SUPPORT OUR KICKSTARTER TO GET THE FULL GAME MADE!
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Hey there!

My name is Hope, and I'm making my first visual novel ever, so I could use a lot of feedback! I've been an enthusiast of the format for several years now and streamed a lot of VNs for both promotion (when they're good) and amusement (when they're not so good) as my screen name JesuOtaku for a while, but I always wanted rather be a creator than a critic when it comes to these things, I see such promise and so many good things in the medium, and I admire all the cool stuff that's been done with the relatively young format in the English-speaking world so far. I know making these things is a lot of hard work, and after nine months of gestation, I'm ready to share the WIP of the game I'm hoping to complete a demo of and send to kickstarter for a full version.

Once the demo is complete, I plan to take it to kickstarter to make the full, 70-80 CG monstrosity a reality, so I want to make it the very best it can be over this final month! Also, the highest resolution images I can post on lemmasoft is 800x wide, so if you want to see higher res versions of any of these images, you can see them on this shiny new tumblr.
THE TEAM
- WRITING/CODING -- JesuOtaku (me!)
- SPRITE ART -- Tengu-Arts
- BACKGROUND ART -- JackEavesArt
- CG ART -- Auro-Cyanide, DejiNyucu, seeking more artists for the full version post kickstarter!
- UI DESIGN -- Auro-Cyanide
- GAME LOGO DESIGN -- Ashuraoh
- COMPANY LOGO DESIGN -- Tengu-Arts
- ASSISTANT PROGRAMMER -- Barry P. III
- MUSIC PRODUCER -- [will be needed for full version post kickstarter]
- VOICE ACTORS -- [will be needed for full version post kickstarter]


THE CHARACTERS
I was inspired by the f***ing adorable VN Autumn's Journey to use a transparent layer model for the characters' expressions, since it worked so well in that game. Their eyes, mouths, brows, and a few effects layers all move independently of one another, giving them, hopefully, an enormous range of expression. All five friends are romanceable, giving the player four boy options and one girl option to pursue. So it's sort of an otome game, but I hope the story will be strong enough that all genders and persuasions will want to play it. You don't have to get a romance ending, and in fact "choosing" an ending could prove very difficult as the choices are not framed as clearly as "BE NICE TO THIS PERSON" or "BE MEAN TO THIS PERSON" and are more about defining your own personality and telling you a little bit about yourself and who you would get along best with. ...Also, the odds that whoever you like is going to die a gruesome, gruesome death are pretty darn high.








THE GAMEPLAY



This is a simple VN in that there are no RPG elements or complex mechanics. It's all just player choice, and every choice in the game is binary: the player will always have only two options at a prompt. I wanted to focus the experience heavily on player choice and re-playability. The demo alone will have 40+ choices for the player to make, and all of them affect how the story can potentially end, so ~choose wisely.~ Your choices will change fate only slightly at first, but the choices will snowball into 9 different "ending types" with hundreds of ways to get there and dozens of variations on those Nine Fates. For example, getting a True Ending with a character, any one of the five characters, counts as just one of those 9 Endings, but needless to say the five True Endings are wildly different from each other. So you're getting more than nine endings, it's just Nine Different Kinds of Endings and the ways to get there are pretty endless thanks to the bottle story structure.
THE TRAILER
(Watch in HD!)

Please tell me what you think of the project so far. (Any favorite characters/ideas? Anything that looks off/problematic?) Let me know if you have any help to offer, and thanks for being such an awesome forum! (I've lurked here plenty to look at projects and figure out how to code, but I'd never registered til now. ~Please be gentle with me.~)