Scelta - Shuffling the hands dealt by Fate

[Guest]

Title Screen:


Genre : Drama RPG VN (CMIIW, I'm not good at genre-ing)

Engine : Renpy

Rating : Approximately equivalent to PG-13 - which is quite fortunate since our country has just recently issued a strict law against pornography

Team : PaintBox VN team (we're looking for new members!)

Website : http://vnproject.org/scelta

Forum : http://vnproject.freeforums.org/index.php - VNProject is an Indonesian visual novel discussion and development forum greatly inspired by this Lemmasoft forum

Amateur/Commercial : Currently mostly amateur (we had to hire a pro chara designer since ours went AWOL just when we needed him most), but we're discussing about commercializing the project if the result is decent enough

Working Demo (size approx. 29 MB) is available here: http://vnproject.org/data/sceltademo.zip

Your feedback on the working demo will be very appreciated, feel free to post it here or in our website/forum.


Story Prologue:
Mao have just lost his mother, whom had been living in a small town on the small island of Aviano. Returning home, he found that he inherited an old mansion, a white siamese kitty that according to his late mother would prove 'most invaluable', and her final message to always be kind and helpful to everyone. But, with the bitterness from his recent past, could Mao follow his mother's wishes?

Living alone and unemployed in a small, foreign town, haunted by his past, and burdened by his mother's legacy, how will Mao survive? Should he follow his bitter past, his mother's legacy, or his own choice into the future?


Main Characters:
(Note: these are only what's present in the working demo, others are still being planned and worked on. Their images and profile could be seen at our website)


1. Mao (protagonist)
Male, 25 yrs, black hair, Height 180-ish cm, Weight 70-ish kg

A young man who had a promising career in a construction company in town - until his best friend ran away with his money and girlfriend, leaving him deep in debt that exhausted nearly his entire savings. Fired from his job and with everything he had impounded by debt collectors, he had nothing holding him back when he heard that his mother passed away in her home at the small island.

2. Anna Wilhemina Von Krant
Female, 16 yrs, blond hair, height 170-ish cm, weight 55-ish kg.

Silent but not shy, Anna is daughter of a local magnate. She is strictly educated and well-mannered, and is greatly adored by the girls at her all-female school but is treated coldly by her own father. Her mother disappeared just a few years after Anna was born - nobody ever knew why she went away or where she is now, or even if she's still alive...

3. Rocco
Male, 30 yrs, dark hair, height 185-ish cm, weight 60-ish kg

Von Krant's driver. Very proud of his status and due to it often regards others condescendingly.

4. Shoko
Female siamese cat, age unknown

Mao's cat, inherited as part of his mother's legacy. Usually playful but sometimes exhibited intelligence and perception far beyond what's expected from a house cat - or perhaps it's all just one coincidence after another?


Current Status:
We of PaintBox team have just recently (barely!) made it past Cycle I of our project plan - obviously not perfectly since as you can see the images aren't even colored yet (we failed to find a good amateur colorist) - the working demo is the landmark of that cycle. Currently we are evaluating the results and preparing to move on into Cycle II, where we hope we can address all the shortcomings in the previous cycle and complete a full story path (Anna's) and all the characters present in the path. We currently plan to have the full game finished by the end of next year (2009) at the latest.



The full game is (too ambitiously?) planned to contain five interconnected story arcs with a different leading lady and multiple possible endings in each arc, with a total of at least seventy game days of story and events. Which arc and ending the player will end up with will largely depend on his choice during certain events as the game progresses. The working demo itself contains two days worth of Anna's story arc.

We are Recruiting!
As for now the team is short of talented background and character illustrators, colorists, and English-language voice artists - feel free to let me know or post here or directly in the VNProject forum if you are interested to fill any of those positions. We also could use input and advices from someone who knows Italian/mediterranean culture well since Scelta's fictional Aviano island is located off the eastern coast of Italy (near the actual town of Aviano).

Regards,

Novinha
VNProject Forum Creator/Admin
Scelta Project Leader

P.S: Be advised that VNProject forum mainly uses Bahasa Indonesia, but we are capable of switching to English should a non-Indonesian join our team.

[Novinha]

Woah, forgot to log in before posting ^_^; I'm that Novinha in the post above BTW.

[PyTom]

Just played the working demo, which looks really good. Colored properly, they could be professional quality.

Two minor issues:

The splashscreen screens go by overly fast, especially the first disclaimer one. I mean, I read absurdly fast, and I couldn't read it.

There's also some garbage in the sound stream. This is usually due to mp3s with ID3 information in them... I suggest using OGGs, especially if you plan to sell the game.

Otherwise, just keep it up!

[Novinha]

PyTom:
Thanks for your feedback and the excellent engine! I was going to ask you about the squeaks, but you beat me to it We'll also tweak the timings a bit so that there'll be enough time for the disclaimer to be read fully.

The progress might be very slow since practically all of us are amateurs and our day jobs are NOT related to VN (I'm a salesperson for an IT company and the lead scriptwriter's a sysadmin, for example), but we'll try to keep this thread updated.

*continues hunting for a decent amateur colorist*

[Deji]

I played the demo and it was lovely <3 I really liked it!
I agree with PyTom that colored will look awesome =3

The only things bothering me (as in me being picky, nothing terrible, really), was that i felt there was noneed to have Anna's headshot on the text windo AND Anna's sprite on screen at the same time. I think it'd work better with just the sprite ^^;
And Anna's sprite seems to be in a different style than Mao's headshot drawing and the... driver guy and Shoko, so it was a bit weird.

Good luck finding helpers! And keep it up! =D

[Maruta]

This looks really promising! With the right colors it would look absolutely fantastic!
As for that "coloring job", how much work do you think it would require? If you wouldn't mind me taking a long time for each sprite, I might be able to pull it off.

I agree with Deji though, I'm all for head-shots in the text box, but they seem rather unnecessary if the same character's sprite is showing up at the same time.



Also, I noticed the menus. Those are awesome. And I have been trying to find out how to make that sort of menu for a really long time (i.e. one that looks like regular links), so..mind sharing that secret? Please?

[redcat]

*continues hunting for a decent amateur colorist*

heheheheh.... going for international recruitment already, eh?

[monele]

Wow, I *have* to ask : are these backgrounds done in 3D or by hand? If 3D, I've never seen such a clean b&w rendering ô_o

[Ellie]

I'd like to help out on the voice acting end of things. =3
...Umm...(...Gah, I feel like I'm posting such a horribly blatant self promotion/shameless plug...x__X)
Voice over Sample (demo reel): http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/176486
...And something more recent as well as a bunch of other voice actresses +actors (credited as Hatomi Kazuki): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXwh6XBqT_c

But...As a whole, if you want to get a really spectacular cast, try posting an audition thread over at the voice acting alliance (voiceactingalliance.com/board); there's a ton of amazing voice actors and actresses over there who I'm sure would love to participate in this. =3

[Novinha]

Ellie:
Thanks! I'll check out your sample later today (at work now and forgot to bring earphones ^_^; ) as well as dropping by at the VAA site.

Monele:
Most of the backgrounds are combination between 3D and 2D (you should be able to spot the 3D part quite easily, they're the very neat ones).

redcat:
ofc

FYI for the rest of you, redcat is also part of our development team - I consider him our Cheshire Cat (primarily because he gives very interesting feedbacks - and disappears a lot)

Deji:
Good observation - they're indeed made by different people ^_^; We'll try to have a single chara designer for the next development cycle.

When do you think the use of thumbnail is appropriate? I'd guess when the pictured character speaks/makes an action but is not/should not be visible by the player, as Maruta pointed out.

Maruta:
The next development cycle is four months long, in which all the existing sprites and backgrounds will hopefully get colored. I'll PM you to discuss further about it.

About the in-dialog-box choice, I'll have to ask our programmer - I'm certain the good folks at this forum will give you the answer already by the time I get back ^_^;

[Nandaka]

Ellie:
About the in-dialog-box choice, I'll have to ask our programmer - I'm certain the good folks at this forum will give you the answer already by the time I get back ^_^;

Hello, I'm the proggrammer. Nice to meet you all.

for in-dialogbox choice, just edit option.rpy and search for button_menu below theme.roundrect. Just set it to False.

## If this is True, in-game menus are placed in the center
## the screen. If False, they are placed inside a window
## at the bottom of the screen.
button_menu = False,

that's all.

[Maruta]

re: Novinha: Alright, then.


EDIT: Never mind that. I was playing around with it, and I found a way that make the menus work. So, thank you!

[Novinha]

Ellie:
Finally able to check out your demo - I don't really have much experience about judging a voice-acting portfolio, but you seem to be able to convincingly VA (for lack of better verb - blame my awful vocab) quite a wide range of characters

I'll look into posting an Audience in the VAA forum within this week, which among other things will include English writeups on the characters so that people will have a good understanding of them and can VA them as close to our intended characteristics as possible.

One question remaining though - considering the voluminous amount of voice acting needed in Scelta and our geographical separation, what do you think is the best and most economical way and format to send audio files?

[azureXtwilight]

Hi, this project looks soo cool!!!
Me myself is Indonesian, it's great to see a VN made by Indonesian ppl!
I can help (a bit drawing, a bit programming, and I can translate eng-indo or indo-eng, I won an english olympics in my school)...!

[Novinha]

Hi, this project looks soo cool!!!
Me myself is Indonesian, it's great to see a VN made by Indonesian ppl!
I can help (a bit drawing, a bit programming, and I can translate eng-indo or indo-eng, I won an english olympics in my school)...!

Hello Azure - as vnproject forum admin I know you're already a member there, and I know you're working on your own project as well Feel free to participate in discussion threads in vnproject you find interesting - you can also present your project there and promote it to get more people to join you. As for Scelta, the recruitment thread is here: http://vnproject.freeforums.org/scelta- ... -t274.html - looking forward to see you there