Day 1-16-18:
Got some more coding done today! As well as a bit of sprite edits.
Going on the theme of me being cheap, I took the pre-made sprites that came with the program and just spent several hours editing them to more like my character designs. There's a few more tweaks I'd make if I had the time to spend even more hours on these, but I'm really happy with how the changes came out even just for this primary two characters, so I'm gonna stop giving myself more work to do. These are Vaughn and Ineni, the characters the player will spend the most time with in this version of the game - I'm working on the sprite for Alasie, who will also be introduced in this version of the game but not for long. All the NPCs and ghosts will use generic sprites.
I fixed a few bugs in earlier scenes and added in some flavor events while I had a free hour waiting for a friend, then coded the first half of the scene that introduces the character to the main quest. Yes, I know, this is way late in the game jam cycle to just be starting on the main quest, but a lot of the character design and worldbuilding work I did up until now will make working on the main quest super easy for me.... theoretically?
I'm kind of stressing about this. Guess I know what I'm doing tomorrow.
I had another picture but I guess it's not loading. Basically the main quest will be the essence of my original vision for this game; Vaughn finds a ghost sad and alone in the wilderness, and decides to help it by killing its murderer. The player will have to explore a bit to find the murderer, and there'll be NPCs around who give the player clues on where to go. I'm currently trying to decide between one 'invisible' event hiding on a corner of an overworld map that the player needs to step on, or just a deep room in a long dungeon. Either way, if the player finds the murderer too soon they'll have a harder time, since they won't have gotten as much time to level up.