100 Plays!

Thank you all so so much for over one hundred plays! It means the world to me that more than one hundred people decided to play the little game I've been working on. I hope you all enjoyed it, and if you did, I'd encourage you to leave a rating and come join other fans in the community Discord server. 

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is a niche game that's impacted a lot of people my age with its fairy tales about a world only inhabited by Pokemon. It's full of emotional stories about friends, sacrifice, and unconditional love that, to me, taught me that a good friend is one who believes in the good they see in you more than the bad other people will say. During those times as children when our personalities are forming, this game series taught me, through example, that friends can care and be emotional with each other, things I wasn't sure boys were allowed to do.

This kind of deep and unconditional friendship stuck with me - Red Rescue Team was, after all, the first game and possibly the first story to make me cry. I hoped that, in this little experiment, I could attempt to recapture that mood, that energy of flawed or uncertain characters believing in each other unconditionally.

But, as an adult, I also knew that even that can only go so far - the games never really tackled it as far as I knew, but there are certain breaches of trust that shouldn't be forgiven so easily. So I tried to craft characters with forgivable flaws, but flaws nontheless - Cinna's hunger, Alya's pride. Tate was hard, because I knew I wanted a peeping tom angle, but I also knew that I was toying the edge of forgivable with this element. There are rules for this kind of element in this story, and in future ones - acts of perversion are either willingly allowed or even instigated by the second party, though perhaps not openly expressed as such; or they're explicitly and openly bad, with no in between. Harvey is meant to be an example of this - attempting to advance on a situation where he can get an advantage leads to his defeat.

My greatest fear with this project is that the story is rejected for having this plot element, but in a way, I want the stories I grew up with to grow up with me, and including a romantic and even overtly attraction-based plot helps me include the kinds of stories I also want to write. I'm playing up a cartoonish element with it and would never encourage Tate's behavior, but I do hope that his idiocy gives readers the correct level of eye-rolling that I intended. As mentioned in the story, he genuinely cares for Cinna, and while I'm not sure if I should include a confrontation from her about Tate's peeping, if I did, Cinna would be willing to forgive him if he would just work past his fear of rejection and told her how he really felt.

A lot of this post is about the story, because I've been doing a lot of thinking of where I want it to go next. At the moment, I'm focusing all my energy into finishing college and getting a degree so I can begin to get something of a stable income for myself, so don't expect a new game anytime soon, sorry. But I'd also like to discuss the code as well! Ren'Py is a fantastic engine that really lets people like me get exactly what we want from our games. The HTML port is a little rough but it does work (if it doesn't, please tell me) and there's always the downloadable versions which I've tested to work on their respective operating systems. The fact that Ren'Py has the infrastructure needed for me to build a chunk of code that can make the characters move their mouths in certain ways when certain things are happening is astounding and wonderful for a person like me who's interested in making Visual Novels more than just a PowerPoint Presentation (fun fact, my first game was made in a Power Point Presentation).

I appreciate that tools like this are both free to use and free to release a game with. Tom and the community have been incredibly helpful whenever I had a question, and I've learned a lot that I'd like to include in future projects, related to this story or not. I find coding for a Visual Novel to be like directing a stage play, and I enjoy the visual element that the code provides. While I was nervous going into it, having come from Tyrannobuilder which is heavy in UI, I found that by braving the code I could make a more detailed experience.

And finally, I couldn't have done any of this without the artists I worked with. Bauerklos Music and TGH were generous in allowing me to use their covers of Mystery Dungeon songs in the game, and nothing in the game would look like anything without the amazing Nyanhou and KaijuKid. I'm happy that KaijuKid in particular could pick up the specific kind of layering needed to make the puppet animations work and still make it look like his style in the end, I'm happy that it ended up looking as good as it did.

Of course, thank you as well for playing through this silly little Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Fanfiction. It means the world to me that a thing I made, people enjoyed. This is the first Visual Novel project that I fully funded, and because of that it's the first project that got finished and that I could release. For the longest time, not even being able to make a proper Proof of Concept for VN Projects frustrated me, made me feel like I was doing something wrong, but seeing that people like the game I made, I'm happy and excited for what could come next.

Truly, thank you. I hope you enjoy Fan Dungeon and I hope you stick around for future projects!

-Ramble