gal-game project, Alpha 0.5 release, WIP

[desulishor]

First things first. Coded the game by myself, and the bare non-visual skeleton of the game is now ready. I'm too tired up something that is basically screens of text, but if you'd really like to see this incomplete version, pm or post to thread and I'll do something bout it.

This project was fueled by discontent towards simplistic gal-games that force the player to play trough the same story with minimal variations each time and limit their choices.

In this gal-game the player is offered a total of 3 girls to date, 10 dating spots of free choice, each girl has different scenarios for each spot, with regular questions as well. Each playthrough consists of 5 dates with 1 girl, so the replay value is huge. Points are awarded for each action so and the good ending takes only half of all possible points for the 5 dates so the player can date any girl pretty much in his own style and still win.

as for the game scenario, it's set in a medieval fantasy. The main protagonist is an adventurer who gets a month's free rooming in a wizard's tower after killing a dragon with a young female mercenary who he met by a chance. The other inhabitants of the tower are
a white mage and a black mage, both girls.

Characters:

Rudy:A young adventurer with long brown hair held on a ponytail. Wears blue travelers clothes with a cape, wields a sword and a small round wooden shield with some iron parts.

Iris: A female mercenary, same age as Rudy. Her proportions are a bit flat and she has a lot of muscle on her arms. Holds her long violet hair on a ponytail and wears all black clothes and some armored parts like an iron shoulder pad on her left arm. Wields a huge 2-handed sword that is normally tied to her back. A huge tsundere.

Alice: A young white mage girl. Dressed in a white gown, and has long red hair. Wields a decorated white iron rod with her. Great proportions! Inexperienced in love and a bit air-headed

Carina: A young black mage girl. Dressed in a black gown and wears a black pointy hat. Long silver hair with eyeglasses, wields an old wooden magician's wand. Normal proportions. weird bookworm type.

post if you're interested or you'd like to comment something.

[ashewalton]

While I don't have the time to offer any direct assistance at the moment, I can try to help you find some resources for all of the above! The only restriction on any of the following resources is that the final product be non-commercial (not a problem for most games). So here's a list of useful sites:

Music:

Jamendo: Hands-down one of my favourite open-source music repositories. Some songs have a royalty-free purchase option if you're looking to make a commercial game. Try searching by genre (Instrumental and Ambient are my favourite) and then listing by most popular to get to the best music for use in a game.
Newgrounds: I was surprised to hear, but apparently Newgrounds has quite the selection of creative-commons licensed music. I haven't listened to much, so I couldn't comment on the general quality of the archive.
Musopen: Mostly open-source/creative-commons licensed classical music. Also includes sheet music if you happen to be a composer.
Incompetech: Free for use in non-commercial projects, I can't say much on the quality of the archive because I've only listened to a few songs from this archive (mind you, what I've heard is stellar).
Free Music Archive: Not sure about the quality of this archive... it seems to be hard to sort the slushpile material to what might actually be useful, but I'm sure there's some fabulous instrumental tracks.
Sakari Infinity: The tracks are decidedly RPG-oriented, but could work well in a more high-action visual novel. Some of the slower tracks are quite good as well. The general quality of the archive is quite high as it's a closed community.
Wikimedia Commons - Music archive: Useful because a great number of the tracks are already in .OGG format, which Ren'Py actually prefers to .MP3. It's not necessarily all public domain though, so check the licenses for each track carefully.

For editing music for use in your game, you'll want a program like Audacity (free), and then remove ANY silence from the beginning of the track (you'll likely need to zoom in a few times) and most from the end (this will help music loop more seamlessly).

You could also try to use Youtube/Dirpy in combination to find tracks that have become public domain (anything before ~1920 which hasn't had the copyright renewed), but music-wise, you'll probably have a hard time finding public domain works since the 60s and the 70s were the advent of easily accessible music.

Visuals:

(While I have little to no resources for sprites/characters, you could try photomanipulating stock photography of models if you have the skill. It's an idea I've toyed with in the past, though I'm not sure how a "realistic" visual novel would be received. However, below I've included stock resources for background images, which, if you can't find an artist will make an acceptable substitute for cg backgrounds if you resize/crop and run them through some filters.)

deviantArt: Make sure you're looking around in the "Stock Images & Resources" category -- there's lots of photography on deviantArt that isn't meant to be used by others. Also make sure when choosing stock from dA that it doesn't come with a stipulation limiting it for use ONLY on deviantArt.
stock.xchng A huge repository of stock images, all free. Here, you may find some stock images that are free for use in commercial projects.

If you don't have an image-editing program like Photoshop, never fear: free ones exist, probably the best being the GIMP (which is free, and available for all platforms).

Coding:

As far as coding goes, if you get everything together that you'd need (including any visuals, sound, full script, etc.), I'm sure someone could give you a hand putting it altogether, but very few people here are willing to help a game that isn't complete or very, very close to complete because of the number of projects that get started but never finished. If you still can't find someone even once you've finished everything for your game sans the coding, I'd be more than willing to help you out~ just send me a PM when you get to that point (:

Hope that was helpful for you~

[desulishor]

thx for your advice. I'll look into the links when i'm done with the bare, non-visual skeleton of the game. While this should solve the problem of music and backgrounds, but as I have no interest in using real photography, it still leaves out the most important part: the characters themselves.

Thus, Still looking for character visuals! Might try posting a request on deviantart or some other site where amateur artists/fanart ppl gather when i'm done with coding the game's bare skeleton, but if you're reading this and you're interested or have something to comment on, please post.

[desulishor]

Bumping cause of the "alpha release", info edited to opening post.

[desulishor]

soundtrack was chosen, courtesy of incompetech. Instrumental tracks, mostly from the soundtrack section. Contains some nice celtic melodies and other stuff with a medieval feel.

everything except character art is practically here. If all is about to go to waste my last resort is to use charas sprite creator and a set of free rpg-tiles. Since the medieval fantasy gives the whole world a kind of rpg-ish feel and the chars themselved are modeled after rpg sterotypes, this kind of unique solution might work. At least I could compensate the lack of art with animation.

[desulishor]

updating the situation again. An artist was chosen, over from Deviantart. All the components are finally here, so the finish line shouldn't be far now.