itch.io

I'd love it if you could include the palette used in each asset. With the palette shaders can be made to recolor the assets like how arcade games did it, by replacing each color with a new one.

This would make it easier to make dark palettes for caves or sewers, or night time colors, or even Player 2 color variants.

I love the work so far and would love to do something with Ruin Runners and Shaia... I will need to come up with some ideas

Edit: I didn't realize these were palettized PNG format. Awesome!

Its unlikely these assets can be used legally, given they are direct tracings of Ragnarok Online's enemy sprites.

Public Domain refers to works that are not protected by copyright law. Meaning they belong to the public and can be used in any way without permission of the author.

This means you may sell access to the work (but you may not enforce any license to use the work), make copies, distribute, alter, archive, and display them at will.

Derivatives of the public domain work may still fall under Copyright, to the extent that they are modified. (For example, the example images shown here may NOT be public domain themselves)

Laws regarding the transactional nature of accessing the work are likely to still apply, so it is inadvisable to simply screen-capture this page.

Similarly you also may not falsely claim original authorship of the work legally, though it is somewhat dubious what repercussions would arise from doing so.

Edit to add: There is nothing that prevents anyone from attempting to drag you to court over a public domain work. They may not have legal standing to do so, but sometimes causing you the hassle of court is a win for them already.

Edit2: US Copyright law version of Public Domain. Every country has their own unique copyright laws which may differ from each other. CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) is a formal license that applies these same properties as a matter of contractual license, in order to be valid in countries where Public Domain would not normally apply. Each country's Public Domain, should they have one, takes precedence if it is the country of publication.

I've noticed in the devlog that several versions beyond 0.7.10 have been released, but the download link hasn't been updated. Does this mean the free version will never get new content?

Asking for clarification. Your license says not to sell the assets directly. Would you classify allowing a user to access the asset as a part of a modding framework in a game as "direct" and thus not appropriate, or "indirect" and appropriate? 

I do not have any specific plan to do so, but I do like the idea of giving players the ability to create their own content if I should ever develop a game that would benefit from it.

The question applies to both the free version for a free game, and the full version in a commercial game. I understand the answer may be different for those two cases, but I would like clarification.

Great stuff btw.

Hey these are great! I can easily see them fitting into both a realistic and more stylized scene. Good looking scene clutter is hard to get.

Depends on which side you're on. They can be both!

They're using the children as a meat shield for this like they always do.  Doesn't matter that 99.9% of what they're trying to achieve won't have anything to do with children at all, if they say they're doing it for the children, it's basically an unbreakable PR fortress, because its really REALLY easy to throw accusations at anyone who argues the topic seriously and with actual rigour.

She'd probably have been more popular if she had more content from the start. Currently there's not much the player can do to interact with her.

Konvel appears to be close-to-or-done-with sorting out the most recent hardware issues and is working on the game once more, however I can't be absolutely certain of that as I haven't asked directly. He's not gone dark in the discord again though, so I think the game is being worked on again at this time. 

Tech issues are very unfortunate, but it seems resolved. Hold tight and keep the line! Morale is the first best weapon against the trials of the world.

Status update from discord: Konvel had another hardware issue and is remedying. No indication of any data loss. 

In my personal opinion this does not sound like cause for panic, just gonna need a little more patience.

X scenes or minutes of content per month is how you end up with slop.

If all you care about is the number of scenes and amount of gameplay time, there are plenty of other H visual novels that can waste a lot of your time... however I would assume you're here for this story and this quality, which simply can't be squeezed out like a quickie. And that's assuming one is spending all of their waking time doing it. It gets even harder when you assume they have a life and aren't some kind of hikkikomori ecchi addict.

It would be unrealistic even if all he was doing was writing a book. That's simply not how this works, and trying to force it to be otherwise is why so many anime, game, writer, and other artists literally end up spending weeks in the hospital or having life ending depression issues.

We will wait however long it takes, there is no alternative.

Keeping the fans happy is irrelevant if the attempt to do so causes a bad product and ruins lives... because that certainly doesn't make fans happy.

Be happy you're not being charged anything to get updates. You're getting this for free if you choose to. Remember that, because you certainly aren't owed nor deserve it.

