We proudly present our first game: Vicky's Afterlife. What is "Vicky's", you may ask?
This game is not exactly a visual novel, where you can usually find different routes that affect the main story and results in multiple endings: it's just a straightforward story with just one (...canon!) ending. This kind of game is called "Kinetic Novel".
Before explaining the story's setting and synopsis, let's make one thing clear about it: the story IS LONG, VERY LONG. Or at least that's what we think now. We'll talk about that later. First, what kind of story is "Vicky's Afterlife"?
Setting
Year 2009. A luxury academy, the Solarium Academy, placed in the heart of the Great Forest. These facilities, present over more than a century, combine the most exquisite luxuries and the highest education quality of the country. Despite of the excellent infrastructures, some zones of the academy remain permanently closed due to its notable antiquity. The academy is located among a endless ocean of trees - the Great Forest, as mentioned earlier - in Centre Europe, whose wilderness goes across high mountain ranges. The buildings and facilities of this academy are isolated because of the existence of a huge cliff. There is located a modern bridge, the only entrance that communicates the campus with the nearest village.
The weather in generally peaceful, but it will be disturbed due to a unexpected rainstorm that will not stop anytime soon...
(The Solarium Academy buildings and campus are based on Peles Castle, located in Sinaia (Romania)). (Photo found on https://68.media.tumblr.com/b05062c0638 ... o1_500.jpg).
Synopsis
Josh Red is addressed to the Solarium Academy, due to his misbehaviour towards his environment. There he will meet and establish friendship with a motley group of students. Some of them being his cheerful roommate, "JB", or the feisty Angy Black, who will share with him certain rivalry. Everything will be surrounded by the legend of "Vicky", a ghost that supposedly wanders the academy. This innocent legend will become little by little the main nucleus of a dreadful darkness. The fun days will tint in authentic despair at the same time that the boundaries of life and death become even more muddled...
Josh Red is a conflictive guy who loves sports. His rudeness and aggressivity bring him trouble. Little by little he will forget his selfishness to protect his new friends.
More artwork, with different clothes and emotions. There will be more once the game is finished.
"JB" is Josh's roommate. He's cheerful, peaceful, and supports all his classmates. His altruism makes him think that everyone's happiness is up to his actions.
"Cece" is JB's twin sister. She's spirited and full of determination, although she has almost no friends at all. She plays with Mr. Grey, her rag doll, and jokes about gruesome things all the time. Despite all of this, she hides deep in her heart great sorrow.
Angy is the new mean and tuff girl in class. She just arrived to the academy at the same time as Josh. Despite her manners, she cares a lot about others. Due to her affective deficiency, she evades and shields herself from the world that's trying to approach her.
Rebecca is a very shy girl who helps out at the garden's maintenance. She is very bad at making new friends, and being one academic course ahead of her age because of her intelligence doesn’t help at all. When it’s necessary, she does overcome her shyness and demonstrates she has more courage than she ever thought.
Sierra is the self-proclaimed “Queen of the Academy”. She’s smart and pretty, and she is aware of that. She knows how to act and the consequences of her acts. She will definitely do what it takes to preserve her honor and power.
Mackenzie is Sierra’s most loyal friend, who supports her in every situation. She’s inside a passive-aggressive relationship with her, and she’s aware of that: but it is that or being alone. She’s easily manipulable, letting herself being ashamed to let Sierra shine.
Mike is a popular guy that desires to be a journalist. The truth is the highest goal in his life, and will fight what is needed to uncover it. He’s obsessed with the legend of Vicky, and will try to convince everyone about its existence.
Mary, one of the academy’s Philosophy professors. She’s an apparently cold woman that deals with the students with rigor. She wasn’t like that at first, but the misfortunes that happened to her changed her entirely.
Evelyn, one of the academy’s Biology professors. She’s clumsy and sleepy. Perhaps one of the most eccentrics professors of the whole academy. Her kind and caring nature leads her to protect her pupils, most especially little Cece.
Persephone, one of the academy’s Chemistry professors. Students appreciate her because she kind of connects with them. She’s coquettish and snooty, but lefts her vanity aside when it’s about the academy’s sake.
Savannah, one of the academy’s English professors. She’s grump and bossy. She loves eating pancakes. She’s also Mackenzie’s mother, and protects hers before anything else in the world.
The rest of the characters presented here have been designed, but aren't ready to see the world... yet.
Matthew
Matthew, a Literature professor that doesn’t teach our characters, and a fencing teacher on the academy. He’s a serious man in search of perfection. Supports Josh in his first days because he admires and respects Cathy.
Jimmy Pistachio
Jimmy is a simple and happy boy, always complemented with a pear. He never stops smiling and his behavior may be classified as “odd”.
Cathy Crimson
Cathy is Josh’s mother, and attended the academy in the past. After her husband’s death, her relationship with her son only gets worse. She decides to enroll him in the Solarium Academy, where her name still can be heard...
There are more characters with their names, sketches, personalities and appearances on the novel that are created, but we'll keep it for now as a secret! We'll try to regulary update this thread with new information about them.
The progress until now has been very slowly, and it may continue that way: we've been working on this since 2015, on our spare time when we aren't studying for university and so. We are a team of mainly two people, one working on the plot and writing the whole story (which it currently has over 300 pages, 14 chapters of the novel!), and a designer working on the characters, CGs and programming. It's very hard to us to work quickly. Nonetheless, some people are helping us a little bit: both of them using their free time, just for practice (which is something we really appreciate since we aren't professionals), making some soundtrack and other one translating the full novel into English (as Spanish is our native language and is easier to us to first write it in it).
(Jokes aside, if anyone finds anything wrong in the posts... tell us! We want to improve our English so no problems there!)
All right, this is what the novel offers and how is it going so far:
• A huge cast of characters (Designed 80% aprox.)
• Almost 7 chapters per episode (Arc)
• 4 total Arcs (TBD, 90% of Episode 2 written so far)
• One CG per chapter (We'll try)
• Original Soundtrack (TBD)
• Episode 1 will be totally free, the rest are TBD
As of now, we aren't designing any backgrounds, but it is something we want to do.
Next are some screenshots of the current UI with original characters, photo-backgrounds and some text (in Spanish!).
To end this post, I'll give leave here some questions. Answer them in order to help us, every post will be appreciated!
• What is your first impression about "Vicky's Afterlife"? Do you like it?
• What do you think about the character's design?
• Do you find the plot / setting interesting enough?
• What kind of advice would you recommend us?
• Is there enough information to understand the synopsis?
• Would you read this novel?
Aside of this questions, we also accept questions so if you need to know something else, ask us away!
Feel free to ask and follow us on Twitter, we are @VickysAfterlife and @thatGlobito.
We also have a game page on https://vickysafterlife.itch.io/welcome!
(And yes, before anyone says it, we are huge Umineko (or 07th Expansion) lovers and are influenced by it!)
Thank you so much for reading this far. We hope you enjoyed this presentation and that this will be the first post of many more that will conclude in a finished game. We are putting our heart on this game, and we hope someone will like it too. Because this is for us, but we already know our story. We want you to experience it, we want all of you to enjoy it. We don't want to lock this story and bury it, we want it to be free. We want it to be... loved.
Again, thank you all. Have a nice day!
- thatGlobito, the team behind Vicky's Afterlife.
