Responding to your hopes. Creating all the game systems makes me happy, so i assume i won't have to be overwhelmed. The only thing that might take a while and load me up quite a bit is figuring out the balance. For example this morning i realized that i should split my NPC wallet into two different wallets. One wallet containing a small piece of their money that the NPC carries with them and a second wallet containing the rest of the money that is stored in the NPC's personal chest, bank etc. This is an important piece of balance that will prevent the player from skipping ~months of gameplay and then stealing from a rich merchant getting too much money while destroying the econ. system.
skill name, level, description and a list of available abilities are displayed in brown color
On the subject of skills. Right now it looks like this. You have a general skill level that grows with the character's training. This learning can be in the form of just using the skill or actually learning from NPCs. On top of that, you have the abilities that the skill unlocks.
Using the unarmed combat skill as an example. By using the abilities of this skill during combat, the overall skill level will increase. This will affect the attack modifier of that skill, making your hit simply stronger. In addition, it can unlock a new ability, for example your character will learn how to hit more correctly and have a better chance of dealing critical damage. In addition, a high level of unarmed combat skill will allow the character to learn new attacks from NPCs. In this case, the game will not put a restriction such as "Reach level B unarmed combat to continue learning the skill", the game will simply show your character's attempts to learn, which will fail, and roughly hint at how far you are from mastering a certain skill (for example, you will see text that Tessa is not at all ready to learn this skill, which would mean a very big difference in the required skill level and actual, or text that Tessa is almost there, but needs some more practice - so the skill is almost at the right level).
There will certainly be many different jobs available in the game for different ways. I'm also considering a scenario where the player doesn't have to work at all. For example, begging on the streets, stealing, exploring the world and finding things to sell, trading, etc.
Regarding the optimization of the game. One of the reasons for choosing Ren`Py to create this game was the spaciousness in optimization. The game takes almost no resources for rendering, because the picture is just a static background with possible other images on it. This allows me to add an immeasurable number of features to the game, because even if the calculation of each of them will occur after each transition in the scenes - it will not be noticeable. But anyway, right now the game constantly updates only the character's personal stats. Even the NPC inventory is updated once every 1440 game minutes.
Regarding the rumor system. There is already a fame system available in the game that will be the basis for this. Unfortunately, i can't promise that every action of a character will be directly reflected. What do i mean? Let's use an example. You rob a tavernkeeper, he notices it, and your fame as a bad person grows in a certain zone. Characters in that zone start treating you worse, but they don't point out your thievery specifically. NPCs just say that Tessa is a terrible person, but don't call her a thief. But, important story elements will definitely be fully rendered in the game. I think it's no secret that in the future in the game there will be an opportunity to become a queen. In this case, people around will start treating Tessa as a queen. This will affect dialogs, random events and even gameplay.
I'm thinking about limiting the carry weight in inventory, but those are just thoughts. For now, the game is built on complete player freedom, though i realize that adding an weight restriction would increase the immersiveness of gameplay by not allowing you to carry 50 apples, three swords, and a few logs. I'll try to think more about this and maybe add it to the game, but it's important to realize that the weight balance will change very often. It's very hard to even roughly realize what the weight distribution of items should look like. It's even harder to estimate the player's carrying weight and to estimate what stats it should depend on.
Absolutely. In this development blog, i've talked about stealing as if it would be very easy. In fact, in addition to learning the skill, the player will have to learn NPC schedules, possibly find special ways to steal, and even more so, will have to find a way to escape immediately after stealing. Catching a character while stealing will mean not just failure, but time spent in jail, loss of stolen items and even own coins, in compensation to the victim of the theft.
Thanks for your feedback <3 I hope i can meet your expectations in the next public build
