After finishing Pet I decided to work on NaNoRenO since it was the same time that it was starting. I did a tiny bit of planning the night before and ended up deciding to flesh out a project I was working on in bitsy a few years ago before I actually finished anything. It was a game about meeting some ghosts in a cemetery and then helping them get home.

I decided that ahead of Desideratum, I wanted to make sure I learned some new skills. The two things I decided to focus on were: puzzles and dialogue. Even if I don't end up making Desideratum in Ren'Py at this point, I know that designing puzzles and working on more code driven things, plus writing more dialogue, would help me with gaining those skills for making my larger projects. I also had never designed a puzzle in any of my games (beyond like, "making choices is a puzzle in and of itself."

This is the end of week one. During this time here's what I've done:

• I wrote and designed the characters. I haven't really worked on the main character yet, but they are kind of not as essential. They have a backstory, but I needed a LOT for these ghosts: dates of birth and death, ways to die, full names, stories about family, etc.
• I made a skeleton of the game in Ren'Py. This means I wrote out the following in its most simple form: intro, a map for the graveyard to look at graves, a puzzle map for the puzzles to "awaken" the ghosts, a simple dialogue tree, and a method to pick a ghosts, pick one of 8 locations, and for the game to know which ghost you've dropped off, and when you've dropped all of them off.
• I started writing! I started with Jackson, the youngest character who also died the most recently. I wrote about 2,000 words about his backstory, and I feel maybe there's 3,000 words in his story total. This means if I do 3k words for each character, it's at least 15k overall for the game.

Part of my intent when designing this game was that these conversations could be shorter or longer, and contain flashbacks or not, because I wanted to make the game a reasonable story. Honestly, what I have now is technically a working game. Is it good? No, but it does function and a player could make it through the whole thing and get some semblance of a story. I have to see how much I can complete before April 1. What this means is it could be 10k words long, or 50k words long, depending on how I end up feeling when I start writing the other five characters.

Things I have not started on:

• the music - I feel pretty good about what I can do for this game because I don't think there needs to be too many songs or noises, though I'd like to have some if I can figure it out
• the art - I have talked to some artists but I don't even know where to begin still, I am working on some of my own art which I'm using as placeholders but it's not the best and I'd like to do something more interesting!
• the endings/how does the story end - I *do* have ideas but I haven't built out how your choices change things

Finally, I'm attaching some REALLY preliminary images. I made all of this art myself (not that I'm THAT proud of it!) but it's really placeholder stuff. 

This one cracks me up. It's SO fucking preliminary and the locations of the things to click on is just me ripping off my own code from Desideratum. 

Yes, you can learn and borrow code from not just other developers, but also yourself.