Mysterious Fosters (Cute, Mystery, NaNoRenO 2016)

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Plotline_Progenitor
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Mysterious Fosters (Cute, Mystery, NaNoRenO 2016)

#1 Post by Plotline_Progenitor »

Image
Story Concept:
Mysterious Fosters follows the story of a little boy or girl when they are adopted under strange circumstances where all the paperwork has all cleared properly yet somehow no one has seen your new parents in person, reluctantly the nun running the orphanage decides to let you go under your insistence.

When you arrive in your new home no one is there... The door you came in through jammed behind you and you keep receive bizarrely well timed text messages as if someone were watching you on a strange smartphone with no buttons that was left out for you.

You begin to explore this seemingly abandoned house... Can you unravel the mystery of your new parents before Sister Mirabelle's nerves get the better of her and she comes to take you back to the orphanage?

Download:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/xwa13 ... .0-all.zip

Behind the work:
It was mostly just me working on this, in the beginning I had a friend of mine on board for the art but their life got busy and they ended up just providing me concept sketches to help out, they also did some quite helpful testing before the final release

About:
Mysterious Fosters is the second visual novel I have created, It is 11,722 words long and has 7 endings in total

Mysterious Fosters operates with you moving between the different rooms of the house investigating objects and documents to find the truth, by clicking on different parts of the screen
ImageImage
You will also use certain items to find solutions to some simple puzzles.

You pick the gender of your character and choose between being smart, quick, or brave (which have different ways of affecting your two main stats) [Note: The different character traits may not be well balanced]

Anxiety: The house is a little spooky and some things can make you more anxious, if your anxiety gets too high you will instantly switch to the "running away" ending
Time: Sister Mirabelle was reluctant to let you go and will come to check on you, if she finds you alone in the house when she comes she will take you back to the orphanage, leading to another non-victorious ending

Quick: Use up less time moving from room to room
Smart: Use up less time reading or solving puzzles
Brave: Anxiety has to get 3 points higher than average to be scared away

Characters:
"You": A small primary school aged orphan child
(This character is never actually displayed in the game)

Sister Mirabelle: The kindly nun running the orphanage, she worries often about the children under her care
Image

"Dad": A person sending you text messages as if they were watching you without ever showing themselves
(No image to prevent spoilers)

"Mother": A mysterious person who seems to leave you messages by arranging objects in the house
(No image to prevent spoilers)

Progress:
I actually made a tiny amount of this before once but then stopped when I thought this would be good for a NaNoRen0 entry and waited until now. I started the project all over again from scratch this time so I hope that's still okay.

The end result of this visual novel varies slightly from the original outline in the WiP thread, for one thing there is no longer a "you" character image

Known Issues:
Any issues made known to me will be added into this section and crossed off as they are fixed
-Inconsistency between the game referring to you as "you" and referring to you as "I"

Feedback:
1: Please report any bugs or difficulties you may have playing the game
2: Be sure to let me know if the game is too unclear on what you need to do to win
3: Let me know if 160 time seems to be an appropriate amount or it should be raised or lowered
4: Any feedback you have would be welcome, you don't even have to particularly verbose or detailed, I'd be glad just to hear from you

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BáiYù
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Re: Mysterious Fosters (Cute, Mystery, NaNoRenO 2016)

#2 Post by BáiYù »

Thanks for pointing me to your game, I ended up enjoying the story quite a bit! Here's a link to my review on tumblr.

Critiques:
  • Needs more characterization. The characters all spoke very similar. spend a little more time thinking about not just who they are but how they would talk. Easily fixed with more time to write and an editor.
  • I recognize that you're still rather new to Ren'Py, so I highly suggest playing other games to get a feel for what the engine is capable of. I'll PM you some of my recs. Main concern is a more organized and user friendly interface, especially for the moving and search portions.
  • In the case you ever do need to make BGs again, try taking a look over here for some pointers.
  • Mom acts a little too... young? I got the impression she was a bit older while reading the journal.
Keep up the great work! I hope to have some time soon to play your other game as well.
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Games and supplementary Ren'Py codes

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Jadis
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Re: Mysterious Fosters (Cute, Mystery, NaNoRenO 2016)

#3 Post by Jadis »

I found a bug - if you keep searching the boxes in the attic you can keep accumulating drawing fragments until you run out of time. (And fragments found that way don't work to put the drawing back together.)

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