New area: Cemetery.

It has been a strange week. There was a death in my family, and it's a complicated one, so loss is on my mind. There is a sort of "empty chair" exercise at the front end of the game where you have the opportunity to talk to someone who has hurt you. Now that the person I envisioned in that exercise is gone, I decided to tag a graveyard on the back end so the player can speak to someone they've lost - whether it's someone with whom they had a good or not-so-good relationship. I'm all about the catharsis. I've considered both a setting from my childhood and a graveyard for other projects - but added them to Rorasuketo. Maybe I will get around to those other projects someday, but the areas are nice to have in here, too, just in case they don't manifest otherwise.

I've been canvassing my city, and one of the themes I'm advertising is that it's a game about mental health recovery. There are times I've wondered if that's a good idea. I don't know if this is exactly a selling point that makes most people say, "Oh! That makes me really want to play this," but I don't feel like hiding it, either. Yes, it's about roller derby. Yes, it's a JRPG. Yes, it's a dating sim. But the gooey, feely portions are there, and they're there very intentionally, so I should own it.

Programming-wise, I spent a long time making individual leaves gently waft from trees to the opposite end of the screen in this cemetery. There is probably another way to do it in RPG Maker, like a weather effect. I should check it out, but this works for now. It was fun making gravestones and planting some personal tributes in there.