My not-visual novel has four different scenes, of which three and a half have been written out. I'll finish the last one today and come in under deadline! Not what I was expecting, and not half bad for someone who's been incapacitated by illness for much of this month.

Now, my "story" isn't so much a story and feels more like the extended commentary I often post here on Tildes. At present it's heavy-handed -- less of a narrative and more of characters collectively grinding an axe. I think over the course of the next week I need to "soften" it up -- add some humanness and nuance back into it. It'll still be fundamentally didactic, but hopefully I can at least prevent some readers from rolling their eyes as they make their way through it.

I also, from the technical side, am going to play around with the engine, as I'm using it pretty inefficiently at the moment. After my original plans got derailed by feature creep, I prioritized writing over all else, but that means I have some "bad habits" for how the story is written in Ren'Py that I hope I can address. For example, I'm using something "NVL-mode" where the character dialogue takes up the whole screen and has multiple responses shown all at once, instead of the more standard layout of only having one character's words shown at a time, down at the bottom of the screen. I chose this because I scrapped any visuals for the project, so it didn't make sense to keep it in the standard format and have 80% of the screen be blank.

Unfortunately, I don't think I've implemented NVL-mode well, and am at this point having to hardcode in screen-clears approximately every five lines. If I go back and add dialogue to scenes, I have to adjust the clears I currently have to make sure everything displays well. Choices also seem to have issues in NVL-mode, sometimes prompting a fade in/out which I didn't request, and sometimes overlapping dialogue instead of appearing below it. I've gotten around these by always clearing the screen before giving them, but it would be nice to have the choices more organically embedded in the text. Whether all of these issues are my lack of understanding of how NVL-mode works or whether some of what I've run into are simply limitations of Ren'Py remain to be seen. What I have currently is absolutely readable at present; it's just not ideal, so I might spend some of next week trying to simply refit what I've written into a better display system.

As for other event ideas, I have a couple that I think could be really neat, but here's one I've been kind of throwing around for a while in my head. I came up with it simply because I'm someone who gets significant decision paralysis when faced with too many choices, so I very much like it when someone else can narrow my decisions for me.

Media Circles

A lot of people like the idea of "book club" type setups, but they can be hard to keep up with, particularly when the choice of media is something you have to go out of your way for. I feel like everyone now has their own backlogs of books, movies, music, etc. that they want to enjoy, so trying to get everyone under one roof for one particular piece of media doesn't work well.

So, my idea for a "media circle" is this: let's say 10 people all like reading and want to challenge themselves to read five books in a month. Each person posts 10-15 books they want to read, and participants are randomly arranged in a circle. So, Person A would choose the five books from Person B's list for Person B to read. Person B would choose the five books from Person C's list for Person C to read. And so on, until Person J chooses the five books from Person A's list for Person A to read.

This is the most generic form of the "media circle," but it can be jazzed up in a lot of different ways. For example, we could focus on specific genres, we could give certain criteria for book choices (similar to the "reading challenges" that are already out there), and we can even fold in outside choice (e.g. based on the books posted, Person B has to choose a book they think Person C would like that isn't on person C's list).

The idea also scales from little to big, and could be run over the course of a weekend, a week, a month, etc. It also works for any type of media, so ~anime could do their own media circle while ~movies does a separate one. These could even be recurring. Imagine a movie circle each weekend, with people signing on to participate by Thursday each week and the circle randomly chosen each Friday.

This setup allows people to continue to consume the media they like, but with a little gamey, community twist. I also think it can help with follow-through, as I'm bad about leaving a book behind when it's just me pushing myself to read it, but if there's a deadline and social pressure ("Person D hand-picked this book for me!") I'm more likely to get through it.