A lived-in world.

I had my adoring husband Jerry do a playthrough of the approximately hour and a half of linear, uninterrupted gameplay, and one of the great compliments he gave me was that the dialogue wasn't "cookie cutter."

 

This pleased me. I'm working to make sure Rora feels lived-in and fresh. I want the world to be something you want to explore and interact with (and a world that rewards you for doing so). 

I feel a bit sheepish describing an hour and a half of gameplay. That's it? That's all I have to show right now? But I stress to myself that it is the linear component. It doesn't count minigames, dates, towns, and other elements that come down the pipeline later. See, I've just been working in chunks, building certain portions when they tickle my fancy. Maybe altogether it's more like 2 hours. The game itself will be probably about 3-4 hours, now that I take a cold, hard look at things.

I read somewhere recently that approximately 100 hours of RPG Maker time equates 1 hour of gameplay. For me, it's easily more than 100, given how I tend to take the longer, harder road when it comes to workflow and learning curve in most things. I also have to remember that I first built Rorasuketo in RPG Maker VX Ace, then got my hands on the more robust RPG Maker MZ, and rebuilt the whole first 45 minutes of the game from scratch. I've changed the font midway through, which required me to go back and replace all the line breaks for every single dialogue box so that the text didn't run off the edge. (In a dialogue-heavy game, that's murder.) I also tend to undersell the hundreds of hours I've spent creating all original tilesets, sprites, sound effects, fonts, etc. Hundreds of hours easily.

A solo game dev who is also working and going to school, with chronic fits of creative ebb and flow, must remind oneself that they are not a AAA studio. I am at best a C grade shantytown of hobbled together ideas. I'm not going to have a 70-hour epic on my hands. I just have to polish the semi-realistic hope that maybe a dozen or two people spend a few hours in my world.