Hello! It’s been a while but we’re still alive! And we’re still working on Norvale!!
Life kind of got the better of us this year but we’ve still been working towards the full version of Norvale!
We’ve been taking into account the feedback we received from our updated demo’s player survey and have been fixing and improving the game accordingly, such as players encountering some issues in regards to the audio which has now been fixed.
We’re always looking for feedback and ways to improve so please do try out the new demo and fill out the survey if you haven’t already!
Now onto the updates:
STORY
We’re happy to announce that writing for the story is done~! The story for Norvale is roughly a little over ~16,000 words. It’s a nice, short story for when you want to just play a quick visual novel to relax. We’re still doing a bit of fine tuning here and there, mainly just double-checking things like continuity and typos and the like but the overall story is finished!
The candy store route has also gone through some reworking so it’ll be a slightly different experience compared to the demo version!
ART
Over the past couple of months, we’ve been working on designing and finalizing the remaining cast of Norvale! Sprite work is finished for all characters so it’s only a matter of adding them into the game.
Here’s a peek at the characters you’ll meet in the third route, Louis, Sara & Lathika!
(We will do a proper introduction for them on our social media at a later date.)
Now that character related artwork is finished, we’ll be moving to designing backgrounds. The current plan to overhaul all the backgrounds from the demo and try to start from scratch again since we’re not too happy with how they turned out haha ;;
It’s a short update but we thank you for your patience and continued support!
Hello~! As we've stated in our previous devlog, we released an updated version of our Demo with a new UI & a change to a sprite 🎉 We hope old and new players can enjoy this demo (and answer the survey 😆)
A slice of life visual novel of a trip to a childhood hometown
Time flies doesn't it? It's already the end of October! Before we start on the updates we've made since the last devlog, we would just like to mention that last August marked the one year release of the Norvale demo!
Time really does fly…
Anyway, on to the updates
GUI DESIGN
As mentioned in a previous devlog, we have decided to redesign the GUI design. So we have changed the visual aspect of the GUI, though the theme technically stays the same.
*for now, Music Volume & Mute All is disabled
In addition to this, we revamped the quick menu and MC name input!
We had an idea to create a quick menu that appears on hover, and through trial and error, we got it to work.
And with the MC name input, based on feedback, we added a "Confirm" button for better user experience and interaction.
DEMO FEEDBACK
Based on feedback we got during the first release of the demo, we have adjusted and changed the font as well, and the text size of the dialogue in-game. We've also adjusted other functionality like adding a "Test Sound" option on the settings screen, adjusting the Auto Save (currently, we removed the Quick Save and Quick Load options), and as mentioned above, the MC name input.
We've also fixed a few UI bugs like how the dialogue textbox would be bigger when the MC speaks.
And for story script understanding, we added parenthesis to when MC has inner thoughts, instead of leaving it italicized and removing the confusion that it may be a narration or an actual dialogue.
DEMO V2 + MOVING FORWARD
With this, moving forward, we plan on asking a few of our friends to test the new GUI design. This will be using the same story as the previous demo gameplay (candy wrapper route), and depending on that we'll discuss whether to upload it to our itch.io page or not for more feedback/participants.
We still don't have BGM, as we are focusing on the story, art sprites and GUI, but once we're done we hope to spend more time fixing the sounds/music for Norvale.
In the demo feedback, we received feedback about the text size. Currently, we just made it so that the text is large enough to read and the font to be readable/understandable. However, we do plan on making the dialogue text adjustable and hopefully will be implemented by the full version or in future versions of the full version. There are also a few other issues we have yet to fix in this version, but we'll tackle them one by one.
And that is all~ We've made a lot of progress this year and we are grateful to those who continue to support us.
It’s been 1 year since the demo for Norvale was published! We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for playing it and following us on our journey to completing the full game.
We’re slowly but surely making progress and we hope you will enjoy the full version of Norvale once it comes out~!
If you haven’t played the demo yet, please do give it a try and let us know what you think~
Once again, we thank everyone for your support and we hope you will keep watching over us from now on as well!
The player character for a visual novel I'm currently working on~! You can find the demo and where you can keep up with updates regarding the game over here:
An indie visual novel group
I really hope you'll give the demo a try and take the survey at the end to let us know what you think! I'd really appreciate it ♡(ӦｖӦ｡)
June has ended and with it we have some more updates regarding the progress of Norvale!
As we mentioned in the previous devlog, we’ve finished the initial story draft for the Craft Store route. In this route, Morgan decides to visit the local craft store in search of something that they can pick up as a new hobby. But once they arrive, they find two men arguing in the middle of the street…
NEW CHARACTERS
The designs for the two men, Frank and Kushal, have been completed and we’ve uploaded their character introductions yesterday.
