Project Exist is an English visual novel (of the psychological horror genre) being developed by a team that, to an extent, rotates (as no members are obligated to stay on the team). It will be released for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X (as it is using the Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine). The gameplay will follow a somewhat-branching plot line using a pool of pre-determined scenarios, and the player's choices. Rather than use x/y branching, nearly all branches in the game are point-based. The choices themselves focus on how the player interacts with the other characters. It features two main storylines.
The main "themes" are the thought process and dreams; it is intended that much of the horror doesn't come from what humans do, but how they think. Along the same lines, rather than focus on nightmares, dreams are set-up to influence reality as opposed to the other way around.
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Playable Characters:
Kazuki: You are Kazuki Kamata, the son of two Japanese working-class parents. As a result of a botched Caesarean section, your mother died of internal bleeding; this left your father in the proverbial dark. In an attempt to escape his own memories, and in hopes of giving the remaining family a better life, he takes you and moves to America. To be precise, San Francisco, California. But as any psychologist knows, a change of scenery cannot coerce a change of the mind...
Fast-forward 18 years. You are attending the local community college, and living in a small apartment. You pay for this apartment using your job at the local machine shop... you also pay for your father's bar tab... and your college tuition... and your living expenses... for all intents and purposes, you are the self-reliant, lonely breadwinner. This job, which you've had for 4 years, is becoming more unstable as the world moves towards mail-ordering and the throwaway mentality. Even through these hardships, you understand that you are fortunate to be able to get by, and maintain a positive outlook on most aspects of life.
As this is going on, you begin to notice that, in the mornings, you've accumulated marks on your body during the night. Marks that you know for certain could not have been caused simply by rolling around in bed. Very early into the game's story, you learn that you are a "transeer" (\tran-sē-ər\): a person whose dreams affect reality. The rest of his story belongs to you.
Rin: You are Katherine "Rin" Faust, a foster child. Found in the streets of Sacramento as an infant, you never knew your parents. Two things were left with you: a small blanket, and a photograph of your parents.
The world was never particularly kind to you, leaving you alone and without a voice, but it gave you one grace: a loving foster mother. Having been abandoned herself, your mother couldn't help herself from quietly taking you off of the streets, and she began raising you while she was in college. Of course, this means sometimes wondering when your next meal is, but thus far, you've managed to get by.
When you were eight years old, you purposefully burned the two aforementioned things. Your mind matured very early, and you understood that the past, while worth remembering, is not worth holding onto. But as a child, you can't help but holding onto the past, and keep the ashes of both items in your back pocket. Ironically, you also burned a third thing: your right arm.
Very early into the game's story, you learn that you are a "transeer" (\tran-sē-ər\), and a very powerful one. You are a person whose dreams affect reality. Sadly, although understandably, you have an extremely negative view of the world. The player picks up this story when Rin is 16 years old, and still living in Sacramento with her mother...
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Other Information:
Since our humble beginnings as a very bad idea in an IRC channel, we have since...
* Started a development blog, which to an extent, serves as a change log.
* Released a Ren'Py plug-in, which (however badly), makes it easier to create savefiles and read assets apart from the persistent table.
* Started a [url=http://wiki2.projectexist.net)]wiki[/url] so that those that are interested can keep up with design changes as we make them.
* Began putting out builds; the latest builds can update to future versions in-game, and we will be writing a plug-in that will make it possible to backtrack to previous defined checkpoints so that when more story is written, it is far easier for the end-user to pick up where he left off.
* Specifically, 0.2.3b was released last week.
* Here is a direct link to 0.2.2b which updates to 0.2.3b, and serves as a recruitment demo. (It should be noted that most of my work has been programming/scripting.)
Development wiki: http://wiki2.projectexist.net/index.php?title=Main_Page
The development wiki details other characters.
Release blog: http://blog.projectexist.net/
The blog is updated whenever there is a notable release or news.
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Screenshots:
http://projectexist.net/screens/
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I guess this is a very slow start considering we've been more than a year in development, but until last month, I was pretty much the only permanently active member on the team. I'm wondering if anyone would be willing to (or want to) tag along for the ride, even if that only means proofreading/testing builds before they get loaded into the update server (and hey, significant stuff has been done now). Any takers? <3
(We're also looking for writers.)
Sorry if that wasn't clear.
(Not actually sure how that happened, since it's transeer on my local files. Oh well.)