I have a lot of difficulty getting the game to run in window mode. Any suggestions?

oh wow. Amazing! I was starting to really lose hope (and worry a little bit about a stranger on the internet's health and wellbeing). 

Great to hear Konvel's alright!

Cherry on top that the game isn't condemned to final development hell!

Sorry to hear about the hardware troubles, though. That's my most real and immediate recurring nightmare.

And hey, no pressure. Just genuinely great to know what's going on. Love the story.

I believe that's a logical typo and it should actually say Barrbourgh

Konvel has a playlist on youtube with the tracks and their sources.

Assumptions were made based on the extremely adversarial tone of both of your posts. 

To progress you need to look at the hints in the menu. Sometimes the hints in the quick hint menu are more or less descriptive than the ones in the main menu and the individual girls' dossier pages. If your complaint is specifically about the need to fill up an invisible "get to know you better" gauge when they really have nothing to say, then I would agree that is a flaw in the tuning. However, if you've been trying to focus on one character, that's probably the major chokepoint you're hitting. Talk to everyone a little bit until they have the hint 'I need to X with Y first' at which point you can stop talking to them. Eventually you'll run out of people who don't have a hint like that and simply talking to the right person will set off a cascade of new event flags as long as you do them in the order of characters they're listed as depending on.
Be sure to also check the main menu for hints about progressing the main plot as sometimes you will need the world to be in a certain state to be able to activate new pending events. You can't deal with a serial killer when there haven't been any killings.

It's possible to get a little stuck. It's not perfect. Sometimes events will happen when you least expect it simply by entering a location even without a hint telling you its there.

Again I would agree that the hinting needs refinement. 

I hope you can figure out the rhythm and enjoy the plot as it unfolds. But if you can't then... that's unfortunate. But maybe take a breath and remember civility if you don't want to fight in a war it seems to everyone else like you just started.

Incidentally, after getting to know everyone in the hearth is where I would say the most interesting part is. It's where all the gears start meshing... or grinding as they sometimes do.

Your mistake is in assuming a visual novel is a game more than it is a story. The gameplay is choosing how to react to characters when they ask you a question or make you an offer, and when to interact with whom. Beyond that it is literally a novel. From the complaints I can only assume you've barely gotten through the prologue or you came into this expecting all sex all the time or something. This VN isn't that and that really isn't its selling point.

This is a story of political intrigue in a world of magic and modern at once.

There are choices. Choices you may even regret making for a long time, but this is not an arcade game that is played in the moment to moment.

This is an interactive book for people who actually like reading books.

It is a slow start, I will freely admit; the interesting part doesn't really get fully started until all the characters are met. Such is the price of a complicated setup.

But if you're not interested in learning about people more than putting things in their holes, you should probably check out a different game. Perhaps one that actually uses the word 'game' somewhere in its description.

And notably, Konvel does state right there in the description that you'll get plot with your plot.

Not at all. I'm just a massive nerd. Maybe slightly bothered by the tone of the comment, it was late at night. But generally speaking I'm filled with way too much trivia and find it amusing to give an absurdly detailed response to a question that probably wasn't even serious. No hard feelings.  Probably best not to ever consider anything in a comment section too seriously in general really. 

But the fact is the moment I considered how someone would answer it as if it were a serious question, I realized written laziness is probably the oldest invention in the history of writing... aside from writing. I actually do find that very interesting personally. Also a correction, it may have been babylonian rather than akkadian I was thinking of, but I'd have to look it up.

If you'll allow a tangent, 'okay' is an expansion of 'OK' which is an abbreviation for 'oll korrect' which in turn is very clearly an intentional misspelling of 'all correct.' Its really not relevant in context here, but it is a form of abbreviation and I find it to likewise be an interesting story. Goodbye has similar origins, stemming from 'God be with ye' and occasionally 'good be ye.' 

So. While I was being somewhat obtuse, I meant no harm really, and I'll wish you, 

Goodbye.

