Just wanted to say: Enjoyed the game!
If you later check this thread Pyksies, out of curiousity: You talk a lot about building the system you're using for future games. With Mercanoid, did you start with a story that you wanted to tell first (y'know, with Mio grappling with their emerging sentience and growth through all that despite their challenging circumstances), or did you start with the system you were building first and then decided to come up with a story for it?
Glad you enjoyed!
I started the system first, as the first version of it dates back to at least 2016, on another engine (Quest). It went through a few revisions there, then I stalled out due to Quest's development similarly stalling (happily, as of last week, its original creator has returned with plans to overhaul it! Best of luck to 'em).
I eventually got over my hurdles with Twine and began porting the framework there for another revision, and I needed examples for a few things, so I came up with Mio (who is based on a test character from a long-ago cancelled earlier game of mine) and a short simple game about going through an infested facility. 2 trash fights and 3 bosses was the plan. A lot of the systems I created are/were very janky approximations of how they 'should' be done, for but the game's limited scope I decided it was that, or realistically nothing as I would burn out trying to learn too much at once, pfft.
Not wanting to make yet another setting to the growing pile of them I had in my head, notes, and half-started projects, MERCANOID ended up gluing a lot of said settings into one, and by taking place in the future it helped me figure out a rough timeline of things from start to 'finish'. This is the Glowing World, and it will be the setting for my major games going forward. The scope of MERCANOID increased during development, either because I wanted to show a feature off, or because I just got an idea and had the energy to implement it.
Since MERCANOID, I've learned a lot more about object-oriented programming, so I'm improving a lot of the Framework. My new game,
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, benefits from a lot of framework improvements, though it's also a trial in scaling back my RPG mechanics for smaller games - I feel that a few of the things I included in MERCANOID (as a showcase of my framework) end up selling themselves short, as they don't scale well at this scope of game.
My next goal is a 1.1 version of HHtMM, for which I aim to complete a few more system replacements/overhauls for expanded functionality and stability, overhaul some UI functions (I want to improve how the game's basic rooms and tiles are displayed to the reader) (and I REALLY want to do a big overhaul of the combat mode and give it a proper UI, I feel it's a major weakness right now), and perform a total rework of Status Effects, because the way they exist right now is both dominant and really boring - both to use, and to get hit by.
After that, pending further bugfixing, I'll make sure the framework is robust and then move on to the next small game, similar in scope to HHtMM, to introduce a third and 'final' setting which will serve as a vehicle for some more niche kinks.
After thaaat, I intend to start work on my first larger project, Evilixir.
