[WIP] Dragon Story - Demo released!

[Cironian]

"Dragon Story"

An epic story of adventure, magic, action, growth and possibly even romance.

PREVIEW DEMO NOW RELEASED! (just under 2 hours of gameplay, at 23486 words)
Win32: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/715562/Dragon%2 ... -win32.zip (19 MB)
Mac: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/715562/Dragon%2 ... 20-mac.zip (22 MB)
Linux: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/715562/Dragon%2 ... 86.tar.bz2 (18 MB)




Story overview

Starting out in our own, current day Earth, the story centers around three young people caught up in the events resulting from the return of magic to the world.

Our heroes are going to play a significant role in deciding the fate of the world. That is, if they manage to survive long enough...



Main Characters / The Dragons
(spoiler-free version)

Stefan

• Main protagonist
• A 22 year old whose desire for a normal, uneventful life must remain unfulfilled as he finds himself drawn into a global crisis
• Gained the ability to manipulate local gravity, both as a weapon and as protection

Jessica

• Main companion, who will be travelling with the protagonist for most of the story
• Age 21
• Starts out as Stefans girlfriend; where their relationship goes from there depends on the player
• Well-educated daughter of an old and wealthy family, but no longer on speaking terms with her parents
• Tends to swing between very serious and very goofy moods, often with little warning
• Easily the most powerful of the group, commanding a devastating form of pyrokinesis
• Her great power is also her weakness, as she lacks fine control over her abilities

Sarah

• Third of the group, an ally of Stefan and Jessica who soon finds herself in disagreement with them
• Age 23
• Distant and not too friendly, she is nonetheless extremely intelligent
• Has the ability to heal any injuries someone has received, although her power might be more than it appears

For more characters, play the demo!


Style

Normal NVL display style, with first person narration by the protagonist. No mini-games.

As for intended age-appropriateness, I'd give it a 15+. While not the primary focus of the story, there are some segments with text-based violence on about the level you would expect from an intense action movie.



Status

The first preview demo is out now (see the top of this post), so check it out. The preview contains chapter 1 to 4 out of 23 total. It's still missing all sound and music, so I won't call it a full demo yet. The other chapters are scripted and playable, but missing all artwork.

I hope that this VN will see its full release some time in 2011.



If you have any general questions, comments or feedback, just reply here and I'll do my best to answer.

[Blue Sky]

It's times like these that I wish I was a more experienced artist! I'm really interested in doing a collaboration, but I'm afraid that I'm not quite skilled enough for a commercial work. Should I send you some of my work anyway?

[Cironian]

Of course, go right ahead if you're interested! It might always be that your personal style turns out to be exactly what I'm looking for, even if it is less technically polished than someone elses work.

[Blue Sky]

Thanks! I'll send you something soon, then. :)

[Ramidel]

And so it begins...

"Dragon Story"

An epic-scale adventure oriented visual novel in NVL style.

You might call it a BxG story, but it's not really focused on dating, unless your idea of dating includes action, magical powers, widespread destruction, ancient monsters and the like...

This is Lemmasoft. Of course it does!

[tylerthekitsune]

hey there. i am tylerthekitsune. and your projects looks very interesting. if your game actually contains dragons. i will be willing to work on this game as an artist.

[Cironian]

if your game actually contains dragons

Very likely not in the sense you are thinking about right now.

Ancient incredibly powerful creatures, memories of which echo in the minds of humans: Yes
Huge reptiles: N... Ah, well, yes actually. But none that spit fire. That's Jessica's part, instead.

The term "dragon" refers, for certain reasons explained in the story, to the

mostly

human main characters and a few others like them.

[Cironian]

Self-bumping for demo release.

[mysterialize]

I just played through the demo, and got all the available endings. While the story is really nothing new at all, the writing was high quality enough to make up for it enough for me to play through the whole thing. The art in particular was really impressive.

With that said... *Points forward*

Nitpicking, ahoy!

Considering how pretty the character sprites are, it's kind of a pity that all of the backgrounds are photos. I realize it's a lot of work to draw a bunch of them though, and you seem to be working alone on this project, so I'm not really going to judge the game on that at all.

