This story is treating itself pretty oddly.

On its first draft, it protested because it didn't feel like a game. It had 1,000 words back then, and now it has 10,000.

The story chooses to lean into the abstract in an otherwise grounded atmosphere (if you're standing on your tiptoes).
At one point, it wanted me to sing like cowboys used to sing to their herds. Out loud. Making things up along the way.
It wanted my guitar to sound like a banjo, and now that it gave up on the idea, it wants other objects. I have things that can make sounds and I'm not afraid to use them.
Its art: primitive. I literally met a three-year-old who draws better than myself. The story contains a few drawings to make player orientation easier. (And because, who wouldn't want their game to have visuals?)  

Meanwhile, here's another absurd feeling.

When I was a child, people who made my games were 1/3 of a planet away. By the time I was in high school, at least I shared the same continent with some of them. My hair is starting to go gray now.

When I clicked "start game" on this thing, a character greeted me, three dialogue options were there to choose from, music played, and a picture showed up. All at once. None of these were made by somebody else. I stared at the screen for an hour. And now I'm writing a devlog.

https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2149733073/size=small/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/artwork=none/track=2621830278/transparent=true/

Two things done today. One of them was creating sound effects, and the other involved implementing them as parts of a journal mechanic.

The game is only intended to have three SFXs: scribbling, drawing a circle, drawing a tick. So, I plugged the cable in, lay down my guitar, squeezed a T-shirt between the fret board and the strings, and I set to work.

When I put a notepad on the guitar's soundboard, the microphone only picked up faint sounds that could only work if heavily boosted inside the DAW. That could've only meant trouble - hiss galore, mighty morphing aliens invading the audio. 

Putting the notepad nearer to the microphone did produce a volume I could sort of work with, especially when pressing harder into the notepad or there were less pages on the soundboard, but the microphone picked up sounds of wood. It was still a writing sound, if you're into writing on wood. 

So, Plan Random it was. Taking another T-shirt to tuck it underneath the strings by the bridge, I placed a notepad over the strings themselves, directly above the hole.

The sound was actually pretty clear! If you make sure that the strings are muted, the sound travels pretty well! I could hear the playback very clearly!
If I jacked my headphones all the way up.
Some digital audio magic is making that work, though. (Note to self - test that.)

If you're wondering why I'm wasting time with a guitar to record scribbles with a microphone, it's because the guitar is the microphone. Or more specifically, the teensy little thing strapped to the inside of the guitar - meant to record sound based on physical vibrations. You strum the strings, the vibrations travel through the saddle and then the wood it's attached to. It's the only microphone I have.

On to the computer! And boy, was this going to take all afternoon.

When you play the game, you have a journal where quests get noted and updated. The idea is that, when you're going through dialogue and there comes a point when you trigger a quest, you get yoinked to the journal, the scribbling sound plays, and the journal suddenly gets a new entry.

When you advance in a quest, you get yoinked again, the circle sound plays, and you now see that a quest is circled. Now, the quest is ready to be turned in.

When you interact with the two NPCs in the game (I should actually finish my first game, okay? :P), you can bring up the journal and talk about any entry with them. When you turn in the ready-to-be-completed quest to one of them. by clicking on its title (not the whole text, as I want that area click/touch-immune), you talk with them, you get yoinked to the journal page yet again, a tick sound plays, and now the entry is both circled and ticked. Quest complete.

Playtesting will tell whether all of this yoinking is useful or jarring, but in a game where text is all you have, I get the feeling that the visual feedback will help.

At the moment, the journal itself is made up of software letters and a simple HTML background, while the circles and ticks are images with transparent backgrounds that let the text through. It could be all images instead but, as images are set to scale based on device resolution, I wouldn't want to gamble with the actual legibility of the journal.

In the end, half the afternoon was spent telling the system to circle each paragraph regardless of size and layout, while the other half involved squabbling with the Harlowe Audio Library to implement the sounds, more due to my own ignorance than anything else.

It does have its aesthetic problems. The parts with the circles and the ticks load faster than anything else, and the few attempts to get it all to show at the same time resulted in different jank. There is also a QOL issue I didn't realize until I saw it: there is no immediate tell to show which entry got newly circled. They're all just statically sitting there. The journal is too long to fit on the screen, so you need to scroll to find a quest, too. I'd be like, "Is there something that wasn't circled before? Do I recall all of the things written here, or is there something new?"

A working solution would be this:
- Make gifs. Put those into the system, making sure they only play once per quest with a variable.
- If you trigger a quest state and you get the journal shown to you, as you scroll through the journal (the 'close' button is at the bottom anyway) and the entry becomes visible on your screen, the gif plays over the paragraph, the sound plays, and you unambiguously spot what's going on.

But this is a task for future me. Right now, I'm focused on getting the game to a working condition as soon as possible. The journal exists, its mechanics work. The next log should address the thing this game absolutely cannot do without: the text.