Alright, not too much progress this time around, but I’ve got the visual novel part of the game figured out. You may now click through a little bit of beginner dialogue that I set up to bring a player into the world. You may not do anything else though, since I did not get to the part of integrating it into the game.

Visual Novel

So the idea was to have you talking as the game simulates everything in the background. Every line of dialogue that plays, a tick of time goes by. My hopes is that it won’t pressure the player to read fast, but still allows the dialogue to progress the game and turn those fact-finding choices into a bit of a tradeoff.

When the conversation ends, you’ll be prompted to proceed to another point of the game. You’re usually expected to talk while traveling, or just a quick conversation before returning to your map and looking to see what still needs to be done.

As the story is now though, I’m trying to set it up in such a way that most beginning actions will take place through the dialogue screen. That means talking to Eri in order to send adventurers off on quests, and talking to a lot of the NPCs already in the world to find out more about the situation before proceeding.

Next Update

So in order to get all of what I just said done, I need to reconfirgure a lot of the simulation to acomadate the actual player like they’re a character in the world (moving around and talking and such). Which means moving away from the previous semi-godlike play format like Rimworld and more towards a traveling character like in 80 Days. A lot of next period will be setting up the interface between the dialogue screen and the actual simulator. So that’ll be fun.