked different projects this jam while still providing everything necessary for Featherquill and then some. I really loved working with them from the start. 

There was one more part of the core of this project, though, but we'll get to them later ;)

THE BIRD JAMMING:

So, let's set the stage for my inspirations for writing Featherquill, because I think if you're already interested in what I have to say, this is important:

- Toby Fox is my biggest inspiration as a writer, period. I love Undertale and Deltarune. Actually wait no I'm being tame here, I absolutely adore Undertale and Deltarune. Getting introduced to Undertale one fateful day towards the end of 2015 would go on severely change the way I approached media in general. But more importantly to Featherquill, I just really like Toby's approach to handling mixing humor into more serious moments. He's extremely good at getting you to care about his weird, quirky characters, and integrating wonderful songs into even more minor moments just to keep the emotional core of any given scene going strong. I cited multiple Undertale/Deltarune songs as tonal sources for Featherquill's music, and half of the reason the ending of the game exists is just because I really liked It's Raining Somewhere Else and the scene it plays in. I'm not joking.

- I really liked Echoing Hearts, another VN you might've heard before if you follow these jams. So much so that I worked with a majority of its team on this very project after reaching out to them. It's a very comfortable and warm game that isn't afraid to get into some more personal subjects, and well,  perhaps that approach might've rubbed off on Featherquill's script more than I intended, lol

This was my first time ever working with Ren'py, and it was definitely easier than I expected it to be. There were some hiccups in regards to the scripting side of things, which is when Theo, a late addition to the team and the programmer of the aforementioned Echoing Hearts proved to be very useful in keeping my sanity. They also helped get this game's wonderful UI going when I was fresh out of ideas, and too busy working on the core script regardless. To everyone who gave the game points just for not having the default Ren'py UI, you have Theo to thank for it!

The art that historyleaf and munchea prepared for this game was so wonderfully adorable I'm still out of words to describe how grateful I am for their work. I only had very basic ideas for them, and they handled them extremely well, bringing an absurd level of personality to the game's visuals. Perhaps working with some of the community's most avid bird lovers gave me a bit of an advantage, in hindsight. 

Saishoo got his musical work done for the jam extremely fast, handling any small critiques I had with ease and brought music that fit the tone of the game just right. They absolutely got my silly UT/DR inspirations too, which was fun. Real meets real.

Finally, the actual writing process of Featherquill in practice... was tough, to say the least. I spent the first night of the jam working on and polishing a pretty decent intro while getting used to how Ren'py worked, but the next couple days would prove to be much harder for me.

So I'm officially diagnosed with anxiety, right? It's a very real part of my life, and it had a major impact on my ability to properly focus while writing Featherquill. The more the deadline approached, the less work I paradoxically got done. It got bad enough that I woke up the morning of the jam's final day to an immediate anxiety attack, and after giving some thought over my actual physical health at the time, I asked for an extension, and Texel granting me this is the literal only reason Featherquill got finished. 

The end result was still pretty littered with typos and grammatical mistakes that came from the rush of trying to get things done closest to the 72 hour window as possible after I had some time to relax. I'm not particularly proud of how bad of an editor I am for my own projects, but this has given me a lot to keep in mind for the future. I think my workflow for whatever next jam project I work on will be much better in comparison to what it was for this game.

Fortunately, the game still had an absolutely wonderful aesthetic going on that managed to get people's attention.

Post-Jam:

We enter the Jam Results phase, in which we're met with... wait, Featherquill placed first in the Writing category?!?

This is something I still don't know how to accept, quite frankly. A lot of what went into Featherquill's script was me taking from very personal experiences of my life, my own very real issues as a writer and some of the worst ways people have treated me, and a lot of the anxiety I was feeling while working on the game got poured into Hatate and her core issues during the game. I wrote this game almost as a letter with some cute birds attached to it, and hearing that people took the game's messages to heart? That it was starting to inspire them in regards to their own projects? I just... I've gotten so much confidence in myself as a writer in comparison to the rock bottom I was working from going into the jam that I really don't know if I can thank everyone who played and rated Featherquill enough. Thank you for giving me the spark I was looking for.

I think it's worth saying that I'm also severely questioning where me and these 3 day jams stand, however. Handling the strict time limit as a project manager was just wayyyy too much for me, and I think if I take a serious role in another jam from here, it's gonna be one of the longer ones. It's better for my own health at both sides of the spectrum at the end of the day.

I don't intend to put to rest Magikrow Studio, with its silly little team name I came up with, any time soon. I do want to seriously try and participate in those longer jams, and I have another non-Touhou related project I want to work on under this little brand, like a little Pokemon hack idea I came up with last year. I'll probably also be working with a much more experimental approach going into future jams, considering that reaching #1 in Writing was already way past my biggest personal goal going into Jam 12. I want to push how neat and unique I can make something rather than how high I can push it on the results screen, you know?

With all of that though, thank you for reading this, thanks again for playing Featherquill if you did, which I assume you did if you're reading this. And of course, another huge thanks to all of the other team members who allowed this project to become a reality. See you guys wherever the next fantasy takes us!