Official blog for It Lives Within, the fan-made, non-profit third installment of the It Lives Anthology. About | Members | FAQ | Progress Tracker | The Game
Hello everyone! For people just discovering us, or for those of you who do know about us and would like a better summary of whatâs to come, this is the right place! We are the It Lives Project, a fan team working in our free time to make the visual novel It Lives Within, the third and final book in the It Lives series.Â
You're finally ready to leave your past behind and move on. But apparently, moving on means enrolling at a community college in a supernatural town overflowing with monsters and dark magic...
IT LIVES WITHIN fully released đ¤
Our ask box is always open, but make sure you read our FAQ first. To prevent our blog from being too cluttered and chaotic, we will delete any asks that are answered in our FAQ.
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It Lives Within features:
â¨A fresh MC customizable in all the ways you can think of. Customization includes appearance, gender, sexuality, and personality. Play as a diplomatic and gentle Rowan whoâs kind to everyone, or a sarcastic Rowan who doesnât take anything seriously and always has a witty quip at hand, or a hard-ass aggressive Rowan who isnât afraid to stand up to anyone and everyone. To top it all off, you get to determine Rowanâs motivations and their attitudes regarding the bookâs events.
đ Four awesome LIs: Amalia de Leon (Rowanâs long-time best friend), Abel Flint (resident archaeology nerd), Jocelyn Wu (perpetually grumpy jock & former bully), and Lincoln McQuoid (mysterious newcomer).
đŠđ§New characters and old characters coming together to create a new, exciting cast.
đąChilling mysteries and good old fashioned horror
đŤThe opportunity to determine your choices from previous gamesâand have them affect the present. Who lived and who died matters, and who you romanced matters.
đłBranching paths and meaningful choices. Your choices determine Rowanâs personality, motivations, relationships, romance, nerve, success in collecting artifacts and lore documents, who lives and who dies, how the climax plays out, the ending you receive⌠so choose wisely đ
đłCONSEQUENCES! Want to romance two people at the same time? Do so at your own riskâbecause jealousy is alive and well and Abel might not like it if you declare your affection for him and hook up with Lincoln the following dayâŚ
đśOptional mature scenes and heavy topics
đľOriginal music and ambience alongside some old familiar tunes.
đťHaunting CGs and animations, around 10 total
đ 23 chapters, around 800,000 words, while individual play throughs will have closer to a third of the total projected word count.
đťMade with RenâPy, uploaded to itch.io. Playable online or easily downloadable on the computer for best playing experience.
In-depth discussion:
When this project started, one of our main goals was to create a book where you actually feel like your choices matter and that your choices determine where the story goes. We also wanted there to not be ârightâ or âwrongâ answers; different choices have both pros and cons. As part of that, something that was really important to me was the concept of replayability. We want It Lives Within to be the type of game that youâre excited to restart and play differently. In my experience, when I replay most Choices games I always play as the same MC and romance the same person and make the same choices. The reason is that besides choosing your LI, your choices donât impact much. I always feel like Iâm the same person in each playthrough, and so it feels weird to romance someone else. Even if your choices do impact things besides love interest, thereâs generally a right or wrong answer, a good or bad ending.
New pronoun options for Devon and Harper đĽ You can also specify if they are transgender, and pair any body type with any of these pronouns.
The reason I hadn't done it before was because of conjugations, but thanks to a suffix tagging system, I was able to do it efficiently and went through the entire game today, matching every subject pronoun for Harper and Devon with the correct verb conjugation â¤ď¸
I also just finished adding a genderfluid option for all three MCs! If you choose your pronouns as "fluid" at the beginning, you will be able to change your MC's pronouns at any time throughout the game using a pronouns tab in the closet.
New pronoun options for Devon and Harper đĽ You can also specify if they are transgender, and pair any body type with any of these pronouns.
The reason I hadn't done it before was because of conjugations, but thanks to a suffix tagging system, I was able to do it efficiently and went through the entire game today, matching every subject pronoun for Harper and Devon with the correct verb conjugation â¤ď¸
i havenât played ilw in years after finishing all the endings, but itâs always stuck in my mind. your ask box is probably flooding with so many messages showing love and support (rightfully so!) but i wanted to say my own piece because it wouldnât feel right if i didnât. the it lives series was one of my most beloved stories on choices before the entire app and company went straight down to hell, and what you did with it lives withinânot only giving fans the closure we never got from pixelberry, but also creating a whole new unique story that has stuck with me even years afterâshows how even with the development of ai, the voices and work of real artists like you guys will never be erased. weâll always be here cheering you on !!! thanks so much for all your passion and your love for this project and the stories you tell
Hi!! I wanna thank you so much for sharing the game engine code. I'm a (sort of inexperienced) dev who's been playing choices for nearly ten years and I've been looking for a way to preserve my favorite books. I'm trying to follow the tutorial and it's certainly a learning curve but I'm determined to make it work. Again, thank you!! And I hope you have a lovely day!
