Joker's Trip 2025 Retrospective

Hey! LG here. Hope the winter holidays are treating you well. Before I get into the retrospective, an update on the next update. We effectively tripled the dialog in Joker's Trip, added a new Joker scene, and added a new mechanic where girls can leave once they earn enough dough (as well as a bunch of other things). The initial test build for QA was finished last week and revealed we still have a few big bugs to squash, so we’ll be pushing this update to January instead of competing with the holidays. Our playtesters have loved it so far though, and we're excited to share it with you!

In the meantime, enjoy this Reindeer Rosalie that would have gone with the update! We'll come up with a new prompt and poll for you to vote on when we're actually for realsies ready to launch the next build.

To get on with the retrospective...

When this year started I was out of a job for several months, and thought “any day now I’ll get back on my feet and get a new gig again!” This wouldn’t happen until August. Three to five applications a day from October 2024, with a final count of nearly 900 job applications over the course of 2024-2025. 

So you know. I had some free time. 

Joker’s Trip is a game I technically started 3 years ago. I was feeling like I was hitting a dead end with how overworked I was at a shit company, and was failing to make any of my game ideas. TT was the one to actually tell me "just make something simple first, like blackjack." So then I did! I made the prototype and then…! 

I put down the project and picked it back up pretty sporadically. The rate of progress Sky Rocketed once I was unemployed, partly from free time, partly from a manic need to do Anything other than job apps.

I was worried about it to be honest. Instead of learning skills for the jobs I was applying for, I was working on a game that I wasn’t even sure would make back what I put in (at this point a few grand for initial art assets). But the thing I realized was that I was having fun. I liked writing for these characters, I liked learning how to model and texture, I liked making a gambler’s ability and seeing it work. And then I realized that for the past eight years as a programmer, this was the First time I felt fulfilled in what I was doing.

A few lessons I learned. One, no one will care about your ideas until they have it in front of them. This isn't me griping, it's completely fair. I've always had a weird presence online, being friends with a lot of really cool artists and writers but never making anything myself, so I'd remain largely ignored. Then I put out Field Report! And remained largely ignored. Which was also fine, it's a hard ask to be like "hey give me, guy you've never heard of, $5 for a book." It wasn't until Joker's Trip released that I got feedback, and it was positive feedback! People liked the characters I wrote and my jokes landed, what more could I ask for? The fact people had FAVORITES out of the cast was new to me, I felt like I did my job correctly. 

Lesson two: if you think you can Simply Write A VN, no. Nah. Dude. The amount of writing dialog it takes to make a video game is always going to be significantly more than you think. I thought I wrote plenty for the initial release of Joker's Trip, I spent a lot of time on it! Wanna know how much more dialog there is now, compared to the first build? Six times. And we still don't feel like it's enough. Thankfully we learned this lesson early, so the bar conversations won't be a nasty surprise, but still! If you want a taste of what it's like, I want you to take a generic comment or action, like "I'm going to go out," and write 20 different ways to say it that are all different. Then do that again for 50 more actions. Then scrap some when you realize that some of those events will never be used and, and, and–

Lesson three: you've gotta be able to write and code through writer's block. You gotta be able to do that at the drop of a hat, no matter how you feel, no matter how empty the inspo tank is. Inspiration cannot be the fuel for your process. Don't get it twisted, inspiration is insanely important. Playing Deltarune this year really boosted my drive to do better with Joker's Trip in ways I'm thankful for. But. But. If you want to be serious about a project, you can't say, "Ah, I'm not inspired enough to write 20 dialog nodes today. I don't feel like adding that piece of logic today." Ya kinda just gotta sit down and do.

With all of those lessons combined, the biggest take away I had from this year and from Joker's Trip is: that adage of "the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, the next best time is today" is truer than you think. Just sit down, plan something out on paper, then open your game engine of choice and do. No excuses of not being ready or "oh but I'm saving this idea for when I'm established." Start simple and Go.

I could never imagine being where I'm at with Clown Control, and I'm so thankful for TT, my friends, and for YOU, the gorgeous person reading this. I'm going to keep going strong and improve, iterate, and develop on Joker's Trip. Look forward to all the bar stories, boys, and babes in the coming year <3

--LG

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yeah okay i guess it’s my turn.

it’s true, joker’s trip started as me telling leo to stop making these huge projects they’d never finish and start on something small. program A Functioning Game before you start commissioning the art for CGs. and now here we are. working on a huge project that only gets bigger with every iteration, largely because of me going ‘i would be willing to do that’ and then i have to Do That. 

23 sex scenes, 6 (technically 10) character sprites, 5 crowd sprites, multiple drink sprites, background sprites, environment designs, chip designs, particle effects, assets assets assets oh my GOD the assets. leo up there was talking about how you will always need more dialogue than you think you do and now i’m here to tell you that you’ll always need more art than you think you do. you will always need to do more work than you think you will. it’s FUN work. but oh my god it’s endless.

as Basically The Product Manager—because leo needs somebody to keep them on target so they don't spend their dev time redesigning the casino floor for the 8th time—there’s a lot of things i wish we’d done better to streamline production. best practices. things you ought to plan ahead, like. what the story progression actually looks like. or what your final cast would look like. or like—did you know that all the sprites and the cgs were originally shaded. like, baked in, painted shading. i don’t know why i did that. i don’t draw like that normally. it made it a bitch to edit anything. so i went back and recolored the whole thing (at the time, the 4 starting girls and all their layers and the 12 scenes between them). and if i’d just had a brain at the beginning i wouldn’t have had to do that!

still. it’s amazing that the game is Real now. still very early access, still very rough. but damn if it ain’t something you can play and have fun with! that’s more than i’ve ever done before! like every comic artist ever born i’d entertained the “i’m gonna make a VN!” idea and learned basic ren’py and cobbled together some bullshit that didn’t go anywhere. i’ll admit, i’d thought this project would end up the same way, because that’s how these things always go! but damned if leo didn’t make it happen. they’ve put so much work into this and it’s soooooo cool when they fix a bug and it just works. i don’t know dick about programming and i’m not about to learn. it’s magic.

we’ve been at this Publicly for about 3/4 of a year (i believe we launched this patreon in march or april) and in that time we’ve added an entire new character, ability mechanics, and have, as leo mentioned, multiplied the amount of dialogue in the game by six. and we’re about to add an entire other mechanic with the bar that’ll basically allow real story progression. NARRATIVE. my god. we’re really gonna have to sit down and make some flowcharts soon. can’t wait.

and i can’t wait for you guys to go with us there. we’re SO appreciative of your support and patience as we bang rocks together to bring you pictures of banging and cocks. thank you, sincerely, for sticking around.

--TT