Gameplay Modules and date for the next update

Hey, everyone! Hope you're all doing well!

After a considerable amount of testing (most of which didn’t go as planned, especially considering the idea of using Godot and Renpy with assets) and tinkering with mechanics, I had to think hard about how to implement the era mechanics due to a significant issue: saving the game and continuity.

Honestly, it’s a problem related to game duration. I want each module to last around 4 hours without side activities, with an 80k-word plot. If I put everything into one game, it becomes quite massive. From the tests I’ve conducted with the texts I’ve been producing, Choice Script starts to behave poorly because it wasn't designed to handle bilingual texts. Now, with the systems I’ve separated for each era, the files are becoming a Codex, and it's getting increasingly difficult for the tool to behave as it should. I can't quite explain what’s happening since I lack the technical knowledge, but commands arbitrarily start working sometimes and other times not. Random data stops give new values, and the routines I set to clean and regulate things by eras stop working at certain points but work perfectly in isolation.

I often face issues with the longevity of the text, and I need to leave a file for each language. In a short project, this isn’t a problem, but in something long-term, it has become quite problematic.

So, the gameplay modules will come as preliminary content to the main game. This means Nihil Obstat will be the main game and what will be published it will be anthologies. When the anthologies are ready, there will be a special field where you can randomly or specifically decide what happened in each era, having to, unfortunately, note down a password sequence for the decisions to be made. Pretty retro, right? Yes, but this is how I circumvented the issues.

Here’s an image of the order in which the modules will be applied:

My initial idea was to bring the game era by era, facing the leviathan with your protagonist. The problem, here in terms of scale, is that it is too much data for me to manage alone at the moment. In the future, I will condense all the games into just one. For now, they will be separate things.

Only in Nihil Obstat will there be a customizable protagonist, in each module the focus will be on a figure, event or personality from each era. In the modules, you will play with civilizations that will affect the way and the dynamics that the your customizable protagonist will have to face the leviathan.

I believe that in 14 days (08/16) the first tribal game module will be available.

See you soon!

Edit: Well, it's now 08/26 and the module still hasn't come out. Ironically, when I mentioned that I would release Tempus Libertatis and gave a date, some things really didn't go as expected.

Let me tell you what my idea was; Every month, so for 7 months, I would release a game in a jam. And it's been great! I found a good text format, a way to transpose the text in English and Portuguese in the most fluid way possible, but since I'm accumulating pending things I have a list of projects with an average of 25k+ words each, each with its own set of rules and universe, which I forget when I return to it.

If I keep going at the current pace with "Nihil Obstat," I can’t see how I could manage everything without burning out. I usually set aside time at night since I’m a night owl, working from 9 PM until 1 or 2 AM, writing, testing, and playing around in this universe. But I’m feeling creatively fatigued, and when I look at how I might approach things, I think it’s wise to take a step back, breathe, handle the loose ends I’ve left "for later," and return to "Nihil Obstat" when I’m ready. For now, the download is blocked until I resolve the issues.

There are times when I feel linguistically and artistically inexperienced in expressing what I feel and want to convey. I’ve been experimenting with Ren'Py to get more solid visual references instead of relying purely on text. I like ChoiceScript—a lot, actually—but some things that take me hours to figure out how to express might be better conveyed with an icon or a background reference. That realization has been a bit disappointing because it makes me feel like my current writing style and approach to designing scenes have a serious pacing problem. I’ve been searching for writing tips and methods, but some are overly methodical, and I’m not sure I want to follow that path.

Anyway, I’ll be rethinking all these elements, taking a breather, and trying to untangle this mess I’ve gotten myself into so that I can focus on just one project at a time without having to set deadlines as if it were a job. After all, I got into this whole Jam scene as a hobby, and the mindset I’ve had lately doesn’t feel like a hobby at all. 

Giving dates has been a potent poison, but here I go again. Between 10 and 45 days, I should have a more definitive position on how to proceed, not with the project that has a clear path, but with my style, methodology and how exactly I want to approach the hooby of creating with Game Jams in mind.