Truth Invoked [Mystery/Psychological] now on Greenlight!

[ssero]

Hi everyone

I'm new in this forum. Thanks for having me.
I'm working on my first visual novel called "Truth Invoked". It is heavily inspired by Ever17 and 999 (theme&mood).
In this thread I hope to get feedback for the writing, art and in the future hopefully business strategies. I plan to update this thread as often as I can and I would love to improve the quality of the game with your feedback.

Visuals:









Demo Download:
http://ssero.com/TruthInvoked/TruthInvoked-0.2-mac.zip
http://ssero.com/TruthInvoked/TruthInvoked-0.2-win.zip

Gameplay Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsL6Wb0N2W8

Theme / Story:
(Mystery/Psychological/Drama)
The theme is "what is your truth?". 5 people, 5 days, 5 games.
A group of 5 strangers gets abducted and imprisoned in a strange building. There they are forced to participate in tricky/clever games with their life on the line. Only winners are allowed to escape.
During the story you'll learn that each person has a supernatural power. But instead of being useful to themselves it is rooted in a complex each person has and leads to drama for everyone.
Each character has their own view of "what is the truth". If you focus on the individuals, spend time with them and play the games with them, you'll learn their backstory, their supernatural power and their complex.

The story will have a lot of drama in it, but will include occasional humor to lighten up the mood.

The avatar/player in the game will be 100% gender neutral, you'll never see him/her/.. and it will never be addressed. I also don't plan to add romance to the game.

Inspirations are: Ever17, 999, Danganronpa series, Liar Game

Progress / Plan:
- I currently have 10min. of gameplay. I plan to have about 3-4 hours of gameplay in the final game.
- One idea was to have each path approx. 30min in length like a tv series. I like this idea because nowadays people seem to be adapted to such time-slots, they could play and experience it in one sitting/ideally and would probably also play through the whole game if they like it. I hear from a lot of people that they don't like to play long games because it's too much of a commitment. Even I prefer to watch a series because often I don't have enough time for a complete movie. Not sure if I want to actually do it (as the total gameplay time would be under my target length).
- I plan to have 5 different path, probably early-branching. 4 path = 1 path per main-character (bad-endings), 1 final path if you have seen everything (good ending).
- Next step is to finalize the overall story arc, events, games and characters
- Define coherent art style and rules

Ideas / Spoiler:

- Character A: Huge muscular man. Always speaks in a loud voice and appears rude and abrupt, but gets quickly intimidated/shy and turns red when someone directly addresses him or disagrees with him. Spoiler: Has the ability to change his appearance towards other humans. In reality is a young boy/girl (not sure yet) which has a personality complex and does not know who he/she is. Developed this ability/facade to be able to cope with it. Her truth is: "The truth is what I see".
- Character B: Smart guy, know-it-all. Always carries around a notebook&pen and at all times notes things in it. You'll never see his mouth in the game as it is always covered by either the notebook, pen, hand or something else. Knows almost everything. If you ask him something he browses through his notebook and reads about it. Spoiler: Has the ability of a perfect memory. Everything he experienced in his life is perfectly memorized. The notebook is only a cover and actually is completely empty. The problem is that in this perfect state of remembering there's no difference in the events, no difference between past and now. He says that everyone is protected by their ignorance. What people think is true/the past is only the result of not remembering correctly. The present is phenomenon caused by their ability to forget. His truth is: "The truth is what I remember."
- The other characters are not finalized yet and work of progress.
-Every character has a supernatural power. This means that the player should also have one, right? Spoiler: The player has to play the game several times to get to the final/good ending. This kind of "being able to see/experience parallel/alternate worlds" is also his ability in the game. If he has played the games 4 times he has the knowledge to be able to win every game perfectly and thus resulting in a happy ending... or probably not. His truth is: "There's no single truth, only possibilities."

