Okay, let's see how well I do with creating a horror game in a couple of weeks having never made a horror game before. What could go wrong?

It's been a struggle to find time to work on the project this week, hoping to get a big fat coding session in at the weekend and have a lot more to go on next week.

So far, managed to recycle plenty of faffy stuff like text wrap from previous projects. Planned out quite a bit of the dialogue and have a pretty good idea where the story should go, so want to get that implemented next. It's going to be hard going into any sort of detail without giving the game away, so here's a lovely GIF.

CHECK THAT SWEET, SWEET GAMEPLAY. [not pictured]

Can't believe you didn't tag P**, W** and B*m. Already flaunting the rules.

Some slow progress has been made! Additions since the last post:

There's an okay message display system: I simplified it to just display at the bottom of the screen rather than relative to where you are on the map. Not quite as nice, but it works. 

A simple inventory: This made me think about how the controls are going to work. Here's the plan: button O for changing inventory items, button X for talking to NPCs, looking at item, picking up item or generally interacting with things/the world.

NPCs with dialogue: I wrote out a load of dialogue for the NPCs, each person has three things they say. I'll probably need to add context-sensitive chats too, like 'oh, you found my item, thanks' kind of stuff.

A rain particle system that took far too long to make. It's increased the moodiness (kind of important for a horror game, right?) but took absolutely ages and took far too much brain power to create. The end product is pretty simple but looks fine. Weather transitions--e.g. going from rainy to clear--look really cool.

There's lots of sprites designed which aren't in use yet. There's also a barebones full map. Currently using half the standard Pico-8 map size, hoping to use the rest of the space to make many more sprites and map tiles. I think a smaller, more detailed map would be a better than a larger more repetitive one.

I still need to put some game in the game. Or more particles, that will also work, right?