Four more weeks until the end of the semester! I hope everyone is hanging in there! Since Dr.Cody mentioned that it was okay for us to write about our progress on our projects so far, this is what this week’s blog is all about.

The whole online process has been stressful, but I was finally able to work on my Creative Project last weekend. My idea was to use the Ren’Py visual novel maker to create a dating simulator. It wasn’t hard to understand the basics of how to use Ren’Py because they had a clear tutorial of how things worked, but the web page it linked to was out of date and hard to follow. I ended up following a lot of YouTube videos to see how the program itself worked together. A great thing about this program is that it uses Python to create the basis of a visual novel game, but the user themselves do not need to learn how to code.

Now, I already had a plot and an idea of what my characters would look like, but one problem that bothered me was the art consistency. It’s not hard to find someone to commission, but I’m a broke college student trying to get by. So I spent the first day of the working process trying to find free characters and scenes that would fit my story. After a very very long time I decided to look around for programs that would allow me to create my own visual novel characters. The closest I came to doing that was using mobile apps where you can create your own avatar.

Then I worked on the dialogue. I realized it was kind of impossible to have a complete story, so I opted to have at least three chapters with the last chapter being a cliff hanger. I wanted to recreate the notion that if you wanted to see the rest, you would have to pay for the next part of the game (I know that’s really shitty but that’s what a lot of otome games do). I’m not a creative person either, but I didn’t want my story to follow otome games completely with their cringe and weak main character. As I wrote and edited everything out multiple times, I found the story going a bit differently than what I planned (guess I’ll have to wait for the next progress presentation to get some opinions).

So far I’ve only completed Chapter One, which is the introduction to everything. I’m going to be working on Chapter Two and hopefully finish Chapter Three next week so I can start on the Research Project. I decided to split both so that I can at least finish one project (I have 3 other coding projects and 1 writing project due for other classes so I have to distribute all the work stress fully). I really wanted to start on the Research Project, which talks about how game mechanics affect the way a player thinks. I’m going to be focusing on League of Legends since all my friends talk about it and I’m interested how this game could amass such worldwide attention.