The Deep Unknown [Fantasy/friendship] -- Walkthrough added

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SwallowtailedTrinket
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The Deep Unknown [Fantasy/friendship] -- Walkthrough added

#1 Post by SwallowtailedTrinket »

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~Preface~

"There is a legend among our people--That if one were to swim through the deepest, blackest, most crushing depths of the sea, on the other side of all that darkness...there is light."

The goddess of the sea created four races of her power, but since that time, they've scarcely met.

Far in the north live the Nenet, the representation of the sea's storms and unfathomable wrath and power.

In the shallow kelp beds live the Mu'etti, the representation of the bounty of life to be found in the ocean.

Deep, deep below the water's surface are the Loremna'tat, the representation of the sea's mysteries and how no mere mortal can ever hope to comprehend it.

And among the warm tropical islands live the nomadic Ame'sol, the representation of the winds of change and that only those attuned to the winds may ever even get an inkling of what the sea might do next.

But for as different and spread apart as these peoples may be, they all share a common foe: the Pena--creatures of darkness that have hunted the Four Peoples since their creation. In these dark times, four runaways find themselves thrown together. Each has a personal reason for wanting to see the Pena menace done away with for good, and fueled by the belief that they were divinely chosen to end these monsters once and for all, they head out into the deep unknown to save the Four Peoples from the shadows that haunt them. But before these four strangers can ever hope to defeat a monster, they'll have to figure out how to just get along with one another first. Though they all speak the same language, there seems to be an awful lot lost in translation going on around here.

The winds of change are upon us. Let the hunt begin.

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Genre: Friendship/Adventure

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Features

--It's free!

--Strong but caring female protagonist.

--Almost 200,000 words.

--Good Ending, Best Ending, and bonus friendship or romantic endings. But beware, if you or your allies don't survive, there are bad endings too.

--No route system.

--Seven bonus scenes and four bonus CGs for maxing friendship and survival stats.

--No 'one right way' to get the best ending, there are lots of combinations to get you there, every person will have a different experience.

--Water. Lots and lots of water.

--Now has a walkthrough too!

--Warnings for mild violence, mentions of blood, and flippant threats of cannibalism. Game will also include scenes of the characters hunting, which may bother some of my fellow animal lovers.
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For Feedback

It was a long journey, it took us awhile to get here, but I thank you for your patience and hope you enjoyed the game. If you have a little extra time, I'd love to know what you think. Please write your general thoughts before answering the questions.

--Who is your favorite character and why?
--What was your favorite moment from the game?
--Any advice or critique I should keep in mind for the sequel/other future games? (other than having more realistic release goals)
--Any other comments/concerns?


Thank you for playing! If you enjoyed the game, please consider donating as an extra little way to show your support!
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Last edited by SwallowtailedTrinket on Sun Aug 12, 2018 4:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: The Deep Unknown [Fantasy/friendship]

#2 Post by Zelan »

Yeah boiiiiiii!! I'm so ready to play this game! Great job completing it all on your own! ^_^

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Re: The Deep Unknown [Fantasy/friendship]

#3 Post by philip »

@SwallowtailedTrinket-

Download this yesterday and started to play through; finished this afternoon . . . didn't realize that it was such a long game . . . that's not a bad thing; the story got more interesting the further I got into it. I at least got a good ending for my first attempt; I'll have to invest some more time and go back to explore the other alternatives.

The art is attractive, and the story well told . . . an excellent job overall.

A couple of technical comments:

The GUI has an auto-forward speed setting. Generally, that mean that there will be a function named "auto" when playing the game. That does not appear anywhere that I was able to find. Without it; it's an awful lot of clicking to get from choice to choice!

There is a choice on the game page called "STATS"; if you click on it a chart of the character's survivability comes up. Later on, very deep in the game a notation comes up saying that a character's friendship has been maxed. That sounds like a STAT to me, but there is nowhere that I can track it while the game is in progress.

