Yeah, Rose could have been more of an important character in the story, but she was your reasonable best friend who tried to reign the main character in. Even if she was offered to go along with them, she wouldn’t have gone along with them anyway because she isn’t dealing with that craziness. 😆
The speech bubbles are implemented into Ren’Py. So, that’s how I used them. However, in Reaching for the Sky, I made everything, including the speech bubbles, PNG images. This is because I wanted to move them dynamically across the screen, which I can only do with images. So, that one involved a lot of nifty animations.
My visual novel Mother has 27 different endings, no true ending, and no checkpoints to see which endings you’ve unlocked. So, that one will drive you crazy.
Yet, other story games I’ve created like A Night Out, A Heart Undone, and Springtime Cafe all involve various choices, but it doesn’t take long to get to each ending, as each route is fairly short, and each of those do have a true ending. So, you might like those.
They’re all visual novels with stories that I made up as I went along, and they revolve around conversations that can go in different directions.