Around 1994, yes. W and L have been conversational terms for "a good thing happened" and "a bad thing happened" (a win or loss originally) since 2012 at the latest, but probably didn't become something almost everyone who speaks english would recognize until around 2015 or so. Its only become more popular since, and the terms originally come from labeling columns in competitive scoring (W/L/D, win loss draw) for games and matches for.... well centuries. The original meme phrase was 'add one to the win column' or any variation thereof, but eventually shortened to 'get a w' or 'take an l' situationally, and from there just became W and L without explanation because most people don't need it.

Edit: but I should clarify, shortening words to just one letter only became highly popular among the general population in 1994. More generally its been around for about 12000 years, and some examples can be seen sumerian and akkadian clay tablets written in cuneiform. It was 1994 when people started using pagers and the internet to commonly communicate and typing on them was even more of a hassle than caligraphy for the people of that time period, to whom computers and cellular phones were strange technology they were begrudgingly forced to use. 

Winston Churchill is the first known user of OMG, in a telegraph, during WWII, (and the telegraph operator had to explain to the recipient that it meant oh my god). Other forms of shorthand have been in common use by stenographers for around as long as people have been using the latin alphabet. Most scribes copying manuscripts in the 1400s or so for example, would write 'a' in place of 'and' and many other similar single letter substitutions, and in fact this is the origin of the apostrophe, which literally means "there is supposed to be one or more letters in this word and I choose not to write them."

Before that we simply wrote Johns instead of John's (the apostrophe to denote possession is actually due to a centuries old uncorrected mistake that became the new correct).

The snake is the symbol of medicine dating back to ancient greece. You may have seen the Caduceus staff which is sometimes drawn as two snakes coiling around a winged staff, and occasionally one snake with a head on each end coiled in the same manner in other depictions. Its a worldwide well known symbol. There are similar symbols in chemistry, and the Ouroboros, the serpent devouring itself from the tail forward, is commonly referenced in various philosophical practices, including alchemy.

I don't claim to have insight into the developer's thoughts, but it seems likely to me that it is related here.

Made me care about people.
Made me hate people.
Made me care about people I hate.
Made me care about people I should hate.
Made me uncertain about my allies being enemies.
Made me uncertain about my enemies becoming allies.

Made me need to know more about everyone, regardless of whether I like or trust them or not. 

Do not stop.

(Also upset me when I reached the end and several characters are no longer available to chat with, likely to return, but off limits at the cliffhanger. Annoyed about that, but in the end its proof I'm invested beyond surface level.)

EDIT: Note that all of these statements (apart from the annoyed part) are to be considered praise.

the new UI is kind of bright and the low contrast text makes it hard to read. Also it seems to now cause menus to extend off the screen in some rooms. I think it was the west hall. Any chance we could get the option of an inverted color scheme?

Not asking for the old UI back or anything, but the black UI was a lot easier on my eyes. Also it would be nice to have the dossier and quest list be dedicated buttons always on the screen again so I don't have to click through multiple menus to open them up. I was constantly flipping back and forth through them before, so its going to make the QOL go way down this way. A keyboard hotkey might also suffice, though having it on the header would still be ideal.

Another usability issue is.. I can't tell which save is my newest one anymore. Used to be whichever one had a different color text, but they all look the same now and needing to compare time and date stamps on like 8 pages of saves is going to be a nightmare.

Hidden Voices appears to be broken for several characters in Act 2, with anyone not having a character paperdoll in act 3 having their talkChar value improperly updated. Ard becomes cmDefaultBoy instead of cmArd, the Lamia in the mountains retains the value of cmRobinThink or Talk from the previous line written, etc. Most of the time this results in NPCs having the "I shouldn't try to read minds while speaking its too confusing" or "I can't hear their voice, its like its muffled somehow." lines.

As a result some scenes like with the Lamia are actually locked off an inaccessible, while other scenes may still advance but the player won't be able to get the necessary context they should from hearing the character's normal thoughts.

Most of the housemates work, but this seems to be because they are the ones who have paperdolls. I suspect assigning talkChar based on the base image for the paperdoll is the problem. You should probably check that file, or just use a switch statement that checks characters' display names instead of doing anything too clever with image files. In programming clever is only clever until your foot has a bullet in it.