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Vora is a post-apocalyptic story of a mysterious old hermit man living in an abandoned city, an undetermined number of years after an apocalypse. On a day much like any other, a group of survivors enter the city, his city, and set up base. At first he just tries to avoid them, but then he starts to feel like they're taking up resources, and just generally messing up his way of life. He decides to find some way to get rid of them.
The story is structured like a multi-act play, inspired by things like The Walking Dead, the works of William Faulkner, the board game Fiasco, and many plays and stories I've read over the years. You take the perspective of the silent old hermit man (photo above, leftmost), and all the dialogue is between these five survivors (photo above, left to right: Aggy, Diana, Francis, Les, Deborah). It will be ~45k words and have multiple endings depending on what you do.
You play as the old man, but he never talks. There are no branching dialogue choices or simple menu options. The gameplay of this game is much like redlight-greenlight, where you sneak around the area where the five survivors are making camp, moving only when no one is looking and moving from spots when you are about to be discovered. It is fairly simple, done using a single "Action" button that you need to time only insofar as clicking it during the right line of dialogue. It is your decisions on when to use the "Action" button that affects the story.
Progress Writing 2/30 (outlined 100%)
Sprites & Animations 70% - still need inventory and parkour animations
Backgrounds 60% - still one more background, and then evening variants
GUI 100% -WHOOO!
Music 20% - Tunes planned out, just need a good program to make them
Programming 60% - still need inventory and player interaction
Working on the music. Bear with me, I'm real new to this, but I think they turned out pretty good. There's going to be 6 tracks in total, and I'll have the initial attempts at them all finished pretty soon. I'll put the link on the main post.
The premise of this is wicked interesting! The whole use of the "action" button is a nice veer from the grain, plus there could definitely be more post-apocalyptic stories that aren't so...cookie cutter, I guess? I'll be sure to keep an eye out for more updates-- best of luck!
Thanks! I hope the story feels original and unique when you guys can get your hands on it; I'm trying hard to make it interesting.
I originally planned for the demo to be only the first 3 scenes, but I'm bumping it up to be the first 5, just to give a little bit more of a tease and because I'm kind of getting antsy.
Anyway, the soundtrack is now complete! I mean I've never really made music before and I might end up getting a real composer to clean up these songs, but hey I made something. I think they're pretty alright; y'all can go have a listen using the links in the main post.
Things have been progressing quickly. Check out the first background and walking animation in the teaser video I put in the main post. Check back here tomorrow as well, I'll be making a more polished teaser #2 and cleaning up this whole post tonight after work.
Hey, just wanted to say I think the art for this one looks pretty cool! I watched the video and the animation looks great.
I've always thought visual novels are kind of like plays and that people could really do some interesting things if they drew more influence from plays. So I'll definitely be interested to check this one out!
This is super cool, I think I remember you posting about this concept somewhere. The pixel art is absolutely gorgeous, I wish you the best of luck in completing this!
Hey everyone!
It's been a while since I updated this. It's good to hear there is some interest for it. There was a bit of a change because I went and learned how to do pixel animation myself, and took over animating for this project to develop my own skills. I've posted a second, more robust teaser video onto the original post, which hopefully shows how far I've come with the animation and programming. It will take a while for me to animate the other three characters' walk cycles, and then ALL the other animations, but rest assured that I am still working on this project. Also, I've made changes to the character designs since last posting, they now look like this:
Alrighty, so here's the second of hopefully 3 full update videos. I've made a lot of progress in the past two months, thanks to a lot of people on this forum.
-new background
-3 new characters
-beepy voices and talking indicator
-improved vertical movement
-multiple characters can walk at the same time
-the entire UI
-finished all standard stand,walk,run,and sit animations, as well as a few idle animations and some unique one
-not part of the game, but I got OBS so this video isn't an affront to the eyes.
I'll update the original post a little bit, but I promise you I am too lazy to redo all of it.
If all goes according to plan, the next update video will have an inventory system implemented and animated, so characters can handle items like guns and bats, walk with them, use them, pass them to each other, etc. The biggest thing is that I'll be working on the soundtrack.
After that I'll probably go dark on actually showing updates, because The final things will be the gameplay aspect, making The Hermit fully playable, and then actually writing out the whole script.