Halluel

[Trouble Time]

Halluel
Halluel is a fast paced story about an assassin named…well Halluel. She’s part of a new class of killers who have a liscense to kill granted by the government itself. The competition is fierce, so fierce most assassins train to kill to the exclusion of any other skills. Halluel is no such exception, so like her fellow killers she hires a caretaker known as a navigator, or navi, to help her with the business side of killing. Her navi Gavin got a bit more than he reckoned for when he signed up to work with her. She’s lazy, she only kills when she wants to, and she doesn’t understand the social stigma of her profession at all. Because of Halluel’s behavior, both she and Gavin are nearly broke. Meanwhile, in a prestigious girl’s school a killer is on the loose. In need of protections, the daughter of a powerful oil baron hires Halluel to act as her protection.

Setting: The game is set in a city in the northeastern United States 78 years after a war brought the U.S. to it’s knees. The country side is littered with hastily constructed shanty towns and the weak are killed in the streets like animals. Meanwhile, in a few cities, rapid advancement of cybernetic technology not only widened the gap between the rich and the poor, but have led to a culture of extravagance far beyond anything ever seen before. A world of neon signs where every pleasure in the world is available, for a price. Narrowing it down, the story proper takes place primarily in the Lux Girl’s Academy, a school that in some ways resembles a Las Vegas hotel, complete with a casino and bar on the lower floors.

Characters:
Halluel: A kind, naive assassin girl. Despite her friendly nature, she’s a bloodthirsty killer, though she only kills people she feels are fun to kill. She can smile warmly enough to charm a person’s heart one minute then cut a man down the next. She’s got a rather forceful nature, anyone she sees as a friend is ,in her mind, her friend regardless of their feelings. This extends to lovers as well, often times choosing her “lover” based on a whim. She fights with a pair of chainsaw tonfa. Some of her feats are chronicled in legends in which she is called the Killer Angel (or Angel Killer, or Death Goddess, no one tells the story accurately anyway).

Gavin Crowe: Halluel’s rational navi. He’s a taciturn man who is generally annoyed with Halluel’s antics, though he can’t help but be fond of his assassin and her kind nature, He tries to keep Halluel focused during jobs, reminding her that they’re both after money. He did manage another assassin in the past who died following his commands, and so he is a bit protective of Halluel. Despite their relatively close relationship, he only talks to Halluel over long range communications devices and pays her bills over the internet (even arranging for most of her meals to be delivered since she only buys snacks).

Jessica Banks: The rich girl that hires Halluel. While she has heard the legends based on Halluel’s skills, most of these are highly inaccurate (depicting Halluel as a busty giant of a woman rather than the petite, flat-chested girl she is) so she doesn't realize that she hired the Killer Angel. The reason she hires Halluel is because Halluel can pose as a school girl due to her youthful appearance. She is the heir to an oil company, and like her grandfather who wandered into the desert with nothing but a shovel and came back an oil baron, she’s prone to taking risks, even excessive risks. Despite her risk taking behavior, she was passed over in favor of her younger sister to be the next heir to the family fortune. A compulsive gambler, she is one of the luckier students at the slot machines, she tends to have a lot of money lying around despite her family cutting her off to fund the ambitions of her sisters. Even without her families money, she’s determined to remain among the elite with her own effort.

Milla Bright: Halluel's natural enemy. She's harsh in speech and manners, and shows little respect to those who haven't earned it in her eyes. Milla owes both her name and her body to her father Miles Bright, a pioneer in cybernetic science, and perhaps the man to blame for the world's current state. Born with a weak body, she should have died a few hours after birth, but thanks to her father's intervention, she was saved at the cost of being confined to an almost entirely mechanical body. Her cybernetics are said to be 20 years ahead of what anyone other than Miles could produce, in fact they are even more advanced than his own parts. While she is guaranteed a spot among the elite due to her father's status, she actually has little money, since Miles, while brilliant, never sold his own cybernetics, instead he faded into the wasteland. Even Milla does not know his location. While she attends the academy due to her father's wishes, she also occasionally works as an assassin to get extra cash. Though her father didn't add any weapons to her body, she controls her cybernetics with precision that is almost unheard of.

Robin Anderson: A transfer student who arrives around the same time as Halluel. She is the sister of the first victim of the academy killer, and presumably transferred in to get her revenge. Hotblooded and courageous, she acts as if she were some kind of hero from a television serial. While not quite on the level of trained assassins, she does have a combat ready set of cybernetic limbs (in fact from the waist down she is completely mechanical). Her weapons of choice are a pair of roller skates and a spiked bat.