Frank is the father of Louis, one of Morgan’s childhood friends, and the owner of the local toy store that sits across the street from the craft store. He’s someone that comes across rough at first but once you get to know him, he’s a pretty friendly guy. Despite being on good terms with Kushal’s wife Lathika & his daughter Sara, he never seems to get along with Kushal himself and is prone to starting arguments with him over pointless things…
Compared to the initial sketches, his face became a bit more oval compared to the rounder face of the pencil sketches. While making rough designs for his clothes, they were simple like a plain t-shirt and sandals or a sloppily tucked in shirt to go with his rough but friendly personality. But we decided to make him dress a bit neater and added a jacket to his outfit as well to fit the late spring season the story takes place in.
“He decided to head outside for a bit and threw on a jacket, just in case it gets chilly.” is the basic idea behind his final outfit.
Kushal’s design was pretty straightforward. Although looking back, he might’ve lost a bit of the aloofness of the pencil sketch since his features turned softer in the final design.
Kushal is the father of Sara, another one of Morgan’s childhood friends, and the owner of the local craft store. A man of few words and even fewer expressions, his stoicism and blunt words sometimes tend to rub people the wrong way. While he usually prefers to stay out of trouble, he’s always ready to throw words with Frank.
I drew the first outfit, the red Kurta with black pants to draw out a more traditional Indian feel, while designs 2 through 4 were mostly inspired by things dads usually wear haha
We ended up going with the outfit in design 2 since we felt it was a good casual but still somewhat formal outfit someone like Kushal would wear, while keeping the skin color of the first design.
The blue looks a little striking at first glance but I think the white accents bring some balance.
There’s still a little bit more sprite related work to go before I finish the character art for this route. After that, the plan is to move onto character designs for the third route and once those are done, the focus will be shifted to drawing backgrounds. There’s still a lot of artwork to go but I’ll do my best! (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧
DEVELOPMENT
Not much to update for the development side, aside from how we’ve started working on applying the new GUI to ren’py and experimenting on some GUI features we’ve thought about before and while conceptualizing the newer GUI. We’ll continue to finish implementing the GUI to the ren’py script before fixing some kinks/feature fixes then the story script itself unto the game.
tl;dr: we’ve made quite a lot of progress for the 2nd part of the story in terms of assets. We’ll slowly but surely continue to develop and flesh out the full version of the game, so please continue to support us!
In summary, we’re making progress! Although small, we are making progress and a positive one at that! Please look forward to the full release of Norvale!
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Hello! March has ended and we have some progress into completing Norvale.
STORY
To start off, we have listed down the tasks we needed to do to complete Norvale. Norvale has three (3) main routes with two (2) endings. In the demo, you’ve seen the “candy wrapper” route or the “candy store” route and met Julie at J&J’s.
Currently, we are working on the “craft store” route, where you’ll go to a different place in Norvale and meet a different set of characters. We have finished the initial draft for this route around January-February, and have broken down the tasks and assets we’d need for this route and have been working on them.
For the Craft Store Route, the player character Morgan heads to the local craft store in search of picking up a new hobby. But upon reaching it, they find two people bickering in the middle of the street…
The characters that will be featured in this route are Kushal, the craft store's owner and Frank, the owner of a toy store just across the street. Even though they've been neighbors for all these years, they can never seem to get along.
These are the initial sketches for them!
Frank's design has been finalized and we're currently working on his sprite, after which we'll start working on Kushal. Please look forward to both of their finished designs!
GUI
We also started working on re-designing the GUI components, based on some feedback we received on the Norvale DEMO survey. We have discussed a few tweaks on it and will try on a couple of tests on ren’py for them.
The concept of the GUI stays the same, with paper/notes/journal theme. We had feedback that the dialogue was hard to read with the textbox/dialogue box because the text color is dark on dark textbox, so the color was adjusted to a lighter brown color. We also plan on changing the fonts, but we have yet to find the one that fits our theme and still readable in legibility and size.
In summary, we’re making progress! Although small, we are making progress and a positive one at that! Please look forward to the full release of Norvale!
Hello! we’re Alchemilla studios and we’re here to present to you our very first devlog for Norvale!
Alchemilla Studios
First things first, we want to introduce to you Alchemilla studios and how we came to be.
We’re currently just a two-person team, consisting of Mari and nana, and a few years back we thought of making a visual novel and actually had an idea for a really big concept. However, we thought that it would be too much time and effort for beginners like ourselves, so we put that vn idea at the side and thought of making a simple one first and that led to Norvale.
While coming up with the name for our group, we thought using a flower's name based on its meaning would help encompass the type of content we want to make. The floriography for Alchemilla means "a comforting love", which felt like a good fit for us since we mainly want to create simple, easygoing content for people to enjoy while they relax and unwind after a stressful day. We might throw in a little angst here and there (lol), but for the most part, we want to try and create things that give people a sense of comfort in the midst of their busy lives.
