itch.io

Sure, no problem - always happy to help budding game developers! Just don't forget me when you become rich and famous! ;)

For coding I use Ren'py. For the art I use Koikatsu and edit in Photoshop for renders and Premiere Pro for animations. For music and sound editing I use Audacity (make sure to balance the decibel levels for all your music and sound! I use -16 for music and -12 for sound effects)

As for tips and tricks, well, the two biggest pieces of advice I can give is, one, that CONSISTENCY IS KING! Players will forgive a lot of beginner miss-steps and mistakes if your updates are regular and consistent. Secondly, under-promise and over-deliver. This is something I'm TERRIBLE at, but it's much better to keep your scope small and expand when you have the time, opportunity and energy, than to start out biting off more than you can chew and end up struggling or even having to give up on the planned thing entirely.

Apart from that, just off the top of my head:

1.  A good trick for making characters recognisable is to give all of them different speech patterns.

2.  Make sure your characters all have AT LEAST these three things:  A strength, a weakness and a fear.

3.  Listen to your playerbase but don't be ruled by them. You want to make them happy, of course, but never at the cost of your vision for the story.

4.  The most important parts of any scene are framing and lighting

There's a pile more, but I just woke up and brain no worky so good :P Hope that helps, though, and if you have any more questions feel free to ask them here or send me a DM on Discord

Looking forward to seeing your beta demo! :)