I’ve gotten as far as I could with coding for the moment. All the parts that I could do on my own are working now, and I need to do some research to make the game do what I want it to do. There are a few different ways to plan a visual novel’s branching paths, some are like choose your own adventure books that as you make choices you go further down one path than the other. Others are a point system that enough of the right choices unlocks specific content.
I don’t know enough about coding in Python to know which way is easier versus more efficient. I could experiment with it, but I’d probably end up with a system that has several thousand more lines of code. If that ends up being the easier way for now, I might just do that. This might also be the first point where I ask my BF what his advice is.
So with that on the back burner for now, I went back to my problem from a few days ago with the first act and how I wanted it to work. I actually ended up having to math it out, and it’s been a while since I’ve had to calculate combinations, and I had forgotten the right way to do it, so I ended up having to work out the long way. I’ve figured out the minimum input I needed in order for a player to access all the available paths without any one path being more advantageous than the other. That way the player can’t accidentally access something they weren’t meant to. That’s going to have to be play tested later down the line, and I hope I’ll have some volunteers help with the alpha testing of that part.
That means I can go back to writing the first act. I think once the first act is done I’ll start working on the actual assets. There’s no point in writing out the entire game and then have to code in all those assets later. If I can get everything working in the prologue and first act to be presentable, then it will make the rest of the game less difficult. It will of course still be a lot of work, but I won’t have to be constantly putting out fires so close to the end.
Temporarily I’ll have to use really crude assets made in MSPaint because I don’t have access to my actual good supplies. From years working on comics I have a lot of tools for doing quality work, but I can’t get to them, or the powerful PC I use to handle all the software.
In the next day or so I’ll also be working on the character designs themselves. I’ve had ideas of what I want the characters to look like, so it’s come high time to put them to paper.
One thing you’ll notice is that I haven’t actually said what the game is about. For now that’s a secret. But once I start posting character designs, I’ll let everyone know what the game will be about.
