*Does it really count as "mortem" if only like 1/3 of the game is out? I don't know but I'm sure going to post about it!
About 6 months ago I put out the intro and first act of a visual novel, Machinations of Amirus. (It's free and will take you about an hour if you want to run through it before reading this. I am simply not going to worry about spoilers, either for Act 1 or for my plans for Act 2/3 going forward.) My goal here is to think out loud about what I was intending to do, what I did, what works in my opinion, what could be improved within the confines of this basically-a-first-draft, and what's worth keeping an eye on going forward.
Ah no I'm writing another dicelessness article by accident oh god help
Off the bat, one of the technological aspects I ran into is that Narrat is very particular about skill rolls. They're binary in nature, you have to define how they work up front, and you don't get the roll value on a check, just pass/fail.
I don't have an actual cover for this one yet so for now you get a screencap from the SRD title. This one's still at pretty high level. But I did some of that high level work and I wanna talk about it!
Speaking of the SRD, this is the third Total//Effect game I initially proposed/outlined/etc on the Total//Effect SRD. My general (self)-pitch was: