Lemma Soft Forums

PROJECT: CANCELLED
due to people getting real jobs, and lack of communication with others. And conventions.
I still have a number of assets and a quarter of the story already written out, so if anyone wants to pick up the project from where it ended, feel free to contact me.




You are given a free month's subscription to a MMORPG called 'Destiny Limit'. Your adventure begins when you create a username and character. Each character has a different storyline, but the main story is that you explore the land, and decide for yourself what the outcome of the last day of the month will be. Each storyline is a different aspect of real roleplaying games, but they all take place in the same game.

story 1: You are being verbally picked on by internet trolls in the MMO, and in order to fight back, you decide to beat them at their own game.
story 2: A mysterious quest popped up in the game, called 'The Bard's Song'. You must gather the pieces of the song to compete the quest.
story 3: You meet a group of friends who do more than just dungeon runs, and you try and become a hardcore role player like them.
story 4: While exploring, you find a glitch in the game. When you approach it.....

There are two alternate endings for each story, and a number of 'dead ends' as well.
Extras: When you play the game you can unlock visuals, and even a few comics (well none of us are animators, but all three of us draw comics).

note: the reason why each character is designated to a different story is so that the cut scene artist can create unique work for particular scenes (it would be hell if they had to draw four different versions of a specific scene).

opening menu:

(It might look a little 'bland' because the game starts out like this, and the more in depth you go in the game, the more the image on this screen unlocks, so creatures and characters are all over the image)



Just like any mmo, you create your own screenname and character before you begin the game. So the main character is your screenname you choose in the beginning, and you can choose between four classes: barbarian, mage, ranger, thief. Each one leads to a different story arc. In addition to the four classes, you can choose the gender, which additionally will change the outcome of your main character's appearance. And ultimately, in the middle of the game your character will 'level up' for an additional wardrobe change.
And also, like an mmo, you will meet other characters with the same class and gender as you, but differently color coded.
(I know someone might be curious why the thief's gender is so ambiguous. The reason is that every character has a different 'trait' and personality implied, and the thief is visibly most mysterious. )
In the game, there will be other characters that have the same 'avatar' as your chosen one in the game, but with different color variations. There is a total of sixteen variation designs (and an unlimited color pallate) , so hopefully it won't get repetitive. To put it simply, if you chose a female barbarian, there will be other female barbarians in the game, but with a different color variation (and when they talk, they'll be facing in the direction away from you so you can tell).
Most of the GUI is set up, and now plugging in the first quarter of the story, ready for demo in a few weeks.
update: the 'world map', not including what's actually on top of it, else it would be a spoiler

Wow, I like games about playing games) And you even have different classes and genders and wardrobe level-up, it's great! The art looks funny too)
How long do you plan the game to be?
I also think it'll be nice if gui resembled those of MMOs (with small portrait/group portraits, mana/health bars, action buttons and stuff)

There's a slight resemblance to RE: Alistair (which is about MMO players, and takes place over a month), but that's about it. You have a reasonably original story concept. I will look forward to seeing it develop.

pineapplepocky wrote:You are given a free month's subscription to a MMORPG called 'Destiny Limit'. Your adventure begins when you create a username and character. Each character has a different storyline, but the main story is that you explore the land, and decide for yourself what the outcome of the last day of the month will be.

Just so I understand your intentions... is this the story of one person who has four MMO characters, four people who have one character each, or something different?

pineapplepocky wrote:-unique artwork that does not resemble anything like a normal visual novel

If you ask me, "normal" is nothing but the name of a town in Illinois. Anyway, you can find a few projects here on Lemma Soft with abstract, cartoonish art, such as Hinomaru, Club Shuffle, and Elements: The Academy. (I don't recall which of them is still active.) There's some others which have an aesthetic that's different from recent anime-manga series. Ask if you're unfamiliar.

pineapplepocky wrote:I'm having some issues trying to make the dialogue boxes (and the menu bar) the way I want it 100%, and a really hard time trying to well.....figure a lot of stuff out. The tutorials are all very difficult for me to understand, so I have to tread through it pretty heavily to get what I want.

If you need help, or if you are struggling to get Ren'py to do what you want, be sure to ask.

Wow, I like your art! Will be keeping my eyes on this~ We need more games about MMOs!

I like your logo, and I like the overall concept. However, making a visual novel with four different characters and four different paths is probably going to take a lot of work, especially if you're having a bit of trouble "figuring stuff out" for coding, as you said. Just make sure you guys are ready to devote yourselves to this project, because it could take a long time to complete depending on how long the paths are.

Questions:

Will this be free or commercial?

You mentioned that there'll be "lore"; does that mean the game is going to have in-world terminology? For example...

Since you said that each path has two endings, is there a "true" ending, or are both endings considered canon?

waaa so many questions already~
I'm incredibly surprised about the responses. Our intentions of making this game was based on this post: http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?t=109933 (and a few others)
Seems like artwork that isn't very 'anime' was looked down a little bit, and also have a very small crowd of interest. Our goal was to bring it to light, and see if we could do something new with that idea.
Seeing your reactions to this post,I think that shows that I should have looked at even more forums. Oh well, this group project isn't gonna stop where it is now.

Katta:

Katta wrote:Wow, I like games about playing games) And you even have different classes and genders and wardrobe level-up, it's great! The art looks funny too)
How long do you plan the game to be?

Each game is approximately one hour long (or so we planned). So total is about four hours. Would be a bit longer if you spent the time in the game to try and unlock items in the game.

