A Much Better Update Post Than Last Time

I had kept my usual monthly post short and with things going a little better health wise (no covid but lots of headaches because of this damn weather), I should be able to stumble my way through a proper one now.

I'm going to try and not be too tight lipped on the details with this one, mainly because I don't need to fear giving up spoilers. Way too easy to do that accidentally with stories.

I spent some time back in November playing around with Twine because it's the usual engine for these...text RPG/dating sim bang-a-thons. Think Degrees of Lewdity and The Company as examples. Pretty quickly, I determined if you were going to get anything done in Twine, you needed to know some Javascript. 

Which I had no experience with.

In fact, last time I worked with anything with the word "Java" in it was in high school, so you know, 20 years ago. Yay.

Long story short: I didn't enjoy using Twine so I dropped it. Back to Ren'py, baby. Haha hey, it's been what I've been using for like 4-5 years now and I've made multiple games with it and worked on countless more projects. Makes sense to try and expand it into what I need. And, so far so good actually.

December was me focusing on creating systems more than creating a world. (Well, expect for around Christmas when I took a break from programming to practice coughing.)

Date, time, weather and a system where affection growth is based on the character's mood at the time, that's been the groundwork I have been laying down for now. 

Haha actually, the weather system is a chaotic mess that I'll polish up a little eventually. No real rhythm or reason so to speak, just pure randomness. I was going to alter it but then I remembered that I've looked out a window more than once in my life so I left it. Once there's more gameplay elements to the game, I'll make some changes to make sure it doesn't hinder anything important. For the first update at least, I'll leave the original system in place.

There's still tons more to put into the game. Honestly, it can be overwhelming trying to plan anything just because you can start thinking about the weather and end up trying to figure out an inventory system not even 5 minutes later and your notepad looks like a mess haha

It's all part of the learning experience though. This is the first time I've ever worked on something like this and it will show. Thankfully, these types of projects offer lots of room to grow. Nobody's expecting a perfectly polished finished product out of version 0.1 right? This is going to be a big and highly customisable project that will, hopefully, be worked on for many years. One that I hope to work on with you guys.

So once this game gets off the ground, I'll be looking to hold some discussions about what new characters and areas could be added to it. Whether that goes well or not, who knows, should be at least mildly interesting for the drama though.

This has gone on long enough so I'll wrap up. Next update will be about the game's setting and focus and will probably be at the end of the month. I have no idea how to post screenshot updates about this project given its nature but I still might do 1 just because everyone loves walls of text in boxes.

Thanks for reading this massive update. I'm around if you have questions.