Fatal Hearts - Awaiting Release

[papillon]

Wow, we've come a long way...



The below was REALLY OLD concept art when the game was first starting - jump to the last page to see what the current status of things is!

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Romance with hints of supernatural horror - not too heavy on the horror aspects, I don't intend to be really grisly, but there will be death and spooky things around.

Thus - a mysterious collage of concept art. None of these pictures will be used in the final result, they are just placeholders for coding and getting the general feel of things, and thus suggest tiny bits of what might eventually be...

[Watercolorheart]

Can you post a larger version of the preview image, please?

[papillon]

Since none of it is real art, what would be the point?

The whole idea here was to be mysterious and suggestive, not to show what the game will look like, because none of it will really be used. Once I've finished the story and worked out exactly how many images I need where, I will be hiring an artist to redo everything while I source sounds and such.

So I have to draw things myself to figure out how many poses and locations and such I absolutely need - but I don't have to make them look very good. so a lot of the stuff I have is just scribbles, sometimes characters have no hands, the sizes don't really match up...

When there is REAL art done there will be big pictures posted.

[Watercolorheart]

Since none of it is real art, what would be the point?

The whole idea here was to be mysterious and suggestive, not to show what the game will look like, because none of it will really be used. Once I've finished the story and worked out exactly how many images I need where, I will be hiring an artist to redo everything while I source sounds and such.

So I have to draw things myself to figure out how many poses and locations and such I absolutely need - but I don't have to make them look very good. so a lot of the stuff I have is just scribbles, sometimes characters have no hands, the sizes don't really match up...

When there is REAL art done there will be big pictures posted.

Because the art you have done right now is very nice, and we would like to see even the partials anyway.

[PyTom]

I, for one, am the type of guy who would try to enhance the various greek letters and the like that are all over the picture, to see if they spelled out anything interesting. At least, I would be that type of guy, if I wasn't loaded down with tasks to do before Llamacon.

[papillon]

Ah. Well, there isn't a larger version of that particular image, since I just threw stuff together to make it. I can show some of the individual bits....

if PyTom wants to really puzzle himself, he can try to make sense of THIS.

(Almost all of the foreign language snippets in that image DID mean something, but I can't remember them anymore. That's background for researching in the library.)

[PyTom]

Well, I got the german, at least... at least as best as google translate can give it to me.

hier wurde das dunkle man fur die folgende hälfte ein jahrhundert - oder möglicherweise ewigkeit versiegelt.

Here the dark one lies for a half-century - or possibly eternity.

[Alessio]

hier wurde das dunkle man fur die folgende hälfte ein jahrhundert - oder möglicherweise ewigkeit versiegelt.

Whoever the Monk was who wrote that sentence into The Book Of One Thousand Deaths must have been pretty bad at German! :)))))))

I guess it'd better to e.g. write "Hier wurde das dunkle Etwas für das nächste halbe Jahrhundert versiegelt - oder möglicherweise für die Ewigkeit."

[papillon]

Hey, raving mad monks in service to nebulous tentacled Dark Ones aren't generally known for their grammatical skills.

Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fhtagn!

[papillon]

Sometime when the game is closer to finished, I could use the services of someone more fluent in German than Babelfish is, for a few quotes that *aren't* supposed to be nonsensical. But that's all in the future.

Regular status update - Full playable time at this point on a single path, about an hour and a half if you know the puzzle solutions. Story is about to hit the Giant Fork Point at which it splits off in irreconcilable directions, making playtime complicated to measure. (It's complicated anyway, but I'm making my judgement based on putting the text on auto-advance at the second speed setting.)

(The first chapter, which one person has previewed, is basically 'Discovering weird stuff is happening.' The second chapter, which I'm wrapping up now, is 'Choosing your allies', which therefore determines what story branch you are on for the third chapter, 'Shit hits the fan' - these are not titles, of course, this just describes the KIND of action taking place in those chapters)

[mikey]

Well, 1+1/2 hours before a grand fork is huge. It seems that more games will be this big. Foxtaile should have a considerable amount of text, as well as Unwoven. More or less, this will match a shorter commercial game in length. Progress...

[papillon]

Leaking some info:

http://hanakogames.com/fatal.shtml

This is all the sort of thing you'd get on the website or the back-of-box for a commercial game. No big information about the plot, just a few details about the main characters. There are more characters than this in the game, but these are the important figures around whom the endings revolve.

And, repeating my usual warning, NOT FINAL ART.

Bonus geek points if you recognise where I've gotten all the last names from.

[papillon]

Current number of files in the loadable-images folder (these are backgrounds and event CGs) - 48.

Current number of paths complete - Not even one. But over halfway through the first path's Chapter 3... (Chapters 1 and 2 have only mild forking and come to the big point at which we jump off into very distinct paths. Thus, there are multiple versions of chapters 3 and 4.)

Most recent activity - Building a puzzle based on Sudoku.

[PyTom]

Most recent activity - Building a puzzle based on Sudoku.

Okay, you know you've been reading one too many technical papers when your natural response to this is to say:

"But isn't Sudoku already defined as a puzzle?"

[papillon]

Status update -

Chapter 3, Jeremy branch, now in the bag. Ready to begin Chapter 4.

Runtime on auto-advance not counting puzzle solving: 2 hours 10 minutes.

(And just to demonstrate that there IS a reason I keep saying 'placeholder art' over and over again - a lot of the event graphics currently look like this: )