As for the medium of our projects, we're currently focusing on visual novels and are interested in creating webnovels as well. We're still figuring things out but we hope to branch out into more mediums in the future!
Norvale
1. Concept
We came up with the plot for Norvale on a whim really lol
I (nana) thought to make a cute little story about someone that visited their childhood home again and relived the memories they had with a friend and a promise they made. The story went through a lot of changes and ideas to the point Mari had no idea what the story was even about anymore, before we decided on the current plot of Norvale.
The core idea was always to have a simple story since this is the first time making a visual novel for both of us. We’re the only two people working on it so we didn’t want to add too many elements and get overwhelmed.
As for how we came up with the name Norvale…it was a name we picked from a list of generated town names lol
2. Development
Story and Characters
Like we mentioned before, we wanted to keep the story simple and straightforward. As such, we broke the main story into 3 places that the player can visit. Where they go will be based on which item is chosen: the Marble, the Candy Wrapper or the Button.
Each place visited has a different character(s) the player gets to interact with. All the characters that you’ll run into are people the player character, Morgan has spent time with as a child.
※ Only the Candy Wrapper route is available in the demo.
Character Design
In line with keeping things simple for Norvale, the characters are also fairly simple in design! I was initially going to add shading and highlights to the sprite art but I quite like how the flat base colors look so I left it like that. It also personally makes it faster to deal with any adjustments or changes required when I don't have to worry about shading and highlighting an area over again lol
Background Art
Backgrounds were probably the biggest difficulty art wise since I've never really drawn them before. And the few that I did draw in the past...weren't very good lol
So I'm probably the most surprised by how decent they turned out 😂
There's still lots of room for improvement but I've learned a lot from drawing the bgs in the demo so please look forward to (hopefully) better looking backgrounds from now on (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧
UI design
We sort of had a general concept to use a scrapbook/journal design for the UI. Since the premise of the story was for Morgan (player character) to reminisce about their time in their childhood town. So a scrapbook and journal type of design was what we envisioned.
It's still quite a simple design as we're still getting used to designing UI (tools and techniques) for visual novels 😅
I mostly used photoshop and figma. I used figma to design some of the components while I used photoshop to lay them out and other design/color customization.
I'm still figuring out the best tools for me, so hopefully I'll get better.
Ren'py Dev
Developing on Ren’py was relatively easy to pick up, however other customizations, I (mari) needed to figure out and research online, especially for some features that nana wanted to implement, but had to push back to the full version as I didn’t know how to do them in time for the demo release.
But I definitely learned alot in developing vns on Ren’py, and hopefully I get to do more UI and feature dev to fully customize our future projects.
3. Demo
We released our demo in time for SuNoFes 2022, as we thought it would be a good place to get feedback as well as place a deadline on ourselves, since we both just went on our own pace when developing the assets.
We definitely went through alot of trial and error with the art, sprites and development on ren’py, but we were figuring it out our vision for the game as we went along.
We’re still figuring out a proper workflow for the both of us, as well as the practices other visual novel groups do for their projects. If you have any suggestions, we’re open to them! hehe
Moving Forward
Current Progress In Norvale Post-Demo:
We recently finished finalizing the story for the Craft Store and are currently working on character designs for the characters that will be present in it.
Further Improvements After the Demo Release:
We've received feedback on the demo from players via our satisfaction survey and will be improving the game based on that. We also plan to rework certain assets we felt could be polished a bit more, namely the backgrounds and UI design.
The start screen will definitely be changed! As we plan to use an art CG for it, do look forward to it!
We also had issues with implementing sound into the demo, so we're looking into that as well and hopefully be able to add sfx and music into the game.
And that's it for our first devlog! We hope you could follow us along this journey as Alchemilla Studios and for Norvale!
Please do check out the demo of Norvale on itch.io as well!
Get to know the story and the demo characters below!
You can check out the demo at itch.io!
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📖 Story
Burdened by the stress of life in the big city, Morgan takes a short trip to Norvale, a town they lived in as a child. Spurred by the memories of an old ruined photograph, Morgan wanders the small town, hoping to run into some old childhood friends along the way.
👥 Characters
🖼️ Morgan
“I came all the way here but what should I do?”
An office worker overwhelmed by the pressures of the adult world. In need of a break, they went on a trip to their childhood home.
🍬 Julie
“What’s with that look? Don’t tell me you don’t recognize me?!”
One of Morgan's childhood friends. She helps out at her late grandfathers' candy store whenever she comes back home from university.
To check out the story more, get the demo game from itch.io!
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