May 30, 2024

The more I was thinking about "what's next", the more discouraged I become.  I admit that creating the battle system was awesome fun.  It really was.  Despite all the pitfalls I encountered and the break I took to recharge a bit, I always knew exactly what I wanted to do with the system.  Now that it's mostly complete?  I really need to literally put pen to paper.  I need to create a wireframe of a story.  I have the opening and ending in my head.  Everything in between?  A completely blank canvas.  Let's not even talk about pixel art and chip tunes.  

My point is, this is where my updates will really become less frequent I think.  And it's almost certainly because of creative block and/or not being able to create worthy pixel art and music.  I am somewhat less concerned about the story.  Worst case, my story will be a bit "meh".  I mean, my goal is to be inspired by Dragon Warrior 1 and Pokemon Gen 1.  In reality, neither of those are deep games with lots of world building.  With each area I build, my goal will be to populate it with the bare minimum required NPCs to advance the story.  Once the full story is complete and functional, I can work to implement additional houses, non-essential NPCs, etc.  That is a LONG way off though.  

Anyhow, my accomplishments today were to implement the "Key Items" feature.  To do this, I mirrored what I did for sub command moves.  That is to say -- SUBMAPS!  I'm really starting to dig those.  So while you can't use items in battle, you can pick up various items along the way.  Right now, I have 2 items -- a locket and a leash.  You receive the locket in the opening "cut scene" and when selected you see a picture of your kidnapped sister.  The leash I don't have actually doing anything yet; however, think of this as your warp item.  The plan is to let you use this to teleport to certain places you visit in the game (so the player needs to ensure they explore!).  But for the purposes of this update, if you select the key items from the menu, it loads a new scene.  The scene loads a background with the item picture and text on it.  Like with the commands, I have set things up so that if you have not obtained the key item, the logic does not display it.  

Additionally, I also created my opening "cut scene".  

Really, about the only "to do" items I have left before I start the story and world building are:

• I can't successfully/correctly seem to back out of my sub menu script.
• I have room for 2 more skills/commands to be learned.  I don't know what they should be, so I haven't gotten that far yet.  Maybe something like 'snuggle', 'brush fur', etc that can raise your cuteness but make you lose a turn.  Who knows.
• Music / sound FX (good luck here ravioli man)
• pixel art / character designs (also good luck here)

Not to minimize the remaining work because I think it'll take me FAR longer to do any/all of that than to get where I have so far, but once I can actually DO the music and pixel art, the rest is at least feasible.

ANYHOW, i've included a video for my first go at the opening scene and a quick view of the key items menu.