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You wake up in a strange dark void with creatures watching your every move, a voice from beyond the darkness calls to you, but dangers and horrors await you around every corner, follow the light and stay to the path and you may find resolution.

Dark World is about a man who wakes up in a strange world populated by the manifestations of his real world problems, you must pick your path to survive in the games dangerous world in a choose your own adventure style gameplay.

Currently Dark World is in PreAlpha but concept art and music demos will be uploaded to the dev blog very soon.

blog: http://darkworlddev.wordpress.com/

I am hoping to use this thread not only to inform the core user-ship of Ren'Py about my game but to also get tips and tricks from them, to get advice on writing and how to craft a narrative in Ren'Py and to meet and greet the core players of games made in Ren'Py

If you have any questions about Dark World or for myself then feel free to post a reply either to this thread or on the dev blog (if you have a wordpress account)

Looking at your post and your blog, it seems you're currently a bit secretive in regards to talking about your game. I can understand that. Perhaps you're still shaping the basic story concepts. Perhaps you want to wait until you have screens or character images to show off.

Having said that, please keep in mind that you will benefit by sharing details about your fictional world, your characters, your story, and (if applicable) your gameplay. Help us understand what sort of feedback you want. Tell us if you need assistance. Finally, give us enough information that we will look forward to your demo and your final version... though not so much information that you give away your entire plot.

Thank you. Looking forward to learning more about Dark World.

Hey there

I am about to write a few blog posts about the writing and coding aspect real soon so you can get more info on plot and such, the artist that has agreed to work with me is drawing up some concepts that I will show off and hopefully that will be during this week sometime

Just made a blog post about Dark World and how large it may or may not be, please have a read and tell me what you think either by posting on wordpress or replying to this thread

http://darkworlddev.wordpress.com

First up, what do you mean by 100-200 'images'? A sprite is different from a background, which is different from a CG, which is different from other types of artwork like objects and promotional work. Depending on what you are actually thinking about and the time frame, it could be a reasonable or unreasonable amount of work. It would also depend on the artists schedule, how they are working, what level of detail they are doing etc. The main reason for writing a script, or at least a very detailed outline, before recruiting people is so you know what you will be asking for. You also want to avoid feature creep since it's a strain on your resources. Looking for more artists is an option as long as you split the work in a way that will retain consistency. There can be dangers working with larger teams though.

As for Kickstarter, no, not in my opinion. As far as I can see, you have nothing to show for your work and there is no reason why I would think (at this moment) you could complete a project. I personally don't think it's fair to ask for money off of people if you don't have a proof of concept, as in a working demo to demonstrate not only the game, but your ability to actually pull something together. I would concentrate on that first. The idea and concept drawing stage is easy. The rest of the work is not. If you can pull a decent size demo together it would be a much greater indication of what you are doing, what you are capable of and your dedication to your work.

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Thanks for replying

The 100 to 200 images are single background images that appear, in terms of character sprites, well so far no plans have been made to use them, the level of detail on the background images would be high quality since we wanted to eventually sell the game.

A working demo is planned and thats what we are working on now, the demo would contain WAY fewer images than the planned 200 (200 being the final amount)

and we were thinking of using kickstarter only after we released the demo, so we could show clearly what we wanted to achieve and to justify creating a kickstarter project.

Hey guys, just letting you know I'v made another dev post, you can read a little into the story there http://darkworlddev.wordpress.com/

or by reading it below XD

“A world enough, perchance to dream."
"A glistening eye, through which to see."
"A world enough, perchance to sleep."
"You wake up in a black expanse, all around you are different shadows and shapes that you can barely make out."
"Standing up you realise the ground beneath you feels soft as if it were grass, but it doesn't feel all that alive."
v "Come with me, you have much to learn."
"You hear the sound of crying over to your right and footsteps to your left..."

menu:

"Follow the Voice.":

jump fvoice

"Find the source of the crying.":

jump fcrying

"Move towards the footsteps.":

jump ffootsteps



label fcrying:
#image 2
"You attempt to find the source of the crying."
"Slowly you feel a welling sense of despair creep over you, you begin to cry uncontrollably."
#image 3
"You were the crying you heard before, and now you shall forever cry a river of tears"
"A Sombre End."
return

label ffootsteps:
#image 4
"You turn and walk towards the sound of footsteps."
"Your legs step faster and faster as you try to catch up to the noise you heard before."
"Yet still you cant find the source of the footsteps, until you realise you cant stop."
"The frustration grips around your heart and pulls it from your chest, yet you keep walking..."
"A fitting end to a troubled mind"
return

label fvoice:
#image 5
"You move towards the soothing voice and notice a flicker of light in the distance."
v "Calm your mind and let my voice sooth you."
"The voice seems to calm your nerves and you become used to the darkness."
#image 6
"Through the void you can see strange twisted shapes that look like they are wrapped around rusted metal poles."
#image 7
"The light moves further away to reveal a raft on a lake, the raft looks old and rotten but the lake is dead still."
v "Step onto the raft and I will take you away from this place"

Let's say 20 hours per background. 20 x 200 = 4000 hours = about 2 years full time work just drawing backgrounds.

is that for one artist?

yes.

Yeah i already new it would take a long time, which is why after buidling the demo i will look for a few artists

In an attempt to start a discussion here i wish to ask a few more questions.

1. How does one properly advertise a Ren'Py game other than posting on these forums and listing it on the Ren'Py games list

2. How am I doing so far, e.g. posting on lemmasoft, running the dev blog and such.

I feel as if I could be doing things better since this is my first foray into these forums and Ren'Py game making

As I see it, the question you should be asking is not if you should ask for money - but if people would pay at all. This is your first game, and unless your demo is amazingly convincing, I doubt many folks would cash in. There's this game translator a while back for a popular Japanese VN that had something like 5$ in donations after a whole year. So yeah, if you plan to pay for artists, chances are it's coming out of your pocket.

Drawing quality high enough to be commercial means you have to pay a professional artist for your ginormous workload. Some of the truly amazing artists I've seen on DA who produce professional quality work charge at least a hundred for a drawing, and some a few hundred.

Assuming they charge you a minimum of 100usd, that's 100x200 = 20000usd.
Do you have, and am willing to pay that amount? If not, do you foresee people donating that amount to you when you ask them to? Do you think you can recuperate that cost in sales?

For your new questions : Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook. If you make it (well), they will come.

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I was thinking of asking 99 cents for it actually, hehe, yeah around 5 dollars for the size it was going to be and even then make it a suggested donation

Hey, new blog post explaining some small things

http://darkworlddev.wordpress.com/