Septemper 7th,2025 - Devlog #1

Hello. I've decided I want to share game development progress here. I've been working on this game for a little while now.
I want to make a game that lets you walk around and interact and talk to many npcs while also having a main storyline you can follow. I want there to be many secrets and hidden passages you could discover that aren't necessary for the plot. Very yume nikki inspired. I don't have everything figured out yet but I'm making stuff up as I go. I decided I should use rpgmaker mz for this, so I bought it.
I don't know anything about coding. All I know right now is the very basics I need to post things on this site. At this point I am starting to understand switches and variables and also how tilesets work. I will share this some other time but I have notes and concept drawings for the game. Right now I want to share what I have so far.

This is the first room of the game. Originally this was going to be a parallax background, but that soon proved too complicated to do. So I made it a tile sheet and did it the proper way. Spent a long time cleaning the individual sprites because I applied dithering to everything and that ended up adding some white pixels to the sprites. After much troubleshooting I managed to make everything work. You can interact with the objects here, and you can even see yourself in the mirror. There's also a small cutscene that plays at the beggining of the game. You can leave the room but there's only a placeholder map outside. My mission today is to start working on the sprites for the next room.
Most locations are heavily inspired by Kowloon walled city, and I'm using Greg Girard's City of Darkness book as reference. I really want to capture the grimy, dim-lit and cramped feeling you get from the photographs. Perhaps I'll talk about the story some other time.