Heyo! This is more or less just a copy of this Tumblr post but I figured I'd make sure it's here anyway! This is just a little progress update for my as yet unnamed Mechanisms dating sim! For more frequent (but containing a little less content-wise) updates, please check out the associated Tumblr blog!


A drawing of Jonny d'Ville. He is wearing his Death to the Mechanisms outfit and stands relaxed, resting a gun on his shoulder. He grins widely with a wild look in his eyes.

I've now completed all of Jonny's sprites! (Here's one of them:)

I've also done a lot of behind-the-scenes programming. I'll go into it in a little more detail here than I did in the Tumblr post, just in case anyone's interested. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to separate things into several scripts (I'm relatively new to Ren'Py and have never worked with Python before this) for organisational purposes. I could tell I'd have a mess on my hands otherwise, I'm not even done with the prologue yet but the default script.rpy file was getting to be a nightmare to navigate!

In addition to that I wanted to program the... outline, I guess? of the game. Basically, I set up the code for the player picking what dates they want to go on and in what order. I also wrote the code for the player picking which character(s) they want to confess to and to set it so that there would be slight differences depending on whether you confess to just one character or multiple of them. Basically, I set the game up for polyamory.

Less exciting but I also grabbed a couple of different bits of code from itch.io to give the game some nice QoL features. The game now has achievements (I gave them all funny names so this was definitely worth it) and a CG gallery! It also has code where whatever characters that aren't speaking will be slightly greyed out so that it's easier to tell who's talking. None of that stuff's particularly necessary but it's nice to have, y'know?

A much more smaller change is that I made some tweaks to the prologue dialogue that I do have written because it was extremely awkward. For a lot of the Mechs I've either never written them or I've only barely written them meaning there's a couple of character's where I'm not entirely confident on how they should sound. Lucky for me, this game is still very early in development so I have more than enough time to tweak things and make things sound more natural.

An altered version of the Mechanisms logo coloured in turquoise, pink, yellow and white. Instead of the small circle behind the ship there is a cog and isntead of the large cog there is a heart.

I also (finally) created a logo for the game! It doesn't necessarily fit the whole steampunk space pirate aesthetic that the Mechs have going on but I think it looks very nice and it's very "dating sim" I think (whatever that means).


That's all of the updates that I have to share for now so all I have left to share is my next steps for this game! Hopefully something I get done in the near future is the prologue. I've been dragging it out for too long and just need to dedicate some time to getting it done. I also need to come up with ideas for dates for all the Mechs. I've settled on doing 3 dates for each of them which works out to 27 dates total! Also, I'm working on a couple of the backgrounds (it's a nice break from the character sprites which are very intense to make) and realised that I need people in them to make them feel more alive and less like some kind of liminal space. As a result of this, I have a post on Tumblr where, if you like, you can reblog with a picture of yourself or your OC so that you can be put into a background somewhere! It's no guarantee you/your character will end up in a background because I don't know how many people I might want but, as of writing this, there aren't many reblogs so you might have a good chance!

Anyway, that's all for now. Hopefully I'll be able to do another of these soon!

- Boots