This reply means so much to me! Thank you so much.
In short, there hasn't been any solid progress with it. I did some rough planning on how I'd remake the game to have multiple days possible to visit and revisit each area, and even submitted my game as a proof of concept to an app called Tales and was planning on making it through that.
But over the past month I started doing some soul-searching and reflection on how hard writing's become for me - turns out there's some trauma there. So I decided to take a step back from considering myself a writer for the next while - six months or maybe a year, maybe more if it ends up being that. There's just a lot of conflation of my sense of self-worth and my ability to write.
It's hard to say whether I'll revisit this project in the future, but for the time being, it's going to have to sit the way it is.
Again, thank you so much for taking the time to both play through my game and reply to it. To know that a story of mine even in such a rough state can have a lasting mark on someone is humbling to think about. Thank you!
Thanks for the reply!
Taking care of your mental health is super important, I'm glad you've decided to do that for yourself.
I wish you luck in your endeavors. Tackling self-worth is a steep hill to climb! But it's one of the most rewarding things you can do.
Give yourself permission to heal, you are definitely worth more than the things you write.
Would it be hurtful for me to ask you some questions about Witch's Shop? The characters were really intriguing, and even if this project won't continue, I'm curious to know more about them.
Feel free to decline! There's plenty of other media to consume out there.
Yay! I'll start by asking about the very first character I wondered about: Orena.
The first thing I wanted to know is if Orena is even real, or if the goddess is a myth. And if she WAS real, did she really create the river that runs through Burnea with tears of joy from hearing the first bird song? And if she WAS real, is she still around?
That very first little information tree made me wonder about the religion and god/desses of the land. Did you have a concrete idea of what was real and what wasn't?
Speaking of the information tree, I wanted to simply applaud your implementation. I love how I could click on important names and find out more, it pleases that very curious nature of mine, and it felt like my character thinking, instead of say, me looking something up in an index, taking me out of immersion.
Apologies for the delayed response!
The way I've kind of been thinking about the world building is somewhat akin to what I do for my own ttrpgs. Generally I like having deities as real beings, but stories about them may or may not be true. In this case, Orena is real, is still around/in existence, but I don't know/hadn't decided on whether that bit about the river was true. Mostly I wanted to have it bc it's based off of the spring in Delphi, which I was able to visit and drink from myself while I was there. (The same folklore exists about creativity after drinking the water, and the Pythia used to bathe in its water before doing sessions.)
And thank you so much! I can't take much credit for it - I only have minimal experience with playing text games like this, and this was the implimentation I saw that I liked, so I'm just echoing what's come before me and worked. :) It's definitely a sleek way to implement the possibility for more lore and world building that players can choose to dive further into or not
