Thank you so much! Yep the graphics are all me.. (the font too, I can’t decide if it’s legible enough!) I use a combination of Pixaki on iPad, Aseprite on windows/Mac and a bit of PPaint & DPaint when I need certain types of dithering and gradient tools. (Still blows my mind how the old apps do various things that the modern ones don’t so easily..) it’s early days yet but I’ll keep posting as I get further along development.
I’ve made a few design choices specifically to ease potential porting Amiga-ward, not just colour count/resolution but by having a Large fixed text box at the bottom the scene graphics can be reasonably easily plonked into something like GRAC or GRAAL or some other Amos thing that would make it possible for someone as crap at coding as I am.
Oh wow yeah Its
great to be reminded about the infocom adventures.. I vaguely remember being VERY confused by Zork as a kid, haha. Twine games are usually a lot like that, but Twine is so easy to program that there a tons and tons of fresh games coming out constantly.
Oh yes! I recently saw someone posting about Curse of Rabenstein? That looks beautiful. I think seeing that a few months back might have subconsciously poked me in the direction of considering an Amiga port as a possibility.
& thanks for the recommendations! I don’t think I’ve ever seen/played Journey! I’ll give that a try.
I hadn’t heard of level 9 either, not played a single one of their games - so nice to have new old stuff to try!
Visual Novels mechanically (from the programming /logic side at least) work a bit more like the old Fighting Fantasy & choose your own adventure books.. where the emphasis is frequently on story/ character/ emotional choices rather than our western adventures usual puzzle solving*. They often don’t have things like an inventory at all. It’s really common for them to have loads of different endings/outcomes, both positive and negative, and they usually have a picture gallery where you collect images of key moments as you mine the game’s content by making different decisions.
*there are some big exceptions to this, there are puzzle VNs too.. but they still feel like VNs? Hard to explain.
One of the biggest subgenres is dating games, and I’d love to know if the Amiga ever got anything like that. Those can be really heartfelt, weird or funny.. (there are a lot of hentai/porn ones too but that’s beside the point.
)
The Phoenix Wright games about solving crimes and interrogating witnesses is one big franchise.. But there are some VNs that have very little interaction at all, they’re so, so wordy and just like novels with pictures presented in a particular way.
Here are some example screens from the funniest VN I’ve played, Hatoful Boyfriend, where you’re a human who goes to a school for, and dates (mostly) pigeons..
In most of these games you’re building up your friendship meter (in some games not a visible stat) with characters so you get different interactions, dialogue and story branches. This format also works
really well for horror games!
In Japan VNs really seemed to take off about the same time as the lucasarts adventures in the west. I don’t think I’ve
ever seen a point and click 3rd person adventure game like “ours” from japan, I think that’s when we went down different paths.. Which I find super interesting! VNs are still massively popular, and really successful ones get anime and manga adaptations occasionally.
Oh man sorry for the rambling infodump.
I’m finding the whole subject really fun at the moment.
All the best to your families.
I hadn’t heard of level 9 either, not played a single one of their games - so nice to have new old stuff to try! 
Look at the word "meet" the "mee" is indistinguisable blob of pixels on the lower strokes of the e and start of the m.
I'm fond of 6px square as it allows for more lines, but could definitely try 8px. Or I can maybe make it clearer by shifting some pixels around. (and making the lower-case letters bigger)