The characters themselves are probably the part I had the most issues with. While I did get basic ideas of most of their personalities from some of the earlier conversations, that was really all I was able to get. I hate to say it, but a lot of the time they felt a bit flat, and often a little inconsistent.

Whenever conversation got serious (Which was extremely often.) all of the dialogue between characters would start to sound almost exactly the same. Characters should have clearly different speaking styles, and ways of reacting to grave situations. Yet I almost never saw that in any of them.

Considering that, out of everyone, Bowen actually struck me as the most interesting. He occasionally suffered from the "No personality during serious conversation" syndrome the others did, but he did it far less often. He also seemed to have a unique motivation behind him, which may actually be the main reason why he came off as so much more notable than the others.

Jessica and Sarah weren't bad. I could at least tell that Jessica was supposed to be a little hotheaded and occasionally goofy, while Sarah was hesitant and detached. Unfortunately, that's about all I got out of them. If nothing else, I kind of feel like you could play up Jessica's hotheadedness a little during their planning sessions and conversations with Bowen. Sarah could make it a little more clear that she's uncomfortable with certain things and doesn't want to get involved.

Stefan however, seemed to have no personality at all. I honestly can't point out a single trait in him. I can understand (Even if I don't personally like it much) having a relatively blank main character in games where you make a lot of choices for him/her, but there really weren't many in this game. What few there were only changed his actions, rather than his thoughts.

Related to this is the fact that you tended to get a little too caught up in exposition. So much of the demo is seeped in backstory and strategy that you hardly even got any character introduction done in the 25000+ word long script, much less any character development. You may want to try to find a way to thin out the lore, or space the exposition apart so that it doesn't get so thick. After a certain point I found it a little hard to pay attention to anymore, and definitely didn't find myself feeling at all involved in any of it. You need to give players a reason to care about your world before you start describing it in detail.

A lot of the exposition did seem relatively well thought out though, as far as details go. Though your way of presenting it was sometimes a little... odd. (Spoilers ahead)

I eventually realized that the twist with the cells found in the ice was that they were dragon cells, but Bowen's claim that they were from "Sentient, walking, talking dinosaurs" made it sound a lot more ridiculous than it really was. You may want to consider rewording it.

The choices felt a little unnecessary most of the time, since they never actually change the course of the story. Incorrect choices would lead to almost immediate bad ends, and correct choices would lead back to the main course of the story. Unless there's more significant choices later down the line, it might be better to just make the game a KN.

As far as basic writing goes, it was pretty good, for the most part. I saw a few typos and awkward sentences, but I could tell that they were mostly just stumbles. Even so, you may still want to consider getting a proofreader for the final release, just to make sure those little flaws get fixed.

That all aside, I wish you luck in finishing the game as a whole.

[Cironian]

Whenever conversation got serious (Which was extremely often.) all of the dialogue between characters would start to sound almost exactly the same. Characters should have clearly different speaking styles, and ways of reacting to grave situations. Yet I almost never saw that in any of them.

Yeah, you're right. Part of this is because I wrote the story mostly in order, and so some traits only truly come out in the later chapters as I get more used to writing the characters. I should see about "backporting" some of those things to the earlier chapters.

Related to this is the fact that you tended to get a little too caught up in exposition.

I was kind of expecting that reaction. That was one of the reasons I released this. I think I'll be reorganising some of that stuff, like Bowen's infodump in Chapter 3, into a dialog tree, so the player can ask about the things of interest, and ignore other details.

The choices felt a little unnecessary most of the time, since they never actually change the course of the story. Incorrect choices would lead to almost immediate bad ends, and correct choices would lead back to the main course of the story. Unless there's more significant choices later down the line, it might be better to just make the game a KN.

Over the later chapters, the decisions shift more and more away from instant deaths to a point-based system for determining the type of ending and other events that happen at a much later time. After Chapter 4 there isn't another bad end for the next 5 or 6 decision points.

That all aside, I wish you luck in finishing the game as a whole.

Thanks! And thank you for the feedback!