Story
Within a Rose is a romance visual novel involving the evil fairy from Sleeping Beauty.Wally is an 18-year-old boy living an ordinary life, but finds out after coming home from school that his parents had passed away in a car crash. Devastated, he becomes miserable and finds it difficult to smile again. A few months later when he finally manages to gather up the will to enter his parents' room and do some cleaning, he discovers a beautiful rose enclosed in a glass case hidden in the closet. He accidentally breaks the case and when he touches the rose he releases a woman with wings named Desdemona who was sealed away hundreds of years ago for trying to kill the princess of a kingdom that has long been gone.
First impressions will matter a great deal in this game. A player's initial choices will determine how much she likes Wally, if at all. This affects the entire story, with specific dialogue sometimes appearing throughout it all depending on the initial choices. There will be 3 good endings and 2 bad endings.
Characters
WallyHe's the main character of the game and a descendant of the Sleeping Beauty princess herself. He's a shy and overall a fairly kind person who hates it when people fight.
Desdemona
She's the main heroine of the game. She holds an extreme amount of hatred towards the royal family who destroyed her childhood. She will spend most of the game learning and adapting to the new time period she finds herself in. She's very flirtacious which tends to make Wally uncomfortable.
Sena
One of Wally's two best friends. Sena has harboured a crush on Wally for years, but has been too afraid to tell him how she feels. She's quite hotheaded and easily gets irritated by her friend, Marcus. Sena is the secondary heroine of the game.
Marcus
Marcus is the brains of the trio of friends. He's very book-smart which at times makes him feel superior to those that can't match him. He tends to drive Sena nuts with what he says.
CG/Screenshots
Questions
1. What would you pay for this?I intend to release Within a Rose on Steam, but I'm currently unsure what to price it at. It's about 43k words which when taking into account screen fades, characters appearing and disappearing, movement and replaying for different scenes, should be about 3-4 hours. It will have 15 cgs, isn't voiced and there are 6 characters with fullbody sprites and 3 with only headshots.
It seems that $10 is what most visual novels go for on steam and I have seen some that are on steam that are even shorter than my game will be, but they also have extremely good art. I'd like to make a living off of making visual novels, so I'm very worried about the launch price. I don't want to overcharge, but I don't want to undercharge either.
2. Wally being shy and shorter than the two heroines means that they will generally be the more decisive person in the relationship (including asking out/proposing). How do you feel about that type of relationship as opposed to ones where the guy traditionally does that?
3. Also general input would be nice too. How does this all sound?