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Hey there!
My name is Hope, and I'm making my first visual novel ever, so I could use a lot of feedback! I've been an enthusiast of the format for several years now and streamed a lot of VNs for both promotion (when they're good) and amusement (when they're not so good) as my screen name JesuOtaku for a while, but I always wanted rather be a creator than a critic when it comes to these things, I see such promise and so many good things in the medium, and I admire all the cool stuff that's been done with the relatively young format in the English-speaking world so far. I know making these things is a lot of hard work, and after nine months of gestation, I'm ready to share the WIP of the game I'm hoping to complete a demo of and send to kickstarter for a full version.
This is Lovely Little Thieves. I'm hoping to release the demo by August 15th, and I'm looking for some tips/assistance with programming (I am a big drooling baby with building blocks just learning the ren'py language) as well as someone versed in After Effects to cut a 60-second trailer for the game (which I will happily compensate you for.) I figured I'd need a label to release the game under, so I named the "production label" of the game PangoDango Games. (Hence my username.)
Once the demo is complete, I plan to take it to kickstarter to make the full, 70-80 CG monstrosity a reality, so I want to make it the very best it can be over this final month! Also, the highest resolution images I can post on lemmasoft is 800x wide, so if you want to see higher res versions of any of these images, you can see them on this shiny new tumblr.
THE TEAM
- WRITING/CODING -- JesuOtaku (me!)
- SPRITE ART -- Tengu-Arts
- BACKGROUND ART -- JackEavesArt
- CG ART -- Auro-Cyanide, DejiNyucu, seeking more artists for the full version post kickstarter!
- UI DESIGN -- Auro-Cyanide
- GAME LOGO DESIGN -- Ashuraoh
- COMPANY LOGO DESIGN -- Tengu-Arts
- ASSISTANT PROGRAMMER -- Barry P. III
- MUSIC PRODUCER -- [will be needed for full version post kickstarter]
- VOICE ACTORS -- [will be needed for full version post kickstarter]
Dawn didn’t know what to expect when she agreed to pile into a van with a mixture of friends and acquaintances and take a road trip down to Daytona Beach for spring break. She spent her entire freshman year studying her butt off at university, and she’s never really been out partying. At least…not that she can remember. Strange, horrible dreams of feeling her heart and mind slowly freeze solid in an endless black void haunt her long after she’s woken up, and make it hard for her to keep in touch with reality at all, much less get excited about a week of block partying at the ass-end of the country. Not one day into the long drive, however, the group’s van breaks down in the middle of the thickly forested New England mountains. With no help in sight and the sun rapidly setting, the gang seeks shelter in a dilapidated hilltop mansion, marked only with the number “72.”
Her friends are determined to go in, but nearing the estate reminds Dawn of the cold, isolated terror of the dark world in her dreams. It’s not long before her premonitions are proven true, as the group finds a desiccated corpse sitting up in the dining room and far worse surprises in the basement. The would-be spring breakers rush the door and hammer at the windows, but some supernatural force has locked them inside. What’s worse, the assumed house number “72” turns out to be another warning: the number warps and shifts lower every hour, counting down to an unknown fate at the end of their 3-day visit. She doesn’t know it yet, but the lives of her companions are in Dawn’s hands. The people she puts her trust in and the choices she commits to determine who survives the tale, as the house becomes more hostile hour by passing hour. Dawn must learn to fight for what she truly believes before the sun sets on the final day, or the master of this haunted house will claim all the little thieves that have wandered into his maw.
THE CHARACTERS
I was inspired by the f***ing adorable VN Autumn's Journey to use a transparent layer model for the characters' expressions, since it worked so well in that game. Their eyes, mouths, brows, and a few effects layers all move independently of one another, giving them, hopefully, an enormous range of expression. All five friends are romanceable, giving the player four boy options and one girl option to pursue. So it's sort of an otome game, but I hope the story will be strong enough that all genders and persuasions will want to play it. You don't have to get a romance ending, and in fact "choosing" an ending could prove very difficult as the choices are not framed as clearly as "BE NICE TO THIS PERSON" or "BE MEAN TO THIS PERSON" and are more about defining your own personality and telling you a little bit about yourself and who you would get along best with. ...Also, the odds that whoever you like is going to die a gruesome, gruesome death are pretty darn high.
THE BACKGROUNDS
There will only be two backgrounds completed for the demo because my wallet is not bottomless. (Oh, that it were!) The rest will be placeholder images, but the goal is to have all backgrounds done in this style for the full version. Because this is a bottle story that takes place inside a single mansion over 72 hours, there will be a Zero Escape-y type "revisiting of environments" aspect where the player should feel like they're feeling out the layout of this spooky closed space as different paths push them to focus on different rooms.
THE GAMEPLAY
This is a simple VN in that there are no RPG elements or complex mechanics. It's all just player choice, and every choice in the game is binary: the player will always have only two options at a prompt. I wanted to focus the experience heavily on player choice and re-playability. The demo alone will have 40+ choices for the player to make, and all of them affect how the story can potentially end, so ~choose wisely.~ Your choices will change fate only slightly at first, but the choices will snowball into 9 different "ending types" with hundreds of ways to get there and dozens of variations on those Nine Fates. For example, getting a True Ending with a character, any one of the five characters, counts as just one of those 9 Endings, but needless to say the five True Endings are wildly different from each other. So you're getting more than nine endings, it's just Nine Different Kinds of Endings and the ways to get there are pretty endless thanks to the bottle story structure.
THE TRAILER
(Watch in HD!)
Please tell me what you think of the project so far. (Any favorite characters/ideas? Anything that looks off/problematic?) Let me know if you have any help to offer, and thanks for being such an awesome forum! (I've lurked here plenty to look at projects and figure out how to code, but I'd never registered til now. ~Please be gentle with me.~)