Feedback:
- Writing: I'm not a native english speaker so the writing has probably a lot of strange verbalizations or grammatical mistakes. I don't have a native proof-reader yet as I'm early in development. So please forgive these early mistakes and please feel free to point them out if you see something wrong.
- Writing: I'm not sure yet how I want to use "the narrator" or "player thoughts" and it's currently inconsistent. Will try to decide on something when I have more dialogue sequences between characters and not mostly monologues.
- The art style is not fixed yet. For the backgrounds I'm not sure if I want to have them this "rough" or make them more clean/polished. The characters will probably have more details and finer/more clean lineart. I'm probably targeting something like Danganronpa for the characters.
- The music is currently bought stock music and too intrusive/distracting at the moment for my taste.

Questions:
- Do you like the idea/premise of the game?
- Do you like the art-style so far?
- Would you want to know more about the characters/"games"/mechanic of the Visual Novel?

Thank you very much if you read all of it. I would be very happy to get some feedback from you about idea/writing/art, especially if you have played and liked/disliked it.

Thank you and cheers,
- ssero

[gensuta]

I just finished playing the demo and it was very interesting! The art is fine, I like how the main character thinks and I really like the idea of truths and that they have supernatural powers.I'll definitely be looking forward to when it's finished! c:
I just realized too, that thing about him talking about his fantasies is him seeing a parallel world isn't it?

[ssero]

Hi gensuta

Thank you very much for your feedback and playing the demo. I'm happy to hear you liked it.

Yes, exactly. The main character's "vivid imaginations" is a foreshadowing of his supernatural ability to see parallel worlds. The character does not know his own ability (and the player doesn't know it either) and only thinks of it as "imaginations". Only in the final playthrough the ability is explained and "used" to solve the otherwise unsolveable solutions of the games. I'm happy to hear that you made this connection after reading my explanation.

I'm also happy to hear you like the premise of the game.

Question:
I'll probably open a channel/newsletter to keep people up-to-date for when the game is ready/greenlight/etc . Would you subscribe to such a newsletter?

[gensuta]

Hi gensuta

Thank you very much for your feedback and playing the demo. I'm happy to hear you liked it.

Yes, exactly. The main character's "vivid imaginations" is a foreshadowing of his supernatural ability to see parallel worlds. The character does not know his own ability (and the player doesn't know it either) and only thinks of it as "imaginations". Only in the final playthrough the ability is explained and "used" to solve the otherwise unsolveable solutions of the games. I'm happy to hear that you made this connection after reading my explanation.

I'm also happy to hear you like the premise of the game.

Question:
I'll probably open a channel/newsletter to keep people up-to-date for when the game is ready/greenlight/etc . Would you subscribe to such a newsletter?

Yep I would

[ssero]

Hi everyone

My visual novel is coming along great and I just launched the greenlight campaign. As always, you know the drill of getting through greenlight by votes. I have prepared a new Teaser for the game. Please have a look and decide if you would like to play it. A bit more about the story and characters below the links:

https://youtu.be/SAweRq-PXlA

If you like it, please go over to Steam Greenlight and vote "Yes" Also, sharing the link on your social media platform would help me tremendously, since I have a very limited reach.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =914946214

For those who are new here:

Truth Invoked is a mystery suspense visual novel inspired by Ever17, 999 and the Danganronpa series.

Five People, Five Days, Five Games.

Five strangers get abducted and are forced to participate in tricky games with their lives on the line. Each participant has a hidden supernatural power grounded in their personal complex. A suspense-packed situation where trust, lies and luck must be balanced to escape with one's life.

The theme is "what is your truth". Each person has his own narrow-minded view on the world based on their complex. To escape, the player has to gain the trust of the others, learn their ability and find more about their tragic backstories. A wrong step can lead to a bad end but maybe seeing every bad ending is the only way to find the one single truth.

Cast:
The game contains a pathological liar, someone who doesn't accept his own existence, someone who only cares about appearance, someone who cares more about fiction than the reality and someone who can't let go of the past.

Thank you for your help. If you have feedback, please post here. A new demo should be available by the end of Mai and will be roughly 45min to 1h in length. Please look forward to it