NaNoRenO 2008

[Aashtarsrain]

I always take too much time to complete my projects, so I started to make this new one today, February 9th, and I will stop in thirty days. No more excuses ! It's a side-project but I promise I won't reuse any previous work, no images and no script. "The Stone of Destiny" is a short role-playing game, involving investigation and relationships with NPCs, and based on real Scottish history and legends, ... with a significant dose of heroic fantasy
More details and screens soon. I hope you'll enjoy it when it's done.

Edit : As you can see, I'm using Poser 7 and Vue 5 for the artwork, 'cause I really really CAN'T draw !

[chronoluminaire]

Project title: Tales of War - The Fall of Jayshn
Aimed release date: March 31, 2008
Classification: Ren'ai RPG (I'm considering making combat optional, most probably via an "insta-kill" cheat code, but I promise nothing about it yet).

Yay, another Ren'Ai RPG! I'm looking forward to it already

Endings: Besides the silly endings (ie: You drop your sword when trying to attack the creature, and hurt yourself. Two days later, you die due to the infected wound.), the game will feature, at least, 3 BxG paths and 3 GxB paths. If time allows, there are some plans to increase the numbers up to 9 BxG, 9 GxB, 6 BxB, and 6 GxG, for a total of 30 different paths. If time doesn't, the "expanded" version would be released later anyway .
Playable characters: 6 in total: 3 girls and 3 guys.
Conquistable characters: For each game, anyone of the 5 you are not playing (hence the high number of endings).

Ahh, interesting! That could be lots of fun. It would be quite a lot of script though... But if the game length is just 20-40 minutes of VN, that ought to be achievable by March 31st... but it's a lot of work.

Brief intro: As far as you can remember, you've been having a quiet life in the also quite village of Anolecrab, somwhere in the quiet plains of the even more quiet country of Niaps...

Hmmm, there's something familiar about those names...

Additional trivia: Has somebody noticed that "Anolecrab" is actually "Barcelona" reversed?

Yes, I did. I noticed as soon as you mentioned "Niaps" that it was "Spain" reversed as well, which also gave me a hint as to what country you're from! (That and the phrase "Conquistable characters"... The more usual English word would be "Conquerable characters", or in a VN context, "Winnable characters".)

Yay, I'll look forward to all the NaNoRenO entries, but this one in particular!

[herenvardo]

Brief intro: As far as you can remember, you've been having a quiet life in the also quite village of Anolecrab, somwhere in the quiet plains of the even more quiet country of Niaps...

Hmmm, there's something familiar about those names...

Additional trivia: Has somebody noticed that "Anolecrab" is actually "Barcelona" reversed?

Yes, I did. I noticed as soon as you mentioned "Niaps" that it was "Spain" reversed as well, which also gave me a hint as to what country you're from! (That and the phrase "Conquistable characters"... The more usual English word would be "Conquerable characters", or in a VN context, "Winnable characters".)

Note: I had to fix the bbcode from the quote to prevent it messing up my own markup for the rest of the post ^^;

Maybe you'll spot other locations featured by the game, like Dirdam, Acrollam, or even Acronem. But I challenge you to find the real town referenced by the game's city Erep Tnas. Since it would be impossible to unambiguously identify it, I'll give you a clue: a forest in the game has been named Farrag.

It all started as a convenience, two years ago, when the project was just starting: I started taking Anolecrab and Dirdam as name placeholders to allow differentiating references to each town; and somebody joked about this that if I left those names on the final game, most people wouldn't even notice. But... I don't matter if people realizes! So, all location names in the game are the reversed names of real locations from Spain. I must mention, however, that the names have been picked arbitrarily, and relationships or features from the game locations are not intended to represent real relationships or features of their real location counterparts.

