Orphan Development Blog

An Otome dating game in progress about social anxiety, addiction and vampires.

[orphangameblog]

20 July 2014

Micah's first ending is finished! 

This is a really big landmark. One ending down, 20 more to go until the game's writing is totally completed! This means I should hopefully be able to start on Drabek soon, which will be great because I've been really looking forward to that. 

Also really, really excited to announce that Lucy Morris has been working with us to bring us some really great artwork. Super excited about it and I can't wait until we have some stuff we can share. 

[orphangameblog]

29 May 2014

Notes on Micah:

All of the introduction section is finished and Micah's arc is currently under development! I'm also working on Drabek here and there as it comes to me, but I'm trying to focus on my vegan boy for now. The above image is what you'll (possibly) find in game when you enter his story line. Micah is fun to write. While I wouldn't say he's my favorite character, he's definitely the pillar of this entire game. Micah has a bit of a savior complex. He feels he's wronged the world somehow so he's obsessed on paying it back by rescuing people, but it's to the point where he doesn't realize he sometimes hurts people in doing so. He can be pretty controlling, even though he means well, and while he has the best intentions, sometimes he can forget to listen.

The really important thing I think about Micah is allowing the players to have a choice in how they receive his behavior. Some people prefer to be rescued, and that's okay. The notion of being swept of your feet and saved from trouble can be romantic for some. But some people (myself included, admittedly,) aren't comfortable with trading in that rescuing in exchange for being listened to. We'd talk back. We'd argue. We'd want to be able to flex our own agency and we'd feel a little suffocated by Micah's need to be a 'hero.' That's something I want to give players a chance to do as well.

Micah is broody, but he's not depressive. He gets angry instead. Sometimes, you'll get to call him out on that, especially if he scares you. His anger conflicts a lot with his savior complex and that's something he struggles with.

Micah's arc is also very focused on addiction. Both of you are fighting off a biological desire to feed and kill. You're fighting off your nature. Things get tense quickly, especially when there's added stress. This is probably why Micah has such a short fuse, because he's always strung out.

New demo will hopefully come soon. I've had some time off due to illness and my birthday. I also scored an extra job so my time is even more limited, but we're getting there.

[orphangameblog]

14 May 2014

New Demo!

Make your first kill, meet Drabek and Hattie! Lots of new choices and lots of choice-specific dialogue. Only Lauren and Van to go before the individual pathways open up. DEMO IS HERE

[orphangameblog]

24 April 2014

So I've been slamming it out today. I've dedicated my day to transferring Orphan from the four or five chapters of a book it started as into Twine.

That sounds all good and well, given they're both text-based formats, but the format of a book is very different to the format of an otome game. Why? 

Dialogue.

"Have you ever killed anyone?"

Has to become

Mina: 『Have you ever killed anyone?』

It's a lot of copy-pasting and it's tedious to do. First you have to copy and past the original paragraph. Then you have to copy and paste the formatted name and kakko (『』). Then take the dialogue and copy and past that into the kakko. Repeat. Over and over again. 

This is also how my Twine screen looks right now:

That's a lot of 'pages' and I'm not even out of the intro yet. Twine has an issue where after enough pages, whenever you create a new one, instead of them popping up where you click 'new passage here,' they'll just pop up wherever on the story map they feel like. That could be nearby, it could be at the bottom of the page. 

I have no idea why Twine does this or how to fix this. The only solution I've found before is to cut your losses after a while and start putting your game into parts or chapters. Which is fine, but the goal of Orphan is to have it all in one game. 

Hopefully someone can help me fix this or I'll figure it out soon. If not that, maybe I can come up with a way to code it in 'parts' and then stitch the parts all together at the end for ease of development. I don't know. Anyway, new alpha is up. The new part doesn't have any images yet so if you want a fuller experience I'd wait until the next release, but I figured I'd release it at this stage to help give some background.

[orphangameblog]

22 April 2014

Oh. First post. Uh.

I sat down today to write out at least another chapter of this but ended up wasting a day on this blog instead. Fuck.

Take a look around! The pages should be working. They're all good on my end, anyway. All the main character bios are ready as is the short plot synopsis. Yay!