Elspeth's Garden Cutscene AutoBattle

After many months of slow progress, I'm back chugging along at the main game.
The running build is currently over 200mb since it contains most of the art assets.
The problem is that I've been blogging for almost a year and yet there is barely any actual 'game' to speak of. The build is just a collection of various playable maps at various stages of development.
It is hoped I'll be able to string those levels together with a coherent structure.

Making this game is a very different experience from making a conventional linear experience such as a visual novel. I can safely say now that majority of my time has been spent scripting. I suppose that's what you call a 'real game' with lots of animations and interactivity. Assembling the level shown in the video above took me the whole day.

This has been a very asset-heavy project and I don't think I can tackle another game of this scope again.
I have come to the conclusion that what makes video games expensive are the animations. Without animations (or using just engine-driven movements), most games will feel like puzzle games where you slide blocks around or shoot at abstract representations.

My main worry is that so far the game play is not yet actually 'fun'. It works, it's choppy, but until I have everything needed to build all the stages, it perpetually seems like a series of experiments.

I hope that once the build is asset-complete I can tweak until something uniquely emergent comes along.
Like from watching the video, I suppose the context of the situation is already explained -- that's all Jake's Battle Engine running on auto-play.  I'm hoping I can illustrate most of the story situations with minimal forced directives -- rather just setting up a general theme and letting the engine play out the situation.

Isometric = Browser Game?

It seems with the quality of browser games these days, I might have trouble selling a downloadable with isometric graphics.  Yes, the graphics are pretty.  And yes, this will be the first time any game using a visual novel engine will have graphics in this style.

But as technology advances, we have situations such as 2D platformers, which used to be arcade-only or on consoles for $70-80 back in the day, now relegated to freeware or Flash.  The expectation is high even for a game that dares charge $5.

Only a few years ago, many independent games made do with pre-rendered Poser models and they were selling up to $15 or even $35.  Nowadays, you have people like myself, spending thousands just to upgrade the quality and polish just to even be considered in the competition.

The story behind the bruhaha regarding Celestial Mechanica was that it was originally budgeted to be a sponsored Flash game, and failing to get sponsorship, decided to be a downloadable.  Were it an ad-supported (virtually "free") game, it would have cemented it's more deserving position as a good game -- not as great as Cave Story -- but still good.

In my case, I originally wanted to make downloadables, but the more I study the market (note I am really distancing myself with the close-knit visual novel scene and really trying to see if I can make it in the wider indie world), the more I am convinced that maybe I should just go for browser games with a downloadable option... either a mobile version or just a desktop version with a mobile price tag.  Old Home Labyrinth was originally conceived to be a browser Unity game on Kongregate, after all.  And the main game is being constructed with simple large UI buttons, keeping an Android release constantly in mind.

Maybe I might just release the games for free; spare myself the headache.  Who knows.  I just wanted to make my dream games, and in light of that, the projects will be successful.

One thing's for sure, I'm not going to embark on a personal project of this scope again.  By the time this is over, I would have made the equivalent of 'writing a novel' or whatever people did to attain fulfilment before the internet came along.