Ouuughhh I'm so sleepy. I also don't have any clean matching pairs of socks left for tomorrow. Instead of doing laundry, or any other chores I should get done, I spent half the day moping in bed. Don't even know why. I guess I haven't been going on walks as much as I'd like recently??

I had an idea for a Digimon Adventure style CYOA game a while back, and now it's stuck in my head. I think it would be really cool to make, but I wanted to go ham on the randomization aspect and I don't know if I have the chops to do that. I wouldn't do full randomization, that's not going to give anyone a satisfying story. It would be more like...

The first thing you do is pick your "crest" or maybe take a personality test like in Pokemon Dungeon. Then it would give you your designated Mon and a random group of kids who were connected to a different plot "seeds" that would determine how certain parts would play out. It sounds crazy typing it out but I can't stop thinking about it now.

I suppose this isn't the weirdest idea in the world. I mean, there's that one game... Our Life: Beginnings & Always. I've never played it but it looks like your choices in the first part drastically change the appearance and personality of the love interest in the second part. I know you can have him wear glasses or contacts. It's not really my cup of tea but I find the concept fascinating. I also know it took an extremely long time to make.

For my sanity I would have to make the game small. Like, really small. I was originally thinking something like a 12 episode anime but I've gotta go even smaller. 3 episode OVA size. I could make the first episode as a test run. Maybe get some extra writers on board. And maybe artists? My least favorite thing in visual novels is when it's super obvious that characters were done by different artists. I've seen it a few times, even in bigger projects... I don't care if they're from different games, the Namco Visual Novel looks like garbage because there's no consistency!!!

Well, if I did get other people on I'd have to either get or act as an art director. Ugh. And applicants would have to be 18+ because I do not want to corral teenagers, fuck that shit. Teenagers I love you but I am 30 to 40 years old and I do not need this.

Even if I did have people interested in helping me, it probably wouldn't work out because I don't work well with people. I'm a bit of a control freak, and I don't like having equal control over projects with others. I once was working on a visual novel with someone and just wanted to do the art, but they insisted I work on the story too and we had extremely different ideas of where we wanted things to go and it fell apart fast.

Now that I think about it, that lack of organization is probably why a lot, most non paid group projects fail. There's no art director, no one making sure work gets done and people stay on track. OR... the team is comprised of 99% artists who are also all idea guys who just want to think of scenarios but can't or don't want to learn how to code. Oh my god, that just reminded me of another visual novel project I joined. I was going to do backgrounds. Everyone was drawing art of the main characters and coming up with story beats and I was like, "okay, I can get started too. How much has been written so far?"

They hadn't even gotten 200 words into the project. BRO. I literally left right after I heard that. That's not a project that's a fucking play space. I'm not spending hours of my life on art for that.

Okay, that was a bit of a tangent, but I guess I can end this by saying if I did ask for help I'd probably have a decent amount of stuff done ahead of time. Like a nice juicy demo or a small finished product that could be expanded on with extra help. I don't know. I need to keep working on Nocti.

It sure would be awesome if I could work on more than one project at a time...

Current Mood: Physically tired Mentally wired