Another, unrelated point worth mentioning is that the project is facing a challenge that didn't exist when it started two years ago. By then, the project's idea was breaking stereotypes, mixing the Ren'ai VN and fantasy-RPG genres; which had only be done before (at least in a so explicit way) by Grey's Heikou. Now, however, there are some Ren'ai RPGs floating around. Actually, I'm worried about one particular game: I don't want my project to look as an "ER-clone", but there are some similarities, some of them coincidentall (like a mage being one of the "available" girls), and some others just unavoidable: I just cannot make a fantasy game without beautiful elf girls and, at least, one dragon. There is a point I'm specially worried about, and is also a quite good example of my worries:

The elven girl character in Fall of Jayshn is actually the character I've been playing in several (table-top) role-playing campaigns, far before I even knew of these forums or Ren'ai games. However, her golden long hair and emerald-green eyes cause an obvious resemblance with Asilana from Elven Relations (actually, I got shocked, while playing ER, when I saw the elf-girl resembling so much my character). Despite there are clear differences between these girls, I'm worried about how the players will react at this coincidence, as well as many others in the same line.

In other words, the game was originally designed to be a monopoly in the genre by itself, but it's being retaken when there are some serious "competitors".

Finally, despite I'm unable to show you some art yet; I feel in the mood to spoil something So find attached a page of the "game manual" that I will include in the packages (note that all the information here is subject to change, although there are several parts that are not likely to be modified). It seems that the forums do not allow html files as attachments, so I've uploaded it at http://herenvardo.googlepages.com/combat.html.

[mikey]

Well, not to undermine other people's determination, my current active project has gone into a productive phase and all my attention is directed to it - and because of this activity, I won't participate in NaNoRenO.

The project started even before I promised to participate in NaNoRenO and in any case as the active project it has first priority and this can't be changed. I didn't expect that I would suddenly become so immersed in that, but you'll understand hopefully, if I don't fight it. I'm really happy that things are going well with game making for me, after last autumn, where I needed some time off.

It really doesn't happen all that often that I have to use the priority list like this, but sometimes it does and this is the time. That's why I won't try to make excuses or say that maybe I will still participate, because it doesn't really make sense.

Nevertheless, as hypocritical as it may seem now, I'd be happy if NaNoRenO took place and was successful once again. It would be the 4th consecutive year, and tradition is important.

[Jake]

As it goes, we're definitely doing something this year - it seems ten months was enough time to forget how busy we were last March...

Again, it's something less-traditional, and the team has expanded from two to three-maybe-four-depending-on-the-musician, but we'll get something out!

[herenvardo]

Summarizing, until now we have:
7 NaNoRenO participants:

• MAB Studio (posts by Jake): (no details anounced)
• Aashtarsrain: The Stone of Destiny (dateshifted: started on Feb 9th and aims finnishing on Mar 9th)
• Scout: (Details will come on April 1st.)
• akizakura: (Details forthcoming)
• kura: (no anounced title, "a mostly-typical high school setting game")
• Baka Trio (FIA, Ignosco, lordcloudx): Real Life
• parvenue & sister: (no anounced title, "a murder mystery thing that will probably be done by April")

4 IntRenAimO participants:

• Mr. E: (no details anounced)
• Eclipse: (I will not "break" a [ spoiler] tag EDIT: Eclipse started a thread for the project)
• Herenvardo: The Fall of Jayshn
• sake-bento: (no details anounced)

Anyway, a bit egoistically, I'm not volunteering to organize this, but I hope someone will - this isn't really a formal thing I imagine - what counts are the people who agree to the "make a game in 1 month" rule, a forum thread and you have a NaNoRenO.

Well, I don't know how much organization should be done, but by now I voluteer on keeping the above listing as updated and acurate as I can, unless/until somebody else wants to take care of it. I hope to have many chances to add more people to the list before the end of march ^^
So, there is a list of people participating, there is a thread in the forums, and, what's most important, there will be at least a few games seeing the light by, or before, the end of March... what else is needed?
Only left to say, to Aashtarsrain, Mr. E, Eclipse, and myself: tick, tock, the clock is running!

[Scout]

If we're actually looking for a roll call here, I will definitely be participating this year, as I've been bubbling over the chance to get started on my NaNo project for a good couple of months now (several people can attest to that!).

Details will come on April 1st.

[Jake]

Jake: (no details anounced)

To be accurate, that would be "MAB Studio" - sure, we only really get together and work on the same project at the same time for something like NaNo, but still...

