As I reach the night of the second day, there’s 4 more-or-less playable chapters. The fifth one is an afterword without extra assets, so it’s just appropriate to leave for the last stretch.

Despite speaking about chapters in these posts, I’m thinking of losing that concept in the game itself. Some of the cut-offs are weird anyway: chapter 1 is way longer than 2, but the only way to solve this would be to treat their interlude as “chapter 1b”. Perhaps problems like these are not very critical to the player, and I think a game like this might work best as one long ride.

You could say character “arcs” are a better split. There’s 6 main characters (ranging from moderately silly to very silly), 1 side character and some throwaway ones.

A gazillion hours of work on this sprite alone.

The format already lends itself to dealing with one character at a time. Well, except for the bits where everyone you’ve met comes together and they just babble over each other.

Having turned plans into things on the screen, I have to say there’s some actually pretty funny stuff. If you’re not laughing at your own script, you’re doing humor wrong.

Basically I’m just copying the script over to the code, creating assets and new functions as I need them. It turns out to be a rather organized approach without being restricting creatively. Of course, when recycling stuff, it also becomes smoother to add new content as the work progresses. Working like this, the usual anxiety about the final product is significantly reduced.

I’ve done most of the heavy lifting by now, and I don’t think anything left on the list is overwhelming as such. The gameplay segments are gonna need some more effort though, hehe.

Aah, pretty tired. Gonna wake up early tomorrow and have one more of these fun LD weekend days.

Tags: good night