Lemma Soft Forums

Posted: **Wed Mar 09, 2016 3:44 am**

Hello! I'm new to this forum but have been practicing game design for over a decade.
I wanted to share my small team's first official title, Kitsune Magic Shop.

It's a Unity Engine creation made to fit into two genres, Point and Click and Visual Novel. We hope to create a new innovative experience that touches on the merits of both genres.
Perhaps, if we're lucky, it'll draw in people from both genres and make them more interested in trying out games they never would have played before.

Our team of 5 is taking the game very seriously and are reaching out to visual novel fans in hopes to get some very important feedback.
We plan on going to Steam Greenlight by the end of the month and are working hard on a cinematic trailer that will help people understand the vibe and general direction of the game.
It's a very nerve wracking experience making this game as we have no idea how people will feel about this blend of genres, and are doing our best on the graphics and story front to
make the game a good experience, if only for a few curious onlookers.

Our ultimate goal is to create a sequel or trilogy to build on the characters and gameplay, and help us turn our studio into a professional outlet for anime inspired games.

The story follows Niyama Kitsune and her sister Nizume as they try to open the first ever magic shop.
Explore an idealistic ancient Japanese village, interact with the bold villagers who aren't afraid to share their views of the Kitsune sisters, and help Niyama run the ultimate magic shop.
The blend of Point and Click and Visual Novel will create a story heavy experience that also allows players to explore, and interact with the environment.
Create potions by gathering herbs and help the various ailments of the village-folk and gain their trust. Gain money and pay the greedy Neko, a cat salesman, for new outfits to explore around in while being accompanied by a 40 song original soundtrack!
With several romantic options and a host of different endings, we are hoping to bring a 'next gen' visual novel experience to gamers.

Our pre-alpha trailer can be seen here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2AzepJL5tQ

Our facebook is : http://www.facebook.com/worldcorestudios

Our website is : http://www.worldcorestudios.org

We really want to make this something special and are branching out in order to get more opinions of our idea.
You can expect the final game, 5 chapters at around 5-7 hours of total gameplay, before the end of the year, hopefully by the end of Summer.

Thanks for reading and id love to answer any question or receive any feedback about what we have so far.
If you like what you see please follow our facebook, subscribe to our youtube, and stick around. A lot more is coming in the future

Oh! And try out our demo, it's posted to the forum!
http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... 45&t=37535
We have our first fundraiser here, if you like what you see and what to help the project : https://www.gofundme.com/vztytetu

Photos (Content is unfinished) :

Posted: **Wed Mar 09, 2016 11:24 am**

I looked at your 3D character graphics and liked them. Why is this? Because the characters are humanoid, but are not portrayed as photo-realistic humans. I tend to dislike 3D graphics if they make people look as realistic as possible. I consider this to be an uncanny valley problem. Generally speaking, I prefer when polygon graphics show characters who are not (entirely) human, or exaggerated in cartoon-like ways.

Wrongfire wrote: It's a Unity Engine creation made to fit into two genres, Point and Click and Visual Novel. We hope to create a new innovative experience that touches on the merits of both genres.
Perhaps, if we're lucky, it'll draw in people from both genres and make them more interested in trying out games they never would have played before.

There's always potential, and there's always a risk. A hybrid genre video game *can* appeal to people who like both categories of media. However, it might struggle to find an audience.

Wrongfire wrote: It's a very nerve wracking experience making this game as we have no idea how people will feel about this blend of genres, and are doing our best on the graphics and story front to
make the game a good experience, if only for a few curious onlookers.

How will your point-and-click gameplay work? Will the player be asked to solve puzzles?

I believe that you might benefit by making sure players do not have to solve every puzzle in order to continue the story. At the same time, I would recommend making sure that the story segments do not go on too long. People should not be frustrated if they have to figure out a puzzle, and people should not become bored waiting for the next gameplay segment. (A somewhat related analogy: I had some pacing related complaints when I played Sakura Wars 5. It had a couple hours' worth of story followed by a couple hours' worth of battles. In my opinion, it would have been more enjoyable with only thirty minutes of each part.)

Wrongfire wrote: Create potions by gathering herbs and help the various ailments of the village-folk and gain their trust. Gain money and pay the greedy Neko, a cat salesman, for new outfits to explore around in while being accompanied by a 40 song original soundtrack!
With several romantic options and a host of different endings, we are hoping to bring a 'next gen' visual novel experience to gamers.

Be careful with the scope of your game. Feature creep can be a major problem for video game creators. Consider if there are parts of your game which might need to be eliminated due to budget limitations, or not having enough people who can work on the game.

Make sure that your team is prepared to create all of the relevant gameplay and story portions. I have seen a few too many promising work-in-progress projects die quietly. Sometimes it appears that the creators underestimate how much time and effort would be necessary. For more details about this problem, read the Why So Many Unfinished Visual Novels? discussion thread from 2012.

Posted: **Wed Mar 09, 2016 3:28 pm**

Thanks for sharing. Yeah the balance between story and gameplay is going to be a tricky thing to tackle. We are implementing features to ensure both types of gamers enjoy the experience. So we have a few ideas like fast travel for VN players who don't want to manually walk everywhere and just want the next bit of story. And non failstate style puzzles that just result in a different outcome. Rather than requiring players to play though a section over and over again.
Thanks for checking it out!

Posted: **Thu Mar 10, 2016 2:01 am**

Niyama Kitsune in the Unity Editor.

The body template itself is quite old. About 4 years, and in till recently held the object name "Sasuke" because it started as a mesh for a naruto fan game lol.
The final version for the game also features overlayed 2d Eyes and Mouth for sprite swapping, but was originally 3d with animated Blendshapes. This turned out to be a hassle, so we dropped it.

Textures for the romantic interests starts tonight, as does story-boarding for the trailer!

Posted: **Thu Mar 10, 2016 10:34 pm**

As a fan of both point-and-click games and VNs, as well as crafting games, I'm definitely intrigued by this game's premise. I've been looking for a good potion-making game for awhile too. The art isn't my favourite since I'm not much one for cartoon-y 3D, but it is very well done and I can easily look past my personal art preferences for a good story and fun gameplay. So I will definitely be following this; it looks like a most promising project to me.

Posted: **Sat Mar 12, 2016 8:49 pm**

Glad to hear it!
While the art style wont change much by the final release, we are making progressive improvements to the textures and lighting.

A comparison of the old mountain scene with the new one can be seen on these links.
http://i.imgur.com/a7V5Lcf.png
VS
http://i.imgur.com/BLHSxvU.jpg

And the characters are receiving texture overhauls to smooth them out, rather than have such hard cell shading.

Posted: **Mon Mar 14, 2016 5:09 am**

Thanks to the GoFundMe we were able to purchase SpeedTree for our game!
Here's a quick video showing it's seamless integration with Unity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ0nB4WObQk

Posted: **Sat Apr 02, 2016 3:10 pm**

Hey guys we are now on Steam Greenlight!
We have a new trailer to promote the Greenlight campaign as well.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =657668189

Our big goal for April is to get chapter 1 finished and polished to resemble the final game, so we can release it privately for reviews and suggestions.

Posted: **Fri Jul 01, 2016 5:43 pm**

Hey everyone! Weve been hard at work with our game and are preparing the official demo which features an early version of chapter 1. About 45 minutes of content.
Here's a preview

Issues such as clipping are being work on for the final game.

https://youtu.be/iTOHeoBXdj0

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