Assume Survival [Survival, Sci-Fi, Adventure | NaNo 2018]

[Avior]

Assume Survival (Logo is subject to change)
Made by Avior for Nanoreno 2018!

\\--Summary--//
You wake up surrounded by snow. Your body aches, though luckily nothing seems to be broken or badly injured. In front of you is the wreckage of a small plane; the flames rising off of it are the only thing keeping you warm.

You dig your phone—also miraculously unharmed—out of your pocket and turn it on. There’s no service, but it seems you have a special antenna that will let you message anyone within a one mile radius. You also seem to have picked up a strange new program... just where did it come from and what could it be for?

-------------

Assume Survival is a visual novel survival game where you’re tasked with saving yourself and four other passengers in the aftermath of a plane crash, using short range communication and a program that can predict the future.



\\--Characters--//

(Chibi sprites are placeholders for final sprites, but will likely be used in the final game as part of the messaging system!)


Ospina [OHS-pee-nah] (15yo)
A quiet girl who, while resourceful, is not very good at taking initiative. (Protagonist, name is fixed.)

Jasmine (16yo)
A friendly and talkative girl. She’s great at remaining calm under pressure and gives good advice.

Wesley (16yo)
A cheerful but easily depressed boy. He’s not very resourceful and quite unlucky, but he’ll try his best with whatever you give him.

Elsie (13yo)
A young, quiet girl who is not very good with technology. She might be a bit difficult to communicate with, but she’s very observant.

???
Was there another boy on this plane? Somehow, you can’t quite remember...



\\--Features--//

• Special ability to see the results of choices before you make them. It might not be exactly what it seems though, so be careful!

• “Groundhog Day” style of play, where you must repeat the same events until you can successfully save everyone. Somewhat inspired by the game Kindergarten.

• At least 6 distinct endings

\\--Updates--//
Script – 0%
GUI – 0%
BGs – 0%
Sprites – 15%
Music – 0%
SFX – 0%

Mar 1 – Post created
Mar 3 - Added chibi/placeholder sprites
Mar 8 - Added Ospina's sprite



\\--Notes and Questions--//
Hello everyone! If this is your first time seeing me, my name is Avior! This is my second time doing NaNo, and AS will be my 5th released game! You can find me on Twitter, itch.io, and Wordpress! If you're interested in reading game reviews (or if you want your own NaNo or other indie game reviewed!) you can find mine over on on Avior System!

This year I decided I wanted to make a game that was not a dating sim, so I rifled through my endless piles of random concept notes, stuck two together, and this is what I came up with! I’ll be making the game entirely by myself (besides music which will be CC), and my only hope is that the system I designed for this game will not be as hard to program as the one I did for B.A.T. last year. Oh, and also to finish NaNo without crunching, of course! (Though that’s definitely too optimistic, haha.)

Some questions for you guys:

1. What do you think about the concept? Does this kind of survival visual novel sound fun?
2. Which character would you absolutely not let die no matter what? (Good luck)
3. Any other comments or questions about the game?
4. If you could magically gain any gamedev-related skill, what would it be?

[Zelan]

What do you think about the concept? Does this kind of survival visual novel sound fun?: Yes!! I mean, maybe not 'fun' as in I'll be super happy while playing this, but I'd definitely be determined to save everyone.

Which character would you absolutely not let die no matter what? (Good luck): Elsie. I work with kids, so typically the younger a character is the more protective I get.

Any other comments or questions about the game?: I was especially excited to see that you're taking inspiration from Groundhog Day! I just watched it for the first time a month ago and I loved it.

If you could magically gain any gamedev-related skill, what would it be?: ART. GOD. I can write, I could handle coding once I buckled down and taught myself, and good CC music resources are relatively easy to find, but art is incredibly frustrating.

[yoshibb]

What do you think about the concept? Does this kind of survival visual novel sound fun?
Yes! I love this genre and I wish there were more visual novels with this subject matter! In fact, I clicked on this thread because it had Survival in the title. I can't wait to see what you come up with!

Which character would you absolutely not let die no matter what? (Good luck)
Probably Wesley, but I always try to make sure everyone survives in these games if possible. And if it is possible, I'll do whatever it takes.

Any other comments or questions about the game?
I just really love the concept! You might want to take a look at the Letter VN for inspiration if you've never heard of it as it has some of the same types of elements. But honestly, there are so few of this style of game in visual novel and I like the ideas you have for it, so I can't wait to see it.

If you could magically gain any gamedev-related skill, what would it be? Composer probably, I have no talent for music at all where as other skills I might be able to just wing it.

