My idea for the game is that you play as an initially formless being that can embody/possess different organisms. By living through multiple characters’ lives, you get to both make decisions in their body and also see what repercussions those choices have on other characters and the environment.
However, I didn’t have time to fully flesh out a story. So for class today, the prototype that I brought was a proof-of-concept exposition for my character done in RenPy. On a black screen, I wrote a monologue for the exposition from the formless to embodying a farm animal. I will likely extend this intro by having that animal move into a village where there are human characters to empathize with. During the playtest, I shared the RenPy game and I also prepared a broad summary of my premise so I could get feedback.
I playtested with Saharat! The notes that I remember:
- He said that the parts of the exposition dialogue where it was short snippets of description was nice to read. It contrasted with his information-heavy game. We agreed that it was definitely good to have a mix of both long and short dialogue depending on the context.
- The RenPy convention of left-clicking to progress, right-clicking for menu and the buttons at the bottom were initially confusing because he had never used the platform before. I think it’s worth considering adding a just-in-case cheat sheet on how to use RenPy in my final submission.
- I think he had a decent reaction to the Irasutoya clip art? I think it’s a good placeholder graphic for things that I don’t have a sprite for yet. In the future I am hoping to draw at least some sprites for my characters.
What I want to get done by next checkpoint:
- Write out a minimally complete branch of the story (e.g. embody a character, make a choice)
- Figure out branching and variables if I want to change the state of the world based on a character’s choices.