Goals: Well, to tell the truth, since this is my first game I just want to make a short VN with a few choices. I decided to go with something over the top because I like that kind of stuff personally. Hopefully the interactions between the characters will be enough to keep people interested.

EDIT: Reformatted, add the rest of the characters.

[gekiganwing]

Thanks for joining the forum and posting.

There's been a decent number of distinct VNs on this forum with minimal slice of life, and no emphasis on romance and cute characters. I welcome them... even though I admit it's been mostly cute love stories that have held my interest.

Setting: The game is set in a city in the northeastern United States 78 years after a war brought the U.S. to it’s knees. The country side is littered with hastily constructed shanty towns and the weak are killed in the streets like animals. Meanwhile, in a few cities, rapid advancement of cybernetic technology not only widened the gap between the rich and the poor, but have led to a culture of extravagance far beyond anything ever seen before. A world of neon signs where every pleasure in the world is available, for a price.

A clearly defined setting is usually good. However, in the Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés (a list written in the 1990s), one of the Overused Sci-Fi Settings is "A society consists of: A handful of ultra-powerful ultra-rich; Criminal lords who control everything not controlled by the ultra-rich; Police whose only principle of operation is maintenance of the status quo; Hordes of poor people starving in the streets; Absolutely no middle class whatsoever. Nonetheless, the society manages to remain at a high technological level."

Does this mean you should change your setting? I would say no. What one person considers cliche, another person considers fascinating and innovative. And what was trite some years ago probably sounds unexpectedly relevant now. Just think about *how* the future society got that way, and what (if anything) people are doing to change it. Finally, as much as settings are important, it's the story as a whole that really matters.

Goals: Well, to tell the truth, since this is my first game I just want to make a short VN with a few choices. I decided to go with something over the top because I like that kind of stuff personally. Hopefully the interactions between the characters will be enough to keep people interested.

Understandable. Creating a story with a limited scope might help you stay focused. You might also want to impose an artificial deadline to motivate yourself to keep writing.

[Trouble Time]

Thanks for joining the forum and posting.

There's been a decent number of distinct VNs on this forum with minimal slice of life, and no emphasis on romance and cute characters. I welcome them... even though I admit it's been mostly cute love stories that have held my interest.

Setting: The game is set in a city in the northeastern United States 78 years after a war brought the U.S. to it’s knees. The country side is littered with hastily constructed shanty towns and the weak are killed in the streets like animals. Meanwhile, in a few cities, rapid advancement of cybernetic technology not only widened the gap between the rich and the poor, but have led to a culture of extravagance far beyond anything ever seen before. A world of neon signs where every pleasure in the world is available, for a price.

A clearly defined setting is usually good. However, in the Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés (a list written in the 1990s), one of the Overused Sci-Fi Settings is "A society consists of: A handful of ultra-powerful ultra-rich; Criminal lords who control everything not controlled by the ultra-rich; Police whose only principle of operation is maintenance of the status quo; Hordes of poor people starving in the streets; Absolutely no middle class whatsoever. Nonetheless, the society manages to remain at a high technological level."

Does this mean you should change your setting? I would say no. What one person considers cliche, another person considers fascinating and innovative. And what was trite some years ago probably sounds unexpectedly relevant now. Just think about *how* the future society got that way, and what (if anything) people are doing to change it. Finally, as much as settings are important, it's the story as a whole that really matters.

Goals: Well, to tell the truth, since this is my first game I just want to make a short VN with a few choices. I decided to go with something over the top because I like that kind of stuff personally. Hopefully the interactions between the characters will be enough to keep people interested.

Understandable. Creating a story with a limited scope might help you stay focused. You might also want to impose an artificial deadline to motivate yourself to keep writing.

Thank you very much for the feedback. I do realize that the setting as I described has been done, but at the very least I do have an explanation for why things became that way, it may or may not make it into the final draft, though if possible I'd like to include some extras like various exposition bits in a menu that unlocks after beating the game once (since I don't want to bog down the main story). To tell the truth, I was almost wholly inspired by the last stage in Madworld when making the idea for the setting. It was a giant casino land, and I figured if I was going for over the top, casino land was a pretty nice place to be. You bring up a good point though, and I think it would be helpful to try to emphasize what makes the world unique compared to the other similar settings when/if I find a place where I can. Oh, and I just realized I left out a few of the characters in the character section...it was pretty late when I wrote that.

[Trouble Time]

So after some reveiw, I've begun to feel Halluel's character is a bit like chocolate milk, it has to be moving or the chocolate will eventually settle to the bottom of the cup and all you'll see is boring milk. I've had a hard time trying to convey the character in a VN, but a firend of mine with a little programming experience is going to help me try and make another more 'kinetic' kind of game, which will likely end up as some form of action-platformer.