The Story
Deadly Vice: Gluttony is a horror-thriller (with some comedy elements) about a man who accidentally befriends a killer while on a resort for the super wealthy in Hawaii. Your choices as the anxious and stubborn recent lottery winner Harvey Lambert affect your relationship with dangerous billionaire Jason Bing by shaping your personality and changing his opinion of you. They also play into determining how well prepared you are to deal with possible attempts on your life and even navigating the eccentric wealthy socialites who seem blissfully ignorant to their peer’s “hobby”.
(Background is just a placeholder)
Features:
Personality Quirks: There are six total personality quirks presented on three sliders in game, with one personality trait on each end. Your decisions change these sliders and thus change some of Harvey’s behavior. This can affect Jason’s opinion of you, as well as change how Harvey deals with certain situations. A Cautious man can better evaluate a situation while a Reckless one can react more quickly to an immediate threat.
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Squeamish Mode: This game will feature many Bad Ends since there are many ways to die in the story. Each death with have its own CG, some of which can be very graphic. To make the game accessible to more people without curtailing the gore for those who want it, I plan to include an option within the game menu called Squeamish Mode. With this turned on, the more gruesome deaths will show a toned down version of the CG.
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Branching Scenes and Decisions: The choices you make that don’t shape Harvey’s personality quirks will still affect the story. Characters remember things you’ve said to them and you’ll have opportunities to spend time with side characters or even more time with Jason if you so choose.
About the Project:
I currently have a small team of three for this project but as the writer/coder/sprite artist/CG artist/ect., I am shouldering most of the work myself. The help I have found is from my friends, one of which has agreed help with backgrounds and the other who is acting as my editor and occasionally provides writing for Hue who is a character she has provided for the story.
I remember reading once that you should write stories you would enjoy reading, so I’m hoping to fulfill a niche I feel often gets passed over in favor of romance and anime-inspired stories; character-driven horror stories of a quirky, very western style.
I’m starting a WIP thread here to help track my progress on the game and hopefully get some feedback from the community that will help make my VN better.
My current progress:
- Full story outline
- ~10k words, this being the majority of the first chapter with some optional scenes
- A live composite system for Harvey and Jason’s sprites, allowing me to change their expressions by mixing and matching poses, outfits, brows, eyes, and mouths has been implemented. All eyes also have blinking animations.
- Harvey currently has: 1 outfit, 1 pose, 5 brows, 5 eye sets, 5 mouths
- Jason currently has: 2 outfits, 2 poses, 7 brows, 6 eye sets, 9 mouths
- The main GUI with a collapsible window for tracking quirks (which has animated sliders when stats are changed)
Some Harvey Sideimages
Some Cropped Jason Sprites
These are questions I would like to ask any forum goers who come across my post.
- What do you feel makes a character charming? What can make you dislike interacting with them?
- Do you think you would use Squeamish Mode?
- Do you think it should be very obvious which decisions will affect which personality quirks (for example, a decision having the related quirk labeled on it) or that it should be left up to player to figure out so they have more to think about in their choices?
- Do you feel the UI is confusing? Does the text look difficult to read?