State of development

I think it would be correct if I would share my thoughts and set certain goals at the beginning of each development cycle of a new game version. I apologize at once for my English, it is quite different from Belarusian, so I often have to use a translator.

First of all, Five-Year Plan:

-The game will combine both extensive character development and the management and development of your own settlement.

-In the game, there will be choices that will affect further events, and which will eventually lead to different endings.

-There will be several romance options. (yeah boii)

-There will be memes and references.

-The game will balance between serious storytelling and non-serious comic or erotic scenes.

A very important thing that I learned during development is that you can spend your time and resources in literally any direction. And there is almost no limit to perfection. You can spend hours and hours working on the dialogues, you can play other games for days to understand how to borrow some nice mechanics and bring them into the game, you can balance abilities and enemies, and so on. 

But it's the limited time and resources that force you to make choices. So I have to give up certain aspects of the game to do more important things.

For now, I think it's best to focus on the game mechanics because these things are at the core of the game and there's no point in adding tons of content to a game with a shaky foundation that's just not fun to play (Although that doesn't usually stop AAA game developers, lol).

So, the goals themselves:

-Battle animations

Static sprites with a little breathing animation are cool, of course, but for now, I think battles are really dull. Considering that you also have to fight identical opponents, it's just necessary to make the battles more dynamic. 

-Dynamic change of day and night. And dynamic lighting accordingly

This system will open many doors for me. I'll be able to link different events to the time of day, link events to different dates, it'll just be cool to see the lighting on the maps change as you go along. 

But at the same time, it will create a bunch of new problems, mostly I think it will be bugs. Also, for example, there could be difficulties if the scene outside is drawn with daylight and you're there for some reason at night, I have to manage to adjust the environment and time just for the scenes going on there. And a lot of other things. 

But still, it has to be done, even though it's 20 years old technology, it takes the game to the next level in some way.

-Battle improvement

I'm not sure, but if I have time, I'll try to "separate" opponents in battle, if there is more than one. And make some changes to the battle interface accordingly. This will make the battles more interesting.

-Content

As I said earlier, for now, I have to concentrate on other aspects. But for me,  in each update, the minimum amount of content is a new location, a few new enemies (3-4) and as many scenes respectively. Also, there will be a new party member surely. 

According to the story I have to create another small settlement, but here I'm not sure yet, since settlements require a lot of characters, and given all the responsibilities and deadlines, I can't say for sure if they will be or not. But I'll try to give my best.

-Spells, items and balance

It's already hard to balance the game with all the few features I've added. Balance of the game is actually crucial for the right experience. Many game developers spend most of their time only on balance, to make the game hard and yet, rewarding. But for now, I won't focus on it at all. The enemies will be pretty easy just so you can get through it to the end. Just because I already said, there's no point in building a roof on a house if it's standing on three wobbly branches.

-Art and "love scenes"

It's the main reason why for now I can't focus on other aspects, just because of practice. I'm spending a lot of time on sketching, character design, studies and I can surely see progress, comparing new works to the old ones. When I created some nice pictures I felt such progression, that I wanted to redraw all previous stuff right away. And still, I'm not so confident in it. I still have so much to learn and I will continue to learn, just to make the game better and better in all aspects.

As for the scenes, it's hard to say for now how I want them to look in the future. I thought about animation, I even tried to do so, but I'm doing everything on my laptop with a ten-year-old processor, so for now, I won't even try to start "After effect" or similar programs. Right now I have some "audio materials" for the scenes, so I will be doing them the same way until I want to make big changes.

If you have read this far, I thank you. It's important to me that someone is interested in all this.