Katta wrote:I also think it'll be nice if gui resembled those of MMOs (with small portrait/group portraits, mana/health bars, action buttons and stuff)

Regarding the GUI...when we discussed about the game, we realized a lot of it doesn't involve actual battling, so there won't be a battle stat system, but there will be a gold system. This game is more of the 'social' aspect of MMOS, interacting with other people kind of thing (but not an otome at all). Gold is purchasing items and scrolls, which actually just unlocks artwork for the game.

gekiganwing:

gekiganwing wrote:There's a slight resemblance to RE: Alistair (which is about MMO players, and takes place over a month), but that's about it. You have a reasonably original story concept. I will look forward to seeing it develop.

Will definitely check out. Aw jeez, I hope people don't think we ripped off that idea, because we didn't. The story popped up in an online conversation about how some of us were talking about MMOs, then it hit us in three seconds.

gekiganwing wrote:Just so I understand your intentions... is this the story of one person who has four MMO characters, four people who have one character each, or something different?

It's about one person who has the choice to play four different characters. And to make it nice and organized about storylines (and to balance graphics for the cutscene artist), we decided each character class has a different storyline. So one person-->four characters-->each character=different story. The intention is to have you, the player, to play the game over and over, since we intended the stories to be about an hour long.

gekiganwing wrote:If you ask me, "normal" is nothing but the name of a town in Illinois. Anyway, you can find a few projects here on Lemma Soft with abstract, cartoonish art, such as Hinomaru, Club Shuffle, and Elements: The Academy. (I don't recall which of them is still active.) There's some others which have an aesthetic that's different from recent anime-manga series. Ask if you're unfamiliar.

At first I was very shy on these forums and only looked up the topic 'non-anime style visual novel', and saw some pretty negative comments about it (hence, our intention for this project). Of course, re-posting a similar topic would just crowd up this forum so I didn't. I will definitely check these out!

gekiganwing wrote:If you need help, or if you are struggling to get Ren'py to do what you want, be sure to ask.

That's funny, since I know all the answers I've ever needed were all in this forum or google, but reading the language and understanding it in context with the game is what makes it difficult. So it's mostly understanding how to put the code where, and when. Baby steps, I guess.

azureXtwilight:

azureXtwilight wrote:Wow, I like your art! Will be keeping my eyes on this~ We need more games about MMOs!

aw, thanks! My eyes popped this morning when I checked the comments here. Really surprised about your reactions. My programming isn't advanced enough to do an actual fighting simulation with health bars and levels, and stats, but it talks about many other aspects of MMOs. Not just fighting, but socializing, and exploring.

Haze:

Haze wrote:I like your logo, and I like the overall concept. However, making a visual novel with four different characters and four different paths is probably going to take a lot of work, especially if you're having a bit of trouble "figuring stuff out" for coding, as you said. Just make sure you guys are ready to devote yourselves to this project, because it could take a long time to complete depending on how long the paths are.

I don't think you need to worry about that. Only one of us has a job, and the guy who actually does knows how to make deadlines, as that's part of his job. However, after December, things will slow down. While I may be figuring out code from scratch, that doesn't prevent me from continuously fixing up dialogue and working on other parts of the game. Hail the "replace word w/ word" function in Jedit!

Haze wrote:Will this be free or commercial?

Since the game is set up in four different stories, our plan was to only release one of the stories into a demo. The final product with all the stories will be commercial. However, we will be setting up a crowdfunding, in which you will be able to play an additional character/story before the final is released (so a head start on playing the game). Well, that was our intention. Of course, final will always have the all good brownies put in it.

Haze wrote:You mentioned that there'll be "lore"; does that mean the game is going to have in-world terminology?

I guess you can say the lore is about the Destiny Limit world itself. Stuff about characters, places, history. Our concept was that it is possible to create a merchant system where you can purchase different goodies like weapons and scrolls. And instead of using the weapons and scrolls in the game itself, it's like unlocking drawings/artwork for the game with a story written next to it. Some of it will just be gags for kicks, some more serious, etc. All three of us have incredibly different drawing techniques and skills, and so what you purchase in it will have nice variety.

Haze wrote:Since you said that each path has two endings, is there a "true" ending, or are both endings considered canon?

I would consider both canon for most of them. There would be a happy ending, but there might be one that isn't happy but still ends up with different cutscenes. There will be some dead endings in the middle of the game though.

I hope those are good answers for everyone ^_^

I've been following you guys on tumblr. What caught my eye was the art direction. I will be bookmarking this thread.

aw, thanks for your support!

Updated all the playable characters

I really love the art style it is very refreshing from the typical anime style that is usually done. Also I skimmed through the tumblr page, and I really love the backgrounds shown there

Wow I love art style!
Can't wait to try this game!

We want to set out a very short demo or video of us playing the very beginning of the story, since there was some confusion of how story paths follow, and also a little advertisement. I'd like your input on which one would be better:

1)if you would like to play the very very beginning of the game for every single character choice for the story
The pro is that you can see how each character begins their story, and the con is that you don't really get to see much more than the characters reacting differently in each situation.

or

2)a demo that is a bit longer, but only concentrated on a single character's storyline.
The pro is that you can see how the gameplay works and a deeper story, but the con is that you cannot really engage with any other character class except one.

thoughts? Should it be playable or explained in a video?

this is for advertising purposes and to get people more interested at the moment.

I'd prefer the second option. It would be good to showcase the gameplay and your writing to give people a better idea of your game as a whole. Plus its more intriguing to keep the other characters stories a secret for now.

Umm I'd like it to be playable. I don't really find explained videos interesting. But videos are a good for advertising though.

update: added a screenshot, and now looking for a programmer to help out.

update: We found a programmer! yay!
now how do I close this topic? >.>;