I am not well financially, and I have to balance this with my college studies. Bringing this to fruition as soon as possible would do me a lot of good so I can start my career of sorts. I thought for a while about what I could do to improve the development to the complete version of Harmful Heaven, and this is what I decided.
- Originally Harmful Heaven was going to be a very short game, but now the expansions I've done on it made that no longer the case. The things I've added haven't been that great either, but I consider it now worth uploading a demo. Within the story of the game, the story takes place over 3 days (Actually it's 2 days, but *beep* spoilers) so I can make a demo that covers the first day of the story.
Uploading a demo would be a very good thing: I'll have something playable that I can present, I can get opinions and feedback from those who play and the game page will circulate on Itch.io and may gain a following. I'm excited about the idea and I'm going to work harder to make the demo a reality. (besides the full game, of course). - And the second most important decision is that I'm going to discard Ren'py as an engine for Harmful Heaven.
I've been using RPG Maker since I was a kid, several iterations of the software. I've done quite a lot of stuff there, goofy stuff and none of it complete. After that, I had a phase where I was like "I must expand my horizons!" and i started experimenting with a lot of different engines. I didn't get to experiment much with them out of fear, I didn't get to do much or anything at all. The requirement of real programming and coding and scripting for even the smallest things got the better of me. The engine I stayed with of all the ones I tried was Ren'py... And for the moment I will discard it.
In RPG Maker you can already make visual novels, but I wanted to do it in Ren'py to give me the illusion that I'm doing real programming... When what I've done is used codes from the tutorial, from scripts made by others and from reddit searches. All that to do extremely minimal and basic things. That's why I'm going to switch to a program that I know quite well, to make the development of Harmful Heaven more dynamic. It will still be a visual novel and will have no map exploration sections and no rpg elements. I switched to RPG Maker for this because I know how to use the engine, not to make Harmful Heaven an RPG.
I guess that's okay. I'm tired. Anyone is reading this? I was told that devlogs are more important to the dev than to those reading, so I would continue this thread even if no one was reading it. I'm just frustrated, but I have to keep going.