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Above: A sample of storyboard artwork from Rewind: The Empyreum War.
The day after tomorrow, or possibly sometime next week. The Neutron Wars have been and gone, taking with them most of the population of Earth. Those who survive live out their lives under an artificial sky, trapped within giant biodomes and bathed in the purple aura of a protective field. Every word, every thought is monitored by The Company. Dissent is punishable by death, which is kind of ironic, since death is exactly what most people pray for.
Fuel reserves are exhausted. What little power The Company provides comes from offworld, shipped in from the vast Empyreum mines of LV13. But the mines are at the center of an endless war, a meaningless conflict from which no-one returns alive. It is a war we cannot possibly win, and yet a war we must not lose.
When Kantrell Adams is forcibly conscripted to the mines, his family faces the prospect of losing everything - until mysterious startup Rewind Inc. offers a solution. If he backs up his mind to their systems, his wife can have it restored into a clone when he dies. The same husband in a younger body, crafted to her own specifications. Everybody wins.
But those at the top have their eyes on Rewind Inc. - and they may have an entirely different fate mapped out for Kantrell...
Watch this space for more screenshots and development information as I progress. Please feel free to ask questions - this is a big project, being based on my own trilogy of scriptbooks, each of which contains the scripts for 2x2 hour episodes for a total of 12 hours of script. Thanks to Daz Studio and RenPy, this is the first time I've been able to turn the scripts into a visual form, and the end result will contain a complete original soundtrack by myself as well as spoken dialogue.
Last edited by RewindTheGame on Thu Jan 21, 2021 7:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
Just a quick preview of the title screen for Rewind:2096, showing the marines. The blanked out section is simply a placeholder where I will be putting the address of a Patreon or website when I get to that stage. More screenshots will follow over the coming days, as I already have the prolog and most of act 1 completed prior to testing and debugging.
One thing which makes Rewind different is that the game is a fully fledged adventure in which you make choices every step of the way, and those choices dictate the way the game goes. This obviously makes the game repayable to find all the things you didn't find down side routes the first time, but it also means that you can, to a certain extent, change events during the course of the game. It's more like a choose your own adventure novel with graphics than a straightforward visual novel where you make one choice and then need to read a thousand lines of text before the next branching point. It's going to be quite complex, is what I'm trying to say
I've just made a demo of Rewind: 2096 available through my Patreon page for anyone to download, for both PC and Mac. You can grab a copy from www.patreon.com/rewinduniverse. The demo is completely silent, but also contains quite a bit of gameplay - and you're more than welcome to ask for hints here should you get stuck. It's mainly introducing the player to some of the characters in the game, but should contain enough to set the scene for future updates. I'm currently working on the first release for patrons and have every intention that the game will contain full sound from the start (apart from the demo, obviously) and speech shortly after - rather than making the whole game silent and then adding sound and voice at a later date.
My first aim in raising money through Patreon is to buy a dedicated Nvidia PC with which to speed up the rendering process, so you may notice that some images in the demo are rendered to a much higher standard than some of the others - nothing radically different, it's just that some of the images were taking 3 days to render on my meagre setup and there just comes a point where you lose the will to live
