I'm really glad that I stumbled upon this game, it's so well written and I just love Castoria! I'm really excited to see how the next episodes go too! Keep up the amazing work! I'm cheering you on!
I'm glad you think so :3 Thanks for the support! It's much appreciated. With any luck, I'll be able to manage to get another episode out before the end of the year.
That's great it comes across that way! I'm glad you think it does :3 I still have a fair bit of work to do on the UI, especially with making it adapt better to other resolutions because right now, it just refuses to do that and I don't really know why because I'm not very clued up on how to get the codey stuff behind it functioning the way I want it to >.< But I'll most likely be keeping the current look with a few additional tweaks here and there.
I'm not an artist so I find it super hard to design UI that I'm actually happy with x3 This one is probably the one I've put the most effort into so far though and it's growing on me!
I'm glad you think so :3 Right now I don't have any plans for subs just because I'm going through a lot of crappy personal stuff and I don't have much time and energy to spend on my projects in general, so any work I do get done will be towards making new content. However, at some point in the future, I would absolutely love to have the game available with subs in as many languages as possible :D
I'm glad you found it to be your cup of tea :D With any luck, I'll manage to get at least one more episode out before the end of this year (I'm hoping 2-3 more, but that might be pushing it!) I'm going through a pretty rough patch at the moment, so it's difficult to really put a timescale on things, but yeah, hopefully, it won't be too long before I can put something out :3 Thanks so much for your comment!
This game is amazing the art style is amazing and this game actually has very good voice acting which is very cool.This game clearly shows the amount of passion that went into this game. It even has nice Easter eggs like when Castoria's 'i' first had a diamond as a dot then when you progress you either get a skull or a spiral depending on your choice which is very cool. Please keep up with these amazing idea and I have no doubt this game will blow up in popularity so for me this game is a 5/5 as of right now. Keep up the good work
I'm glad you like it :3 The UI still needs a lot of work so it's probably gonna be several updates before I get the final look nailed down, but I'll get there in the end, haha. I just hope that as I eventually get each update out, it will manage to stay fun :D
Luckily this was cheap, because this just wasn't for me. A big thing was the ambiguousness of the descriptions. I don't enjoy playing as female characters, so lacking description kills part of the fun for me.
Thanks for your honesty and feedback :3 It helps with the game's future development.
I know what you mean because I can't get into games as much if the only option for me is to play as a male character. It just sorta kills the immersion. This small taster was made for a game jam though, so I didn't really have time to do much in terms of giving players pronoun choices and writing multiple versions of scenes. I figured the easiest way to go for maximum self-insertability within the jam timeframe was to leave MC without a specified gender and allow players to make MC whoever they wanted MC to be.
The game is still in development anyhow :3 I've not yet settled on whether to keep with things being ambiguous, or add pronoun choices and varying versions of certain scenes that do reference different genders.
Saw your game via YouTube's ManlyBadassHero. I'm buying the Full Version plus an extra 2 dollars, because Manly didn't risk showing the 'suggestive' parts on YouTube and for support in hopes you succeed with this project. I'd give more but i just don't make enough to give more sadly. I like what I saw so far, I'll be trying both male and female routes, looks great~<3
Edit: Okay I see why that part wasn't shown on YouTube, still for the sake of clarification, I sorta realized after the fact I may have implied something with how I worded this post, and I didn't mean anything suggestive by my wording. I simply wanted to see the whole thing, and now that I have, I gotta say, I can't wait to see where this goes!
More than willing to pay a couple dollars (or more) per update or however its done! Might even be willing to pay a couple dollars a month depending how I'm doing money wise if there is a thing for that! Let me know if there is anything like that? This looks promising~! <3
Ahh, yeah, I saw that in his vid, haha. It's really not all that suggestive, but I totally get why he wouldn't wanna risk it x3
Thank you very much for the support :3 Don't worry about it anyhow because any amount really helps me a lot in bringing the game to life! It might take a while since I'm working on it alone, but I'll get there in the end :D With any luck, by the time I eventually finish it completely, there should be a hell of a lot of content. And thanks to everyone's combined support so far, at least 1 more episode will get to be fully voiced, which is incredible. I never expected to receive that kind of support in a million years :3
So yeah, thank you very much for supporting the game and taking the time to leave a comment ^-^
I'm so glad that you enjoyed it :D Thanks so much for your support! I'm hoping to add much, much more content to DD for Castor & Castoria, but I also have plans to add quite a few more characters to the game as well :3
Provided I can get my game jam head on when the time comes, I'll be attempting to create something during September for Spooktober VN jam which will be a free release at the end of September!
I can't thank you enough for your kind words in comments and ratings/reviews :3 I got a really angry 1* review on Apartment No.9 today that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. As though the person writing it had neglected to read about the game on the page before playing it, and also somehow managed to miss the fact that I personally suffer with mental health problems. It's so easy for one person's negativity to sort of knock you back when you already have very little confidence in yourself, so it means the world to me when I read the lovely things that anyone has written. It helps to lift my spirits immensely. So again, thank you ^-^
Holy shit, the game seems incredibly polished and professional, especially with the voice acting in addition to other minor details, such as the skull/spiral appearing on the I in Castoria's name or her very accurate facial expressions.
