Naradno Dev Log #1 - Intro & Stats

Hi everyone! I'm making a little dev log for a game I have in the works.

Welcome to Naradno! is an erotic visual novel about an exhibitionist Animal Crossing island, with a tiny version of the Disco Elysium skills. You've decided to buy a ticket to this island pretty much on a whim, and now you're gonna be neck deep in an extremely welcoming environment despite your social anxiety.

The project open in Godot / Some concept art showing Audie / The writing inside a scene script

It's made in Godot with C#, and I've been working on it since the start of February, so it's about 1 month old. So far:

• Most of the codebase is done; I can reasonably finish the game without touching it up too much.
• There's no art yet, except for some concepts and UI graphics.
• The writing is only barely started. I planned out the broad strokes but I'm still writing the first proper scene.

What did you say about Disco Elysium skills?

The 3 in-game stats: Mind, Body and Soul

Right, yes. I haven't played a lot of Disco Elysium, but the skill system instantly made an impression on me. The idea of having little different personalities inside you that gave you different info on situations was so cool I decided to put it in my game.

Now, DE has 24 skills, which is so fucking many!! It's way too many to put inside a little project like this, and some of them are specific to DE's setting and characters, so I was never gonna mirror them 1-to-1 in Naradno. Instead, I tried to boil everything down to its main components.

The Disco Elysium skills and roughly which Naradno stats they correlate to

What I came up with was:

• Mind: Your logical capability - your knack for remembering and stringing important information together. Helps you recall and extrapolate.
• Body: Your attunement to your physical body and senses. Helps you smell, hear, see, and feel the world around you objectively.
• Soul: Your emotional maturity, sensitivity and literacy. Helps you read how people, yourself included, feel and think.

I'm happy with these, they're super fun to write. And I'm glad to have the engine set up in a way that checking for them is really easy. I can make stats chime in with different information, choices and changes all over the place.

As the scene scripts are just imperative code, it's as simple as putting an if statement between lines

What's Next?

Well the code's in a pretty good spot. A few weeks ago I pivoted to working on the writing, but as it turns out I'm much more of a programmer and an artist than a writer... I'm having a lot of trouble getting the writing to "flow" out of me. It's still a really deliberate and manual process, I'm unable to autopilot the boring parts (like the connective tissue between scenes and general visual descriptions when nothing too exciting's happening). So that's been going slow.

Art's by far my strongest suit, so I'm gonna try to focus some more on getting the character design concepts done. Then portraits! The game's gonna have lots and lots of portraits so it'd be good to start as early as possible. But then again I won't know which portraits I need or don't until I write more scenes... maybe I can get away with just sketching them as I go.

Ok that's it for now smooch