Many thanks to Auro_Cyanide for the beautiful logo!
Demo finally released!
Windows: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=QAJSOLIO
Mac: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=QON0DTQ4
Linux: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OXI3K15J
The demo is just over 37,000 words in length, with three full demo endings, and one bad end. It should take somewhere around one and a half to two hours to complete one playthrough. Quite a bit of the game changes depending on your choices, so I encourage you to play through it again if you like it.
A few notes on the current demo:
1. The default menu doesn't fit in the screen properly, and the return button gets covered up because of this. You can still exit it with the escape key, however. The only time it leaves you stuck is if you accidentally go into the loading screen from the title when you don't mean to. This should be fixed in the final version, once I have a custom menu.
2. I tried to include as many art assets as possible, but a couple things are still missing, such as a few sprite poses. It shouldn't really take away from the game.
3. Everything in this is colored with a mouse. I'm so, so sorry.
4. The age rating for the demo is probably somewhere around 15+, due to some strong language, and a bit of violence.
Finally: Critique, critique, critique! I want you all to tear this thing apart. Tell me everything I should improve. I want the full version to be as likable as possible.
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The World is Made of Paper is a modern fantasy, psychological whosawhatsit that also happens to be a visual novel. It's an idea that I've wanted to get down for ages, and I think ren'py may be the key to making it actually happen.
Hurrah!
I don't really want to bore you too much with introductory ramblings, so I'm just going to get straight to the stuff people actually care about.
Being a bored college dropout with nothing better to do, Dion Nagi had read a lot of books in the past few years. Far, far too many of them.
Contrary to popular belief, this is not a healthy practice. At least not for a young man already prone to over analyzing things.
After a certain point, the lines between reality and fiction started to blur, and it became increasingly easy to interpret even the events of his own life as if they were written in a book. Everything from the people he knew, to the problems he suffered from, started to seem like nothing more than plot devices intent on bringing him to a meaningful conclusion.
Dion didn't really mind this, however. To him, that part was really nothing more than a new way of looking at the world. No, what really made him snap was, in fact, the most simple of book related thoughts.
"What is the genre of my life?"
It didn't take long for him to realize the answer: he was living in an underdog story. He was the kid left at the bottom rung with nowhere to go but up. It would be sappy, heartwarming, and incredibly cheesy.
He hated that kind of story.
So he did the only thing he could think to do. He left his home, his town, his job, his belongings, and just about everything even closely related to his life as it was. He did everything it took to throw away the novel he had already started.
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Stuck in an unknown town without gas, a place to stay, or any immediate goal to speak of, Dion found himself starting a new story. A story that he realized began with him being a complete and total idiot.
Hit with a car on the way to find a gas station, his story continued. A story that seemed to want nothing more than to kill him at every given moment.
A story that, upon him waking up in the hospital with a head injury, started to get a bit weird.
Over time, Dion's reality started to fall apart around him, and the more he attempted to take control his life, the stranger it seemed to get.
In his attempt to simply start a new life, he found himself looking at much, much more.
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When given the opportunity to change the world at it's very core, would he be willing to take it?
How would he do it?
What would he turn it into?
And what will he do when he realizes he's not the only one who can?
(Character profiles and screenshots in the following posts)