That the game will be updated with some more content too is great news indeed - and I have no doubt I'll enjoy watching Lets Plays of this game on YouTube.
I'm sad I didn't find this sooner when it was released to get the free version. I would love to support this game, however, I have no money :/
That's awesome to hear that you think so :D It's the first thing I made when I switched to using Naninovel in Unity instead of Tyranobuilder, so I'm still sorta learning the ropes as I go. The UI still needs a lot of work overall, but it'll get there eventually, haha. Thanks to the support I've had so far, it looks like at least one more episode will be able to be fully voiced :3
You can still have a key for the game if you want to drop me an email to melancholicmarionette@gmail.com
I just can't refill the community copies anymore is all.
Thank you for the luck and kind words, I will certainly need it with all that I have planned for the game :3
Thanks so much for playing through all of those and supporting my projects :D And for taking the time to leave a comment too :3 Much appreciated! I'm really glad you had fun with them. I sure had a lot of fun making them, and yeah, that glitch scene took me quite a while to put together x3 Editing the audio from the voice actors alone took a few days, haha. It was super fun to create though!
I hope I can remake SR someday because there's a lot about it that I'm not too happy with (including large chunks of my early writing, haha) + content that I'd love to add in order to flesh out the game a bit more. I need to finish the BxG version before I remake the otome one though, haha. And work on DD too :3
I found this game from playthroughs on youtube and loved it so I had to buy it for myself! I have to ask simply out of curiosity though: Was this series inspired by Period Cube: Shackles of Amadeus or Dot Kareshi: We're 8bit Lovers? They're both otome games set in video game settings.
In Period Cube out of all the LIs there's an NPC that becomes sentient and turns out to be a yandere! With Dot Kareshi, all the LIs are NPCs turned sentient <3 I only ask this because of my love for those series and this game and I saw some similarities. I can't wait to support more of your work in the future!
Woo :D Well, thanks so much for taking the time to leave a comment + for your support :3 It's very much appreciated!
The main inspiration for the game as a whole came from a mixture of my love for yandere characters in general + some Japanese drama CDs that I've listened to in the past where they have a white side and a black side to the CD. The white side contains the character speaking to you in sweet scenarios and is full of fluff, whereas the black side is where things tend to get a little bit psycho x3 I really wanted to try my hand at making my own series of characters who each have a white side and a black side, haha. Which is where the sweet & sinister bit comes from.
As for Castor & Castoria specifically, the biggest inspiration between them was the track that I use in Winter Wish when creepy shenanigans are about to happen, haha. I bought a music pack to use in my projects in general, and the moment I heard that track, it just sparked a character and story in my head. I decided to call the track “Glitch in the System” for the purpose of the game, but I'm not sure what the original Japanese name of the track translates to because the Japanese language pack on my PC broke at the time and just displayed nonsense characters >.< I'll have to go look at some point though!
However, I do love both Period Cube + Dot Kareshi! Heck, I'd go as far as to say that the Dot Kareshi series might be one of my favourite otome games of all time even though it's pretty casual in terms of story :D So, it's entirely possible that either or both of those games influenced me subconsciously, haha. I also did a 'gamer' route in my first game (Solipsism Reigns) and that route was inspired by stuff like .hack and SAO, so I wanted to expand on that a little, but instead of making it about an MMO to have it be about a visual novel :3
Thank you again for the support :3 I'm very excited to bring more of Castor & Castoria's story to life as well as introduce some of the other characters that I have planned for the future of DD ^-^
I'm glad you like the look of it :D I can send you a download key if you let me know where to contact you. Or you can just drop me a message: melancholicmarionette@gmail.com
It's more like a donation to help fund the rest of the project than a purchase because there's lots more content to come, but hiring voice actors and such is very expensive, so that's why it didn't stay free after the new year :3
I think I typed the name in right and managed to find you on twitter, but it shows as you having dms switched off x3 I'm still very new to how twitter works, haha. I guess I can just tweet it to you. Let me know if you got it okay cos I guess it's possible for anyone who happens to see the tweet to use the key if they want to, haha.
Hello, I am a Mac user and I've been experiencing problems with the game. It is not an opening problem, the game opens fine. Instead, the game seems to freeze completely before the title screen even comes up, leaving me with only a blank gray screen. The loading symbol does show up, but it's only there for a second before it disappears. I really don't know what issue the game or my computer is having, since this is honestly the first time this has ever happened. Usually the only problems I experience with Mac is the opening part, but it's opening fine so I'm just so confused. :(
I did take a look at your Mac helping post, but that mostly mentioned just opening the game and not a problem like this sooo....if there's anyone that can help, much appreciated!
Hey hey. Really sorry to hear that you're having that problem with the Mac version. If you have a look at the most recent comment on the thread about getting the game to open on Mac, it seems as though that person is having the same issue. I responded to them a little earlier with something to try, but I don't think it's going to work. Still, feel free to read through my reply there to the person with the username 'Catherine' because I've gone into more detail there.
Since both of you have managed to get the game to launch, it seems to be a problem with Naninovel rather than with Unity. Likely a Nani initialisation issue. I browsed the Nani support channel on Discord to see if any other devