Working in Ren'Py
Overview
Cloud Mage is a visual novel about a young mage and her familiar. She does weather spells for a living and you play as her as she creates spells for her clients in the form of weather sprites.
When you get a client, your goal is to select the correct ingredients to create the correct spell. The game keeps going if you fail. After all, your life's not at risk here and you can learn something, even from a failure. The overall mood of the game will be pretty casual and easy-going.
Assets
I'm planning on drawing all the art myself. As for music, I've been looking through CC-licensed music and I've bookmarked stuff I'm interested in using, mostly stuff that I think will fit the mood of certain sections.
Characters
The game's fairly light on plot, but here's a list of characters I plan on having.
Cloud Mage || Familiar || Gryphon Gunner || Cat Thief || Plant Tamer || Merserker
I pulled most of these characters out of a small WIP illustration project I'm working on involving RPG classes. I haven't come up with designs for that project yet, so I figured I could hammer some of those out while doing this game.
Gameplay
Most of the game is just reading the story. When it comes time for you to do your spell, you're taken to a series of menus where you select one ingredient from each category to combine them into a cloud sprite. Depending on whether the spell is successful or not, you get different dialogue from the parties involved. I took this code for an encyclopaedia/bestiary and edited it to make a journal that gives a short description of available ingredients and characters that you've met.
I'm pretty proud of myself for getting it to work the exact way I wanted it to. (I used the tried and true method of fiddling with every line of code until I got to the one I wanted :P) After it's unlocked, the journal can be accessed at any time and it gives you short descriptions that include hints about which ingredients are correct for which spell. It's like a puzzle element.
Branching is minimal as any number of different successes/failures will ultimately lead you to the same ending. (OR!! maybe it will lead you to the super secret ending??)
I'm juggling some other work and projects during the jam, but I love visual novels and I love text-based puzzle games (some of my faves are stuff like the Ace Attorney series and Zero Escape series), so I'm here to get my lil' game done, and get it done right!
(I'm also here to check out everyone else's games <3)
