Thanks! I probably should have tried to find an artist to work with, but I didn't want to subject anyone else to my overambitious requirements and it's been fun trying to figure out how to draw anything.
Updates so far:
- I don't have much done, which is (almost) right on schedule and according to plan.
- I've sketched out templates for character avatars. So far, I have a design for a head with swappable eyes/mouth/eyes/eyebrows/hair. I'm making the mouth and eyebrows unisex, since they're used to express different emotions and I don't want to have to redraw them for different characters. For the other facial parts, I currently have one set of male features and one set of female features, though I plan to add more (at least for hairstyles). I was hoping to support non-binary characters and more diversity generally, but making interchangeable features is more work than I was expecting.
- I started doing some writing for the story, but nothing's close to finalized there. I'm still debating how tightly I want to author the story versus making it depend on procedural generation. My current thinking is that a scripted intro will set up the game and give a rough tutorial, then the game will alternate between (A) minigame phases in which dialogue is primarily triggered by game events and (B) transition phases in which characters discuss the outcome of the previous minigame and talk about how the next minigame will fit into the overall story. The transition phases will serve to drive the authored story forward, while the minigame phases will (hopefully) create some interesting procedural stories.
- On the topic of the dialogue system, I've been thinking about how to actually implement this thing in code. The dialogue system will likely maintain a sort of priority queue that tracks possible dialogue options and gives priority to scripted text, followed by contextually relevant options, dialogue that addresses open conflicts, callbacks to previous events, and lastly random filler. In the simplest case, I can rely heavily on scripted events and random filler to scrape something together, but the point of this project is to make this system as advanced as possible.
The plan from here: I'd still like to get a little more art done in the next day or two. If I have a version of character creation and a basic dialogue system testable by the end of this week, I'd be pretty happy. I also need to start designing the minigames and formalizing more of the dialogue/story systems.
Well, that's it for this update. Hopefully I'll have some stuff to actually show soon, because I'd much rather let this game speak for itself than to keep revealing my crazy plans which may or may not come to fruition.