I feel like I made the last progress update like two or three weeks ago but it's been almost five months? Clearly we are living in the matrix or something. Okay so where were we

I think I'm almost done with the first of two adventures Shauntal will take you on. It's a choose your own adventure esque point and click with Pokemon and Shauntal. Originally it was gonna be three adventures but I don't think I have enough ideas to make more than two so we're going with that. I have a friend helping me make a little inventory system so you can buy/collect items that allow you to do different things in the environment. For example, if you come across a lake, if you have a fishing rod, you can do what you might expect. You also might have some other things you can do with the water, but first you have to get past an obstacle to get to the water, and to get past that obstacle, you have to do some other stuff, etc..

The game is basically an excuse to hang out with Shauntal. There's multiple options to go through to hear all of what she has to say, so I'm hoping that she's interesting enough so that feels worth it to do. The "adventure game" itself isn't exactly challenging; there're some Sierra games out there that you could spend hours wandering around trying to figure out what to do next, and I highly doubt you'll need to do that here, there's only so many things to click on. I thought about making it so that you have to specifically click on items and then use them on objects, but even if I could figure out how to program that to work properly, I'm not intending this to be some brainbuster that you really have to think hard about. It's much more visual novel than adventure game. The alternative to this is that the game basically just tells you what every option you have is. Honestly I prefer this instead of having someone getting stuck when they just wanna advance to the next segment of the VN (though I'm sure that'll still happen to some people).

So there's "use key on door" puzzles, and then there's "combat", which is by far the weakest aspect so far.
I was thinking of making some kind of Undertale type minigame for combat, but nothing felt right. As the Renpy tutorial tells you, not everybody wants to have to be good at some bullet hell game to play a VN, so I'm just using dialogue like everything else. Your "might" determines what options you have available; if you have less, your options are more likely to fail. Your items, class, and previous choices might also add new options, such as if you have a shield or not, or if you've read up on this type of Pokemon in a manual, or something. Even with a variety of different options, it's not exactly exciting, and even worse when you have no options. If, by no fault of your own, you don't have any of the items or whatever unlocking additional choices, the above exciting screen might lead to 3 of essentially the same "Fight!" options, and then the game tells you if you won or not. It kinda sucks and I'm not really sure how to improve it all that much.

So if the combat sucks and the game isn't challenging, why isn't this just a standard VN without the weird adventure game part? Well, that's a good question. Honestly, playing D&D with Shauntal was originally just one idea of a thing to do with her, and I figured I'd just make it entirely dialogue, but then I kept having ideas and going "that'd be neat". It'd be neat if you could collect items, it'd be neat if there was like a map screen, blah blah, and by then it was too late and I was programming an inventory system and classes and stuff. Not that I think the VN is bad, I'm actually pretty happy with it so far. Shauntal is a big cute nerd and I like clicking options to see what she'll say, and seeing her dressed up in various outfits is also fun. Given that dialogue is the reason people play VNs, I'm hoping that all the dialogue you get by playing the game in various ways is reward enough. I guess what I'm saying is that it's weird and rough around the edges, so hopefully it turns out entertaining in the end.

I'm not sure how much I'm repeating myself from the last entry since it's been so long, but progress is steady enough, I guess. It's a little frustrating that the amount of work I put into this equates to a lot less actual progress than my past stuff, since I have to spend time with programming and sound effects and finding the right images for items and blah blah rather than just fluidly writing dialogue, which is a lot easier. Not that I'm hating working on this but I'm glad I'm a writer and not a game designer.