Happy new year!
Progress slow and steady over the new year. I have a broad outline of the plot, what endings I want, and how large I suspect the project to get. Looking at the full map of it now, I can roughly say "I want about five of those".
It's very sizable for a first game. However I feel like it's within my capability; the coding for the guts of the gameplay is very simple, condition and choice-based stuff, and I have several finished novel-length manuscripts under my belt, so I'm used to taking on writing tasks of this size. What I'm most concerned about is getting the UI, art and music. I have someone who's interested in doing music and will let me comb through their back catalogue as well as produce a certain amount of new material. Very soon however--once this first leg of the story is done and Jessica has gotten back to the ship--I want to start putting some visuals together and showing a small alpha around.
I have had a couple people playtest what's done so far and it takes around 45 minutes to an hour to read through the ship trip and the combat encounter, much longer than I anticipated, so what I thought might be a 2-3 hour game may run out to 5 or 6.
Thanks for looking! See you in a bit.