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.