12.31.12 HERO Prologue

[nickgreen]

At long last, the prologue preview of HERO is released. This project has been two years in the making and it will still be some time before completion. However, I wanted to have the prologue released at this time for reasons that will quickly become apparent upon reading. Depending on your reading speed, it will take about ten to twenty minutes to complete.

Due to Ren'Py not playing nicely with video, I had to reduce the resolution of the clips used to prevent lag on older machines. If you still experience issues, let me know so I can try and correct them. I used a Theora/Vorbis codec so Ren'Py ought to be able to decode without problems.

Download the version that corresponds to your OS:

12.31.12 HERO Prologue for Windows
12.31.12 HERO Prologue for Macintosh
12.31.12 HERO Prologue for Linux

If for some reason you cannot download from mediafire, let me know and I'll mirror elsewhere.

Enjoy!

Nick Green
flowchart media

[gekiganwing]

I downloaded your demo. It might be a while before I can sit back and read it, since I've been a bit stressed lately. Sorry.

On your site, you summarized your story: aliens devastate Earth, disappear, and then humanity prepares. You provided quite a bit of information about your characters and the HERO robots. After looking at what you provided, I have some questions. If most or all of them are answered in your demo, then I apologize in advance...

1. What sort of aliens are these? Can they communicate with humans? Do they have distinct personalities and motivations?

2. All the pilots are Japanese natives, and seem to be about the same age. Why is this? Is there a reason why older people, or citizens of other nations, would be unable to use the HERO robots? (I'm not an expert on the Evangelion franchise, but I remember that it has an in-universe explanation for why only a few teenagers can control the EVA units.)

3. What sort of school is Nagare-Boshi? Is it ordinary in any way, or is it an elite academy with strict security and training?

4. Will your story include combat? If so, will it be told through prose and dialogue, or will the combat scenes be more interactive? (The Muv-Luv visual novels don't include complex gameplay, but most of the Sakura Wars games do.)

Also, a personal note: I was kinda hoping that you would let people see your .rpy file. I know that it's just code, and it's not the polished story with graphics that you presumably want to show off. You might want to hide it in order to avoid spoilers, or revealing some programming trick. But it does let people skim over your writing, and copy/paste the text so that they can provide feedback on specific things you wrote...

[Samu-kun]

I was looking forward to this, until I saw that another poor developer has decided to be clever and not only severely limit the renpy options, but cut off access to the options all together while the visual novel is in session. This is a terrible idea and practically ruined the whole experience. I really don't understand why anyone would do this, but an alarming percentage of developers have been cutting off the very user friendly options which make renpy a good visual novel engine. So I have to say, I did not enjoy the clickclickclickclickclickclick fest this was because my read speed was four times faster than the default scroll. On a related note, the TV static was cool at first, but after the 30th one, they were getting too long and I was skipping over them. From a design standpoint, I don't like developers who try to take control away from the reader. If the reader wants to skim, the reader skims, one way or another.

I found the presentation to be atmospheric, but the novelty was wearing off by the end without more graphics to back it up. I expect that the rest of the visual novel will be presented normally, or else more graphics will be introduced? I'm sure at some point, the reader will expect to be given images instead of just text and sound effects.

The channel flipping could be interesting to see if it's applied throughout the visual novel, but I can't tell whether you're going to implement it beyond the prologue. Are you?

I am a big fan of the premise, but I didn't see much of the premise in the prologue. But I am hopeful we get to see more of the high school drama and the mecha action in the final product. And I'm getting serious (1990's) Evangelion mind screw premonitions here, so I expect this will twist up a lot of tradition, which I'm also looking forward to.

It's stupid that one design decision can ruin a whole experience, but what's done is done. I sense this is less than 0.5% of the visual novel, so my overall impression of the work is unchanged. I look forward to seeing more updates - and more graphics in the future.

[nickgreen]

Thanks for taking the time to read through the prologue. This release was a way for me to test out a few things as I progress on the main project.

My thoughts were as such: at this point I am still early in development and don't have much to show visually. But as

the final weeks in December of 2012 approach

I wanted to have something that was released before that time. Lacking visuals, I thought of this static presentation as a method of providing a taste for the story, a way of glimpsing a peek into that world. The idea is that the reader is

flipping through channels with broken signals, catching only snippets of conversation and trying to piece together what's going on

.

The reasoning behind removing access to the options was to mimic the lack of control a person experiencing

an invasion that they have absolutely no control over

would feel. Perhaps it was too heavy-handed. All options will be present and accessible in the main game.

As for a lot of the background information about the story, it's intentionally kept ambiguous at this point. All will be explained throughout the course of the main story. One thing I can say is that Nagare-boshi is simply one of many pilot schools that were established all over the world; HERO just focuses on this one.

I locked the files because mixed licenses attached to sound and video clips means that I don't necessarily have permission to redistribute them as-is and wasn't sure if allowing access to those files was allowed or not. I can certainly alter the archive so that the script itself is readable.

Thanks for the critique so far.

[AxemRed]

I don't think it works very well as a preview. It doesn't have any artwork/music and the writing doesn't appear to be representative of the final product. At least, I hope you're not writing a full-length VN where the perspective changes several times a minute.

The "end of the world" point is made in the first 5 minutes, but then it goes on for another 10 without really saying anything new. One of the perspectives was a personal story, but it felt insignificant compared to the end of the world. Text speed hiccups at commas were extremely annoying.

[gekiganwing]

It's been about two months since the last post... According to what I read on Flowchart Media's Twitter, it looks like it's still being created. I would like to know a few more details on how development is going, and what's next for HERO.