Good luck to you!

[Avior]

Thanks for the replies you guys!

@zelan - Groundhog Day is a great movie! I love anything time travel related, so it was kind of a fun twist on that, where "mastering" one single time period becomes the focus. And I totally agree with you on the art thing, haha. I know I could get better if I practiced but I'd have to actually practice.

@yoshibb - I'm glad you're excited for more survival vns! I'll definitely take a look at that vn; I've heard of it before but I don't know a whole lot about it. And I would definitely love to be able to make my own music too; it seems like that's the most common CC use for VNs too, haha.

Update!
It'll be a small update today (I'm hoping to update at least twice a week). I spent yesterday working on Ospina's sprite; it's a little slow going since I'm not exactly a great artist, but I'm making some progress!


I also made these chibi sprites using an online generator, which will be used as placeholders until the final sprites are done! I'll also probably end up using them as a part of the in-game messaging system, since they turned out really cute and it'd be a shame not to use them somehow!

That's it for this update! I'll be working on finalizing the GUI designs and setting them up today. Until next time!

[78909087]

I like this concept, and I'm shoving a message in so I can follow this thread. A cool tip for reusing images is putting them in your GUI. Personally, I like sprinkling characters over the save/load and options screens, but it depends on your own style. Good luck!

[Melonkid]

I think the character designs look cute, so that's great! I would try to flesh out characters more, but you might have just not revealed everything to the public yet, for secrecy's sake.
Good luck!

[Avior]

@78909087 - Thanks! I'll definitely think about where I can put the chibis in the GUI!

@Melonkid - Thank you! I'm definitely still working on fleshing the characters out, but there's also some things I can't tell right now because of spoilers. I don't know if I'll ever update the character descriptions on the main post but there will be more to learn about them in the actual game!

Update time!
Unfortunately I haven't made a ton of progress since last update. It's been a bit of a difficult week, and midterms are next week too... I hope to at least get some good work done during spring break, though! Time is really flying by!


The big thing for this update is that I've more or less finished Ospina's sprites! I hope she looks alright, since this is the first time I'm drawing proper sprites for my own game, haha. (I did my own sprites for Voeux but they were just silhouettes so I'm not counting those. ) I'll probably still tweak them a little more later. As for sprites for the other characters, I obviously would like to show them in the game at some point too (at least at the end!), but since you'll be talking with them primarily over text, they probably won't show up in person too much. Unfortunately, that means making their sprites is kinda low priority, and I've got a lot of other work to do first. Worst case scenario, I'll finish the game and patch the other sprites in after NaNo is over!

I've been working on the GUI a bit too, but I'm not quite ready to show anything yet. Hopefully I'll have another update to show off the GUI by Monday night!

That's it for this update! Thanks to everyone as always for your encouragement and support! I hope everyone else's projects are going well!

[Avior]

Hello everyone!

First off, I’d like to apologize for the long absence. I fully intended to update that Monday, but I got busy with midterms and didn’t get to work on the game much.

Which brings me to my sad (if kind of predictable) announcement; unfortunately, I won’t be able to finish my project by the end of the month. I think I wasn’t as prepared as I was last year, and on top of that, I haven’t made a game in awhile so my programming skills are pretty rusty. Time went by really fast and I felt right from the beginning that I wasn’t making as much progress as I needed to to stay on track, even when I was actively working on it each day.

And if that wasn’t enough, a close relative of mine passed away just this last week, which is obviously saddening in its own right but also means I have a funeral to attend and other matters to help address. Ultimately, I think this just turned out to not be a good time for me to be doing a game jam.

But I don’t want to leave this on a sad note! I will definitely be finishing this game, there’s no need to worry about that! It’s just a matter of how much time it will take me, which I’m frankly really unsure about at this point. I plan to set a new goal for myself once things settle down a bit, so you can probably expect an update to this thread sometime in early April. (In the meantime, you can always find me on Twitter.) I'm aiming to finish it by the end of the year at the absolute latest. But at least one good thing about going into overtime is that I’ll get to include some extra things that I didn’t think I’d have time for!




(Background is a placeholder. Click for fullsize.)
I have a small update of the progress I made on the GUI; it’s not much compared to how much work there still is to do, but I did get the phone menu and PREDICT all set up and working nicely! I'll probably tweak the phone border a bit still though, I'm not totally sold on the design.

Anyway, I’m sorry to disappoint anyone who was looking forward to my game. I hope everyone’s on track to finish NaNo with their sanity intact; I look forward to playing all the wonderful games later! And thanks as always for the support!