I'm happy to know people are using it and following the tutorial!!
I hope it's easy enough to follow. I tried to highlight the most important mechanics - character creator, variables, menus, jumps. All the hard work of formatting/UI has been done, so it shouldn't be too difficult to get it all working. I remember when I created my first demo using ren'py... it was so janky. even legacy is not nearly as smooth as the current engine setup. how far we've come đĽş
Cant wait to play obsidian cut!!!! Thank you guys for all the hardwork you guys are doing!! Lot of loveeâ¤ď¸â¤ď¸â¤ď¸â¤ď¸â¤ď¸â¤ď¸â¤ď¸ and you guys are way better than people who use AI in everything..đđšâ¨ď¸
thank you so much!! 𫶠even if it takes a second for me to respond to everything, comments like this mean so much and are what keep us going.
Itâs kind of disappointing to me that to this day there is no actual alternative to Choices that doesnât use AI. I know Candlelight Gamesâ love & magic was a popular game because it was coming from previous Pixelberry writers, but I feel like there are also signs of AI useage in their game as well.
Unfortunately, it seems like AI is becoming particularly present in the games industry. The place you're most likely to find non-AI games is probably in the Indie games space, but even then a lot of people in that space will probably use AI to get cheaper assets. People used to have to find free assets packs or pay for asset art in VNs, if they couldn't produce it on their own, but I can guess that a lot of people these days will use AI for it :/
I also know that all the owners/shareholders of basically any company have AI requirements for their businesses to make sure people are "keeping up with technology"
It sucks, but it just makes it all the more important to seek out true human creators and support them!!
A couple days ago, I made a post addressing Pixelberry/Series Entertainment's "It Lives Within." At the time, I wasn't aware of the story, I only knew that the name was the same. Since then, I saw many people accusing it of plagiarizing our game. I decided to look into it more, and after having watched all the episodes on YouTube, the claims of plagiarism unfortunately seem to be valid. As such, I'd like to further address this situation, and provide a list of stolen ideas and art with screenshot proofs and explanations.
A few years ago, I had a video call with one of the original writers for the It Lives Series. He no longer works for Pixelberry, and did not work with them at the time of the video call. Though I knew nothing about their original plans for the game before starting this project (including that they also intended to name the game "It Lives Within"), he told me their plans on that call. It was going to be a survivor-type cave crawl story with giant bug-inspired and creepy crawler monster enemies, where you play as a new character who is attacked by these creatures while camping and separated from their friends. From my understanding, Connor and his crew would be sort of like Sam and Dean from SPN, acting as these experienced "hunters" who help protect them.
That is not what the story of what Choices "It Lives Within" was. At all.
This means that the AI """writers""" at Series Entertainment/PB were not creating this story based on the original writersâ plans. They made their story idea later - after ILW was completed in its entirety. Therefore, it's reasonable to follow that unlike the title, these similarities are not coincidence. Though even then, the title It Lives Within had to do with the cave setting and going literally into the earth, while the AI version has nothing to do with caves. So the reasoning for the title is not the same as the reasoning for their original title.
With all this in mind, letâs go over the similarities between our game and the Choices It Lives Within AI show. I am going to be putting it beneath a read more, in case there are people who are interested in playing ILW and donât want to get it spoiled.
Major things they stole:
Their villain, Silas, is Matthias. Literally, that's it. He's Matthias.
Silas is an immortal man who's been alive for almost 200 years and was a member of the Westchester cult, where he knew Cora. Matthias is an immortal man who's been alive 200+ years and was a member of the Westchester cult, where he knew Cora. Silas wants to sacrifice redfield Noah due to his connection to the Power as part of a complicated ritual he's put together in order to... I'm not quite sure what, exactly, as the story was a bit hard to follow. Matthias wants to sacrifice Rowan, due to their connection to the Power, as part of a complicated ritual he's put together in order to gain more power and freedom and heal the corrupted Power. Silas thinks heâs all manipulative and the main crew states that "Heâs getting us to do his work for him!â Matthias thinks he's all manipulative, and gloats about being a "puppet master" and getting people to do his work for him.