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Re: The Deep Unknown [Fantasy/friendship]

#4 Post by AntiquedFae »

MAJOR congratulations on finishing, yeeeaaah! Woo! Dance! I'm so happy for you! You should be very proud for finishing this. :3 I'm a little bogged down with work right now but I will play this eventually and I am certain I will love it!
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Re: The Deep Unknown [Fantasy/friendship]

#5 Post by SwallowtailedTrinket »

@Zelan & @AntiquedFae
Thank you! It's such a relief that it's finally done! I hope you both enjoy it when you get the chance.



@ philip
Huh, I'm not sure why the auto-forward doesn't work. I never use that setting myself, so I never thought to check it, sorry. In replays you can easily use the Skip function to pass by anything you've seen before, but I'll see what I can do about making the auto-forward work too. If I can't figure it out, I may as well just remove it.

Display for the friendship stat was something that kind of got forgotten about after an unfortunate computer-meets-water incident last year. Of the two, it was meant to somewhat understated/hidden since survivability is more important, and I didn't want to detract from the focus on that (you can get a good end with lower friendship scores, but not with lower survival scores). I honestly forgot about it though until you brought it up, so I'll try revisiting what I can remember and see if I can't make something.
If it would help, I've been drafting a guide that lists the max levels of each stat, how to raise them, and how much each option in the game is worth.

Thank you for your feedback, and I'm happy to hear you enjoyed the story and found it interesting!

EDIT: So both these issues turned out to have pretty easy, non-headache-inducing solutions! I'll upload an updated version to itch.io tomorrow morning when I don't have to worry about hogging my family's limited bandwidth.

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Re: The Deep Unknown [Fantasy/friendship]

#6 Post by SwallowtailedTrinket »

Version 1.1 is up. I'll try to finish the walkthrough for release at the start of next week.

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Re: The Deep Unknown [Fantasy/friendship]

#7 Post by philip »

@SwallowtailedTrinket-

Thanks for the quick reaction . . . and fixes . . . for the two items I mentioned. I'll be going back to look for the other endings!

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Re: The Deep Unknown [Fantasy/friendship] -- Walkthrough added

#8 Post by Godline »

I love it so far. Vane is adorable. I just thought I'd check in and let you know that I've been playing this for days now and I'm completely engrossed.

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Re: The Deep Unknown [Fantasy/friendship] -- Walkthrough added

#9 Post by Kikaharu »

WooOOOO!!! I saw on itch.io that this was finished and I was like wait what?! And it checked and it is. And then I instantly came onto here because I had to write about it. I am downloading it while I am writing this out as well. I cant wait to play it. This game has popped into my head a lot since I first played the demo. It has been a game that I've been really hoping was going to be finished and never be dropped. (I actually looked at when I first found this game because it's like the characters and story have stuck with me for so long like they kept just surfacing and it was like I can't wait for that game. Anyways, I checked when I first posted on the original post which was nov 3 of 2016. And you made the forum post for the demo on nov 2 of 2016. So almost two years this game has been something that Ive been looking forward too.)

I can't wait to play it and I can't wait to find out more about the story and the characters. :) I wonder if my originally thoughts on which character I liked the most will change from my original thought but I don't know. I still like jerk(ish) characters so I think Groriu will be my favorite. But I still think I will love all of them. :) I am so happy and excited that you have finished this game. :)

I know this might not seem like much from another person but I am so proud that you have finished this. I hope this is a game that you will always cherish as I know it's a game that I will always cherish in my heart. :)

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Re: The Deep Unknown [Fantasy/friendship] -- Walkthrough added

#10 Post by SwallowtailedTrinket »

@Godline -- Ah shoot, I just realized I forgot to reply to your comment, sorry D: I'm glad you are/were enjoying the game so far!

@Kikaharu -- Thank you, I'm pretty proud of me too! XD I hope you enjoy the game! But yeah, almost two years since the release of the demo, I'm still cringing about it. I never would have guessed it would take me so long. Next project = No demos until I've AT LEAST finished the script...

