in the terms of "can you, purkka, make games with it": pretty well, as evident by the fact that i just published one demonstrating a lot of features that weren't in place back when THE OTHER ISLAND came out. there's sprites now, including a fairly sophisticated system for defining composite sprites and packing them into an optimized atlas, and all the basic building blocks of VN control flow (choices, variables, jumps) exist.

i'm still tinkering with the internal representations and programming interfaces of everything, and some things are heavily WIP. i quickly threw together a basic proof-of-concept of "effects" (used to apply transformations and animations to sprites and other stage objects) for the jam, but i'm struggling to come up with a nice API because there's a lot of complexity added by fast-forwarding, saving/loading, and rollback. anyway oh sorry this is just a tangent

in terms of "can you, the girl reading this, make games with it": this is largely a separate task, which i haven't devoted a lot of time to yet. the biggest issue that the engine only has text interfaces as of now*, but i really want to get into making add-ons for the Godot editor and get some convenient visual editors in place. it's OK for me to use because i know how everything works and can dig into the internals if something doesn't provide an adequate error message, but i'm told UX design can't center the perspective of the original developer and the original developer alone.

(also, there are some design decisions that really demand a convenient editor aware of the engine, like splitting game script & prose into different files. extending Godot has always been a part of the plan in some form, but i'm also realizing what a big UX boost it would be for everything else as well. i'll get there at some point, but only after the core design of the engine is good enough and i have plenty of practical experience from making more games with it.)

• well, there's the "stage editor", which you can use to preview how backgrounds, sprites, etc look in-game with various transformations and animations; i mostly use it when working with composite sprites. it's actually not disabled for release builds, so shhhh don't spread this top-secret information but you can launch it by invoking the executable with

./my_municipality -- -se