Progress report.

I have been looking at game engines, and Ren'Py is interesting enough that I am plugging through codeacademy's tutorials on how to use it.

I looked into screen sizes and resolutions, and decided to use the Samsung Galaxy Pro's 1024x600 as my minimum legible size. Folks can make things bigger, but I will try to make all pages readable and useable at that resolution on a seven-inch screen. Oh, and I do not like scroll bars.

I am mapping non player characters to each other and to specific locations. I think I will end up building the first Beta with only one or two locations and only those characters who play a role. Other characters may be seen, but won't be interacted with. I am also working on what I call my Russian Novel chart. Why that name?  When reading Dostoevsky and his buddies, where everyone has three names and many of them are jawbreakers, the reader begins to think of R-dude, S-dude and so on. I want to make sure that all my npcs and all my Anthropomorphic Manifestations have distinctive names (David Weber's recent novels haveplots that involve places called Monica, Meyers, Maya, Mesa, and at least one other location beginning with M.)  I also want to make sure that they are all visually distinctive. This may break down as players start to throw transformation items at npcs as well as at themselves, but I will do my best to control the number of people and faces to keep track of.

I have sketched out a few more scenes and encounters.

Finally, I have been sketching some concept art for the GUI and characters.

Here is an early draft of the GUI for pages that mix sequential art, some spot art, and about 170 words of text in a 1024x600 pixel window.

My current thought is that a number makes a decision, a letter provides information.

The numbered buttons on the right are choices. The letters on the bottom and the time-location boxes at the top are intended to be constant. The bottom boxes will open up more detailed information when clicked/touched/typed.

I have not yet decided how that information will appear.