The Witch's Black Cat [NaNo18] [Fantasy]

[PKLucky]

Synopsis

Abandoned by his previous owner, a black cat is all alone and caught in the rain, cold and hungry. A young girl finds the cat and takes him in as her own. Turns out, the young girl is a witch in training! However, she's still new to magic, so her mother refuses to let her keep the cat as her familiar. So, the witch and her mother work out a deal: if the witch can prove herself to be responsible, she can keep the cat and make him her familiar once she's more experienced.

Characters

Whiskers
A black cat who's cautious around humans due to treatment from his previous owner.

Aria
A young girl and witch. She a bright outlook on life and always works hard to achieve her goals. There are times she overworks herself, however.

Aria's Mother
An experienced witch with a warm heart. Cares about her daughter's and her new friend's well-being and wants what's best for both of them.

This is the first VN I've ever made, and I plan on making it all by myself from top to bottom! (Except for music; I'll be looking around online for royalty free music to use.)
I've been posting my progress on my game development blog on Tumblr: http://pkgamedev.tumblr.com/tagged/nanoreno-2018 I'll be cross-posting the progress posts I make there over here. I'll be posting screenshots whenever possible and I would love feedback on what I have so far!

[azaraih]

Oh hey, I saw this on tumblr earlier and thought the concept was really cute! I'm curious, is the cat a regular cat or some kind of magical talking cat? Also that's cool you're doing the whole thing on your own, good luck with your development!

[PKLucky]

Thank you very much! And the cat is a magical talking anthropomorphic cat

[PKLucky]

Today's Progress:

Couldn’t get any character sketches up for Aria, but I managed to get the opening cutscene and ending cutscene dialogues scripted out in Ren’Py as well as learn about how conditional branches in the program work.
Tomorrow, I’ll draw up character sketches for Aria and possibly Aria’s mother if I have the time.
I’ll also try to get the UI of the main game mechanic working as well. It’s nothing too big. Just using sliders to adjust certain variables. I'll probably sketch up a mock up of this tomorrow as well.

[PKLucky]

NaNoReno Progress Report: Day 6

Drew some sketches of Aria (top) and her mother (bottom). Didn’t get around to programming today due to being at work for a full day today.

I do weekly art streams on my YouTube channel, so every week starting tomorrow until the end of NaNoRenO, I’ll be doing streams where I’ll be working on The Witch’s Black Cat!

Stream will start on my channel PKLucky at 7:30pm CST

[PKLucky]

I'm gonna be streaming myself working on The Witch's Black Cat! Stream is finished!

NaNoReno Progress Report: Day 7
It’s a week into the jam, and I’ve got a partially finished UI! The sliders at the right will let you allocate Energy Points into what activities Ari and Whiskers will do for the day: Study Math, Practice Spells, Care for Whiskers, and Nap. Doing activities will increase Ari’s stats.

The bar at the top shows your Fatigue Points which will accumulate the more you work. If you max out on FP, your EP the following day will be cut in half, so less time for activities! Napping will decrease your FP, so make sure you let Ari and Whiskers get plenty of rest!

Programming will probably be the hardest thing for me since formatting and being thorough and accurate with what I type will be the death of me :’D. But, I’ve done C programming in college and some concepts carry over to programming in Ren’Py.

For tomorrow, I’ll need to troubleshoot the sliders. They won’t slide for some reason. I’m gonna compare my code to the Ren’Py tutorial’s code and see if I’m missing anything. If anyone out there can help me troubleshoot this, I’d greatly appreciate it! After that, I’ll be drawing up character sprites for Whiskers and possibly Ari.

[azaraih]

Looks like you're making some good progress! Aria looks really cute

I built some sliders recently so I might be able to help troubleshoot if you need help. Are they supposed to adjust the stats between a minimum number and a maximum number, or do they need to do something more complicated?

[PKLucky]

Thanks! And yup, the sliders are supposed to adjust stats between a minimum and maximum value.

[azaraih]

Here's an example of one I did, you can use VariableValue to have it adjust a variable. This one just changes the r_value variable from 0 to 255. I think you could also put a variable instead of the 255 if you want to be able to change the maximum depending on the amount of energy points she has that day. Hopefully this helps!

Code: Select all

    bar value VariableValue("r_value", 255):
        xpos 0.45
        yalign 0.2

[PKLucky]

Yup, that did the trick! Thank you so much!

[PKLucky]

NaNoReno Progress Report: Day 8
I got the sliders to work! (Shoutout to azaraih for their help!) I also added a tutorial section for the game and Confirm and Reset buttons to the UI (Reset is there for debugging purposes.)
One thing I want to work on is making sure the values shown are properly updated on the screen. The overall stats get updated a day late and the values shown above the sliders don’t update along with the sliders. So, I’ll be doing troubleshooting that.
Character sprites will be put on the back burner until I can get the programming properly figured out.

[PKLucky]

NaNoReno Progress Report: Day 9

So, I fiddled a bit with the code for the sliders to get the Fatigue values working. Still didn’t manage to get the variables to update properly, so I decided to work on something else for a bit.
I ended up creating three little tunes for the OST. Just played my ocarina and made soundtracks for the opening cutscene and the planning screen theme: https://soundcloud.com/pklucky/sets/the ... ck-cat-ost
Tomorrow is gonna be more fiddling with the code. If I need a break from coding, I’ll probably be drawing character sprites.

[PKLucky]

NaNoReno Progress Report: Day 10

I GOT THE SCREEN TO WORK kinda. I decided to use buttons instead of sliders instead because the sliders weren’t cooperating well with the EP value. I’m starting to implement the Fatigue mechanic, but I need the EP to be an integer instead of a float. (I have tried using int() but the EP is still being calculated as a float, and the rounding was making the screen show the incorrect values.)
EDIT: Okay, so I just had to reload the game with the script changes, so everything's good now :'D

So, tomorrow’s gonna involve more code troubleshooting and hopefully drawing things?
FINALLY GONNA START DOING CHARACTER SPRITES TOMORROW

[AuCrowne]

This sounds interesting~

Or maybe I'm just drawn in by cats and witches > u<

[PKLucky]

This sounds interesting~

Or maybe I'm just drawn in by cats and witches > u<

Haha, thanks! I hope you'll enjoy the final product!

Also, a testable version of The Witch’s Black Cat is out! No visuals and no final soundtrack yet. If you play the test version, please report to me your stat spread at the end of the game. I need to know this for balancing purposes.
Download here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ful_bA ... sp=sharing