What are you working on?

[BB]

Well, exactly as the title says. What project or projects currently take up your “Doing A Thing” time? I considered putting this in the arts board, but nah lets make this a general Any Projects Thread.

For myself, I am currently laying down the groundwork for what will be a game project I intend to work on. About two years ago a friend approached me and asked if I'd like to work on a visual novel with her and we were very excited, but another project we were working on fell through and our VN project kinda got cancelled by silent agreement. But we had already thought over the barebones idea of what story we wanted to tell and I still really liked what we came up with, so I asked for permission to take the project on solo.

It's currently under the very descriptive title 'Magical Girl Game', but I'm considering the title 'Transformations' as a working, possibly final, title. We wanted to explore themes of love that are not specifically romantic- devotion, admiration, things like that. From a writing point of view, I've been hard at work building a world and characters to occupy it, but as it's a VN there needs to be connecting plot elements that I'm still trying to figure out. What's really sticking my gears is being unable to decide what kind of game it should be and if there should be branching paths- we originally had a 'romance' track for two characters and another track for both, but I'm not so sure that'll work with the stuff I've come up with since then.

From a gamedev POV, I've decided to use RPG Maker to build it. I know renpy is the go-to for VNs, but the kind of worldbuilding I want to do feels more manageable in an RPG engine- I'm looking at games like To The Moon as inspiration. I feel like it'll work better with that kind of presentation.

To that end, I've been building practice RPGs/VNs to learn the capabilities of the engine and get a strong grasp of how to program events. Of course, they've just released a new version which changes every single aspect of the engine, even using a totally new scripting environment (JS instead of Ruby) so that's frustrating! It does fix pretty much every issue I'd had with RPGM so far, though, so I'm definitely looking to get it asap. Expensive though!

That's my adventure so far. There's a lot of royalty-free music available for use in projects so I'm not worried about that, but... my crappy stick figures won't cut it, and I don't want to use any stock assets for the genuine article, you know? I need to figure out what I can do about art... but that can at least wait for much later on.