Seeing the asks by the beleaguered would-be thief just trying to get by as a successful antagonist in the Sacrarium universe made me giggle. I can imagine them chewing a pencil while frowning down at a flowchart of possible evilisms with all the options crossed out and labelled 'DEATH'!
Can you tell us a bit about Project Den? I haven't seen it in the pinned post before!
There are so many options for villainy! Just...not those options.
Project Den will end up being one of two things story wise.
It's going to be a venture into IF/CYOA style formatting for sure. The question is gonna be the genre.
Which will either be:
That one game I babbled about before about the routes being who the kids you take care of ship you with (4 Routes + 1 Acearo route focused more on found family). Each kiddo has a specific person they want you to end up with, and I just find them adorable. It'd be in a fantasy setting, which is why I pause since I do want to dabble more in non-fantasy to scratch some other genre itches.
A zombie apocalypse game set far, far into a world where a heavily mutated virus continues to be a problem. It's set far enough that previous countries and cities have crumbled, groups have fought one another, and a new order has been established to slowly recover. It would have 3 romanceable + 1 Acearo option for just doing your job well. I like the romanceables in it. I just need to squint at the setting more because that requires more hardline lore rules and what not. Figuring out how to properly dismantle and remantle countries and what not.
Of the two, I am slightly leaning more towards the zombie one because I have always loved the genre, and the romanceables in it are some ancient ass OCs of mine that I wouldn't mind dusting off to give some loving to.
Haven't decided yet though.
It's something for me to pick over while at work, because I have sadly discovered I cannot outline or write Sac from my phone T_T (I can only character plot + rough outline) The screen is too small. I'm too used to my giant ass monitor, making it way easier for me to scroll back and check things. Thus, I can't write for Contego or outline for Resisco while in cubicle hell.
So this game would be something I could work on during my downtime at work to keep my brain in the writing mood and get errant plot bunnies and ideas out of my head to declutter it for when I hunker down for Sac.
For anyone wondering why I need the extra screen space to write & properly outline, it's because I write & full outline directly into VSC. My process goes:
Rough Outline (literally just when major convos happen) > Proper outline (flesh out each scene more to hit key points + include code like affection score effects and other conditionals) > Write (write everything out, adjusting the code as needed. Inputting scene transitions + setting up the frame work for CGs) > Sprite Hell (Adding the Sprites & their expressions) > Sound Hell (adding in any and all sound + music. I do this last because adding it in too early makes me go crazy when trying to bug fix)
Needless to say, I'm flicking between .rpys and cross referencing things all of the time. Doing that from my tiny A54 is impossible.
I still wanna keep the writer's muscles from getting too noodly though. Thus me wanting to work on this. I think I'll challenge myself to actually write it in Ellipsus too. That way I can practice just usual script writing without integrating the code into it automatically.