Howdy! Looking forward to putting as much time as I can this weekend into a small game I’m working with Ren’Py, which is a first for me but it looks great. I think I’ll also be using the Dating Sim Engine framework, though the game definitely won’t be about dating or romance. My girlfriend has been playing a game that uses those dating sim mechanics (Matches & Matrimony) and they look like they could be a lot of fun in another kind of story as well.

I have a couple of story ideas, so I’m going to spend the rest of this evening sketching & see which one sticks first!

I’m working on a visual novel about a person who wakes up to find the world empty. It’s one of those old scifi trope premises (like The Quiet Earth, for example) — but this won’t be science fiction in that it won’t preoccupy itself at all with the “how.” Instead it’s a story about the more mundane experiences this person has in an empty world.

For the backgrounds, I’m using creative-commons photos from Flickr, with some cropping & other adjustments.

I’m using the Dating Sim Engine from Ren’py, so it has this day planner interface. Depending on what you choose for the character to do each day, a few invisible stats are tweaked. The stats have a few different impacts: they affect the character’s dreams, determine which ending you see, and some activities have special events that only occur when you do them with certain stats at certain levels. So hopefully that adds some dynamism to the story!

I’m going to take a break from coding now to work on some music, and then I have a bunch of writing to do before tomorrow

I scaled back some of the dynamism of the story, so it’s pretty linear, but there are still 3 different endings to see depending on your choices during the game.

Play ‘Last Tuesday’ here!

Ren’py is great! Glad to have learned a bit about that tool. I posted my source code on github as well, tho it’s probably a bit naive since this is my first time using Ren’py.

This LD was a really good experience for me. It’s the first one I’ve done & I’m glad I had a framework like Ren’py to use so that I ended up focusing on it more as a short-term writing challenge than a coding challenge. There were several moments in which I wanted to discard the story I had in order to pursue some new story that occurred to me & seemed more interesting in the moment but, because of the time limit, I had to just keep going on the track I had chosen. So that was an interesting constraint — I hope it made for an interesting game!