And then there's his appearance. That's literally the same hairstyle - even has the part on the same side and the same curly swoops. He's the same age. Same race. Literally, just like Connor in their story is a recognizable AI-version of his in-game sprite, that's what Silas looks like to Matthias. All he's missing is the beard.
The gang's base of operations is Coraâs cabin
This one is interesting. It's such a tiny detail, and I'd grown so used to the cabin being their safe place that when Connor was like "We need to get back to the cabin" it literally took me a moment to realize - wait. They had nothing to do with that cabin in the original series. Using that as a home base was literally our idea, an It Lives Within original.
The main enemies are mind controlled townspeople working for Silas
Instead of following the precedent of the previous games and having the enemies be Power-twisted animal monsters, they decided to make their enemies humans that are mind-controlled into zombie-like beings with that attack the gang in hordes. This is a rip-off of It Lives Within's horrors, which are power-corrupted townsfolk that Matthias takes advantage of to oppose the main crew. And on top of that, they copied the carnival scene where Harper drives through a horde of horrors, including a scene where Devon drives through a horde of mind-controlled/zombified townsfolk.
Noah and Devon's relationship
Their relationship in this '"TV show" has suspicious similarities to their friendship/romance routes in ILW. They made Devon be redfield Noah's anchor to reality, and even had Devon use memories to help ground Noah, which we showed in the cabin scene where Devon and Noah play baseball together. And I know there were Noah x Devon shippers outside of me before ILW released, but it was never PB's plan to canonize them. So the fact that they are seemingly changing course to canonize them after they grew so popular in the fan version feels a bit too coincidental.
Scraping fan art for their AI animation frames
But what's even more egregious is that they have even stooped to scraping from fan artists, who have nowhere near the same following or exposure as our project does. Seriously, what are the odds that the MC they choose to use matches this artist's MC's race, gender, hair, and outfit exactly, that they used Noah's old outfit, that they are literally positioned on the same sides of the image? It's blatant plagiarism, and it's despicable. @errajay I'm so sorry they did this.
These are the biggest similarities, but considering that it was only like 15 minutes of content, that means that a high percentage of the story was stolen. Sure, the exact details of "Silas's" plan are different (he's like a horcrux for the "entity" aka power and he was split into 43 parts and Noah's one of his parts and he needs to kill him to get it back and be free or something) it's the same concept: immortal man who's trapped making a complicated ritual requiring sacrifice while manipulating people to get everything into place.
If you want to see for yourselves, please find it on YouTube. Do not support them with clicks or traffic on their app. Thank you! Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering, no AI was used in the drafting of this post đ
Finishing up re-reading the first two It Lives books since I hadn't read them in awhile and it reminded me how excited I am for Obsidian Edition! Thank you for all your hard work, I can't wait for the release!
Thank you!! I canât wait to release it either đ itâll be a good day.
Voltage is apparently going after Lovestruck fan projects and taking them down, now that they are releasing their old content on Steam, so hopefully PB doesn't follow suit.
I wouldnât worry. Firstly, we have this in writing about ILW:
Secondly, ILW is an original story. The Lovestruck fan games are recreations of the originals that people could technically play for free instead of playing the steam games, so it could take revenue from the company.
It is SO frustrating to hear about the AI slop version omg. I will wait a hundred years for more IL content but NOT like thisđ Only from you guysđ
Agreed, but at least we have ILW. Can you imagine how it would've felt if we didn't have It Lives Within?? OH i would've been so pissed lol
Just in case you needed to see this, I refuse to touch the ai slop PB insists on churning out and will wait forever and a day for the obsidian cut đ¤
wait WHAT have they literally ripped off your entire game - characters and everything?!?!
It's hard to know exactly.
I know that the title they planned for It Lives 3 was actually It Lives Within before we announced our game.
However, the villain looks a lot like beta AI Matthias, and he apparently mind controls a ton of people to walk into a lake or something? So... who knows? Thankfully we don't have AI Abel, Linc, or Lia though.
Even if they were planning to name it It Lives Within, though, they knew about our game, and they knew how popular. If they searched It Lives Within, it would come up with our game. So either way it's in poor taste imo.