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Re: The Deep Unknown [Fantasy/friendship] -- Walkthrough added

#11 Post by Zelan »

I have been so so so busy with my summer job and then with school since this released but now that it's winter break I've finally gotten the chance to play it!! I haven't finished it yet but I've gone through the first two chapters so far. The first chapter was just as good as I remembered, it was such a treat to revisit it after a while. I loved the second chapter as well, every character has such a distinct personality and with all four of them thrown together there's a lot of great banter (I loved Groriu's ratings of Kameckt's sanity - the line "One point five and dropping" got a good laugh out of me). Poor Makani has her hands full with the three of them, haha.

I'm super looking forward to finishing a playthrough of this, and hopefully going back to get multiple endings so I can see everything that you have to offer with this game! I adore the art, by the way, I've been screenshotting all of the CGs so I can use them as my desktop backgrounds. ^_^

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Re: The Deep Unknown [Fantasy/friendship] -- Walkthrough added

#12 Post by Zelan »

HELLO I just finished this (finally!!) about 20 minutes ago and I'm just. At a loss for words. This VN is so so so polished, I love the characters and how they develop such strong bonds with one another, I love the art and how MUCH of it there is, I love all of the thought that clearly went into the lore of this world..... just. Aaaaaah. I've been sending my girlfriend low-quality pictures of my computer screen while screaming about it and she has no idea what I'm talking about but she's glad I'm enjoying myself, haha.

Like, I need you to understand, I'm ready to write a literal essay on this VN as soon as I get the excuse to. I could really go full academic on this VN and talk about the use of boundaries as a theme, "that is, the pushing, crossing, and also respecting of boundaries by the visual novel's characters, both in terms of their physical locations and their relationships with one another." Like. As soon as a professor tells me "yeah write an essay on some form of media idc which one" this is gonna be the one. Or maybe I'll just write it for myself because I dunno who would actually want to read a dry academic essay about a fun visual novel but y'know. (*:

I really loved the scenes that we got for maximizing friendship with the characters! Although, I hadn't realized until the scenes started coming up that there were stats at all, and I was a little concerned because Groriu's survival stat was never totally maxed and I was worried something would happen to him. Luckily the others were all fully maxed so they were able to look after him. ^_^

I really liked how the main focus of the VN was friendship rather than romance, as it definitely felt a lot more natural - a romantic relationship would not be my main focus if I were on a life-or-death quest to hunt down deadly predators. Still, I did really like that romance was an option and the progression from friends to partners felt natural. I ended up going with Kameckt's romantic ending - I loved all the boys but he was the one that I felt like was right for the first playthrough.

I definitely want to go back and find some more endings when I get the chance. I'm just absolutely floored at the amazing job you've done on this, especially considering it was a solo project!

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Re: The Deep Unknown [Fantasy/friendship] -- Walkthrough added

#13 Post by SwallowtailedTrinket »

Ahhhh, thank you so much :D I'm glad that you finally got the time to finish it and that you enjoyed it so much is even better! <3 It's nice to hear you say you thought there was plenty of art in it, since I was personally kind of bummed by how many art ideas I scrapped simply because I felt like it would never get done otherwise.

XD I don't think I'm ready for any sort of academic analysis to be made of this any time soon, but your thoughts on the subject still made me grin, so thank you for that!

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Re: The Deep Unknown [Fantasy/friendship] -- Walkthrough added

#14 Post by iron_mask »

I've been playing it all this week, getting all of the endings :) I like it very much, especially the characters - they are all different, and each is charming and interesting in his/her own way. The worldbuilding is very cool, too. All of the races make traditional mermaids look so boring and uninspired :P Dialogue is great overall, so it's frankly hard for me to pick a favourite scene. The library section is very enlightening. My only complaint would be the white font, which is sometimes difficult to read against a light-coloured background.

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Re: The Deep Unknown [Fantasy/friendship] -- Walkthrough added

#15 Post by SwallowtailedTrinket »

Thank you so much! I'm glad you enjoyed it! And yeah, the whole thing basically got spawned into existence because I wanted to invent different merfolk XD I tried to make the text box dark enough that that wouldn't be a problem, but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't always successful--sorry about that :)

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