Diligently working on a visual novel game centered on vampires in the eternal city of Venice! It is called ‘Venèxia – Death of the Republic’ as it particularly centers around the final century of the Republic before its demise (18th century).
Unfortunately while the week before was pretty productive in terms of writing, I experienced a lot of writer’s block this week when it came to finishing up a few stories. It took me too long to figure out that I am better off discarding some story ideas and continuing elsewhere when I notice that the logic does not work out, but eventually I did just that and made a bit more progress.
Current Status: Very much work in progress
Word count: 40k (+5k last week)
Released: No
Demo: No
More details below…
Stories of Ghosts
One big inspiration I came upon this week is the book “Venetian Legends and Ghost Stories” by Alberto Toso Fei. This book is really such a rich resource on some of the more unorthodox legends of the immortal city of Venice.
I actually ordered a few more books already on the topic (even though I already had a fair number due long-time interest in the city’s history). I am sure they will serve me well in inspiration. I will serve up and incorporate a fair number of these stories into the game in order to serve as chance encounters with the supernatural, as flavor pieces or as inspiration for expanded story arcs.
Road to a Demo
My next Goal is to reach my milestone “0.1.0″, that is the very first release of the game. I am not quite sure about how I will be releasing it yet, but I would imagine it will be a continuously updated project as the sandbox-y nature of the project does not really lend itself to a process where everything is first developed and then released unless I want to draw this project out for years.
I have a list of things I really want in the demo (”must have”) and a few items I would really like to have in there (”nice to have”) and I will focus all my work on finishing these stories up. There are, however, also a lot of engine-related things I actually will need to implement, not the least of which is a save game / load game functionality, which until now I actually do not have yet. 😅
Division of the Stories
The game is supposed to be a sandbox for the most part, but it features essentially four groupings of stories, which each contain multiple story arcs, with individual stories inside of those arcs. That is, think of arcs as related stories that form a strong narrative stand and the groupings as thematically related stories. Of course even seemingly unrelated stories may interfere with each other as well (making it all the more complicated).
The four groupings right now are:
Pax Venetiae (Theme: Business)
Signori della Notte (Theme: Power)
Scuole Grandi (Theme: Knowledge)
Spettacoli Cittadin (Theme: Social)
Right now the plan is that the first release will cover one story arc from the first two groupings, that is Pax Venetiae and Signori della Notte. In addition it will feature the obviously required intro story arc, which covers Lucrezia’s transition into the Società Nostra of the Sangui and a variety of smaller stories (as many as I can justify) that are not related to these groupings (Hunting, Ghost Stories, ...).
In the future this will hopefully be also further expanded upon to cover more different themes, but those four groupings and some of the arcs and achievable goals within them I have already mapped out, so they will be my initial focus going forward.
I am still working on a visual novel game centered on vampires in the eternal city of Venice! It is called ‘Venèxia – Death of the Republic’ as it particularly centers around the final century of the Republic before its demise (18th century).
Last week I definitely did mostly a lot of working on the writing department, because that is certainly an unlimited time sink. There is just so much that needs to be done and I am only talking about first drafts here with little to no editing or revision yet...
Current Status: Very much work in progress
Word count: 35k (+9k last week)
Released: No
Demo: No
I certainly have a lot more respect for authors cramming out high word counts each day than before now. Even with a fair bit of structure in mind and character prep to know roughly how characters react and say things, this is just so much more work than ever anticipated!
I would guess that Version 0.1.0 (which would be the first version I consider for a small release somewhere) would cover around 60k words given the current progress in compared how much I allocated to that milestone. And 0.1.0 is only a small portion of what I would like to see for the whole game...
Luckily my story arcs and threads are modular (more at a later dev log!), so even partial implementations will provide an awesome story experience. You can think of this game more of as a sandbox with a variety of interlocking stories, than one primary story.
More details below...
Story Files
One of the most important features I am constantly working and expanding upon is the story files of the game. The way it works right now is that all game files are provided in a modular package system, which can be easily expanded (and allows for stuff like DLC or modding). Inside those packages we find story files, which are provided in YAML-Format, which is easy enough to edit with a good text editor.
The story files define how a story works and what is happening on the screen. They allow the author to manipulate game state, and react depending on that state and so on... It is a fairly flexible system that I am sure to expand upon further. Until now, however, it has been proven to be very useful in development. Text files are easy to edit and the engine allows easy debugging by quickly jumping directly to a specific story while writing to test them out.
Procedural Content
Some content, as you might imagine will be fairly repetitive. For this vampire based game in particular, feeding on mortals is a recurring activity which happens quite a lot. As such, the scripting also allows for procedurally generating scenes based on pre-defined stubs.
This is particularly important in regards to how feeding is handled narratively. As a Sangue (vampire) feeds upon their victim, they absorb some of the victim’s memories (both good and bad). For this it is particularly important to have a wide range of variety in what exactly can be seen by the player without it being stale or boring.
Furthermore the actual story format will allow stories to hook into this system to be triggered at some point during feeding. It might therefore be possible to write a story which is randomly injected somewhere as a feeding scene and then spins off into its very own larger adventure. I am actually very excited to experiment with this in the future.
More?
Feel free to checkout the previous post for some more features and screens: Dev Log (2020-05-19)
Currently working on a visual novel game centered on vampires in the eternal city of Venice! It is called ‘Venèxia – Death of the Republic’ as it particularly centers around the final century of the Republic before its demise (18th century).
You may play as a young female Sangue (Vampire) who has been transitioned into this world of schemes and intrigue that surrounds the city and tries to stay alive while forging her own path.
Current Status: Very much work in progress
Word count: 26k
Released: No
Demo: No
More details below...
Art Style
Nothing here is completely finalized yet, mostly based around Public Domain Image Resources that roughly convey the feeling of the historicity of the world. Will be iterated on in future iterations and will feature a lot more visual effects, animations etc.
Map Screen
One of the central hubs of the game is actually the map screen, where the player has an overview over all available current obligations. Stories can pull the player into multiple areas of the city over time and require them to coordinate with a multitude of characters.
Choice Selection
This is absolutely not a kinetic novel, so it will feature a variety of different choices when talking to characters and likewise feature a variety of different approaches to problems as part of the narrative depending on the player’s preference.
For me this was a very important choice, because despite the fact that the game will, at least initially, not feature a completely customizable character for the player (as that makes it hard to convey relationships), it is important for me that the player is given as much control over the narrative experience as can be reasonably allowed.
This likely will result in fail states or mutually exclusive experiences down the line, but I think the medium of text allows to relatively cheaply produce a lot of choices such that a player can feel more involved in their journey.
Story
At this point there is not too much about the story I am able to say, as I am ironing out a lot of the edge cases while writing it. Right now the primary focus was for me was just one initial path (of five) of the first parallel story arc (of four), so the current state of the game likely represents only about 5% of the already planned scope and it is not even nearly completed in such a way that it is presentable.
All I can say that there are a number of larger and minor sub plots that can emerge and can be explored at the player’s leisure.
