It has been a while since I have addressed everyone this way!
This is going to be a slightly more lengthy introduction to our next project, “Gilded Shadows” - which has gone through several name changes, so you may have seen me posting about it under a different title.
Gilded Shadows is an otome visual novel that focuses on the story of a main character named Morgan Leone (name customisable).
The setting is expansive, with part of the world following a more solarpunk aesthetic with bright colors while the other part is more of a darker cyberpunkesque situation. The word is tidal locked and the different aesthetics align to the day/night division of the planet (day side is more solarpunk, night side is more cyberpunk).
In the story, the player will be introduced to two main factions they can choose to get involved with -
Endgame, a group dedicated to protecting the citizens of Altair and keeping the peace between different governments and groups across the planet…
And Crimson, a notorious crime family situated on the night side of the planet.
Neither group is entirely what it seems - because where’s the fun in that?
We are currently planning for six love interests - like Changeling. Three guys who are a part of Endgame, two who are part of Crimson, and one who is unaligned.
There are several additional options for love interests and we’ll be looking, down the line, to determine if this is a game we can potentially add content to after release to expand the world and create additional routes.
As we’ve mentioned before, we are planning for the MC to be semi-customisable, allowing the player to pick her name, hair color, skin color, and a selection of personality traits that will open up (or lock up) specific game options and content, as well as affect your standing with different love interests.
This time around, we are planning to include relationship meters that will help the player track how well they’re doing with specific characters, but this does not mean it’s a stat-raising game by any stretch.
Choices will function similarly to Changeling but instead of adding in a “right choice indicator”, we decided to put visible meters that a player can choose to look at (or not look at) while they play.
We’re looking at other ways to make the game slightly more interactive than Changeling, without branching out too much and making something that is too different from our first project.
As far as where the project stands right now:
I have most of the main cast sprites in some stage of completion, the GUI is coded and set up, and all the routes have at least basic synopsis done.
Like Changeling, this game will have a common route where the LI route is chosen toward the end by some choice that will be integrated into the gameplay. (However, I’m trying to make a shorter common route as a whole. Changeling’s is a bit too long I think).
The first chapter of the common route has a rough draft that is fully written (yay! LoL) and the rest is plotted out.
Changeling’s word count goal was 300,000 words and we hit 686,000 total. This time around, I’m setting the goal at 400,000 so we’ll see where things end up! Since, in some ways, my current plans may mean more branching in general, it’s possible the word count will go up, even if the overall play time does not.
At lot of people have asked about Kickstarting and crowdfunding - we just finished up our reward obligations for Changeling and we are definitely planning to Kickstart Gilded Shadows! Due to some of our plans (like MC customization, among others) we are going to need much more help with coding. I’d also really like to include more CGs this time, but that means getting more help with art than we had last time.
And this setting is so huge and beautiful that I want to include a ton of backgrounds!
We’ll be keeping everyone up to date on that but I do not expect the KS to happen before we have at least some semblance of a demo put together. That means finishing at least one more chapter of the common path and completing a couple more sprites that will need to appear.
We’ll be posting more profiles and things in the coming days and I’ll get back into doing regular progress reports like I did for Changeling.
Looking forward to starting another dev journey and I really hope you guys fall in love with Gilded Shadows as a project! See you soon!
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