It was another productive meeting. There's nothing like coming together to share thoughts and ideas. It really makes me feel that this project is truly a collaborative effort.
Our project is split between two parts. With my programmer, our main focus is to create a working prototype and explore the limits of the program we're using to build the game. With my co-writer, we're building a story so that by the time we are done prototyping, we can put everything together at once.
Progress on the prototype is solid. Basic features check out and it's really a matter of how complex we can push things. We have a solid workflow where I can send my friend the necessary material and he codes everything. From what he says, it's not too demanding, but I've tasked him to research and explore some more possibilities in Ren'Py. We can create conditional true/false branches with ease, but the more interesting prospect is being able to use "arrays" to store values in variables. We'll see whether or not it's possible next by week.
Instead of shooting for the moon, we're going to shoot for the roof. It's best to start small. With this in mind, our scenario will probably last around thirty minutes to an hour. We started off with a basic concept. Based on my friend's research into visual novels, we decided that our first project will revolve around "mystery." We hashed out a lot of different possibilities, but through some good discussion, we narrowed our goals.
In order to keep ourselves focused, we set a limit to these aspects of the story:
1. Only two characters
2. Five major scenes
3. Two different endings
In essence, there's really only one character. For obvious reasons, I'm not going to reveal the story details, but as we progress in our development, it should be fun to see how it all comes together.