I'd let you know what it's going to be called, but... I'm not sure we've actually decided yet!

Well, I don't know how much organization should be done

To be honest, I'm not sure any organisation is strictly speaking necessary at all - last year there was a webpage put up which mentioned details of who'd announced they were going to take part, but then it didn't get updated again until after NaNo was over, if at all... I'm not sure if maintaining a list encourages people to take part or not, to be honest, and that's the point of the exercise, after all.






For what it's worth, I would seriously recommend NaNo for anyone who's not made a game before at all, especially if you have some big project planned - do a NaNoRenO project first! The expectations aren't high, nobody's going to be upset if you take a month and turn in something short, uninspired or derivative, because the challenge really is just getting it all done in a month, and anyone who's tried before recognises that. But it's great experience, and lets you find out which bits are quicker and which bits take longer than you thought they might, and gives you an excuse to get your feet wet doing something fun rather than breathtakingly awesome!

[herenvardo]

Jake: (no details anounced)

To be accurate, that would be "MAB Studio" - sure, we only really get together and work on the same project at the same time for something like NaNo, but still...

Ok, I can put that in the list; although the names where only meant to be an arbitrary representation of the participants as they are identified within the forums, rather than an exact definition of the authory of each project. In other words, "Jake" is used in the list as a "pointer" to "MAB Studio" (don't worry, I'm not going to use pointer syntax on the list, despite I feel tempted to XD ). In other words, if I just put in the list "MAB Studio", posts you could make regarding the project couldn't be associated to the corresponding entry in the list except by people who is aware of that being your team.

I'd let you know what it's going to be called, but... I'm not sure we've actually decided yet!

Ok, don't worry; I'm not asking anyone to provide details; I'm just putting together the basic details (like titles) of those who provide them.

To be honest, I'm not sure any organisation is strictly speaking necessary at all

100% agree. For a NaNoRenO to be, there is only needed some people making games during that month. Everything else could be useful, but is not strictly needed.

I'm not sure if maintaining a list encourages people to take part or not, to be honest, and that's the point of the exercise, after all.

I'm not sure either. But I have no reason it would discourage people, so there shouldn't be any issue about having it. And I actually believe that it will help the "espectators" to be aware of what goes on during the month, probably leading them to post from time to time encouraging the participants... and this might easily cause having more of the projects completed by the 31st

If we're actually looking for a roll call here, I will definitely be participating this year, as I've been bubbling over the chance to get started on my NaNo project for a good couple of months now (several people can attest to that!).

I'll clarify that my only goal with the list was to get the information about participation anouncements together in one place. If somebody doesn't want to anounce the project or the details, that's perfectly fine. The main point is that people takes part on the challenge so we get a sudden explosion of Ren'Ai fun after march 31st. The list is mostly to keep casual visitors and lurkers better informed

[akizakura]

I'm in! NaNoWriMo has done wonders for getting me to write, so let's see if NaNoRenO can get me over my fear of letting people see my horrid artwork!

Details forthcoming!

[mikey]

The Death Clock is here! So it's begun...

[sake-bento]

The clock! @_@

Well, I don't want my first big project to fall into the black hole of despair, so I'm not going to start a new project. I will consider it to be my pseudo NaNoRenO. I started earlier, so it's cheating a bit. But I'll use the same deadline. ::nodnod:: Yosh! Let's all work hard.

[chronoluminaire]

The clock! @_@

Well, I don't want my first big project to fall into the black hole of despair, so I'm not going to start a new project. I will consider it to be my pseudo NaNoRenO. I started earlier, so it's cheating a bit. But I'll use the same deadline. ::nodnod:: Yosh! Let's all work hard.

Ah, IntRenAiMo is a fine tradition! I did precisely the same for Elven Relations last year (was it only a year ago?) and it worked very well for me. So ganbare!
(I'm not doing NaNoRenO myself this year. I've been working too hard on the Tile and Unit Engines. But I'll be cheering you all on.)

[mikey]

Actually, we forgot the most important thing: Good luck to everyone who is participating! We're rooting for you!

[Kikered]

Indeedy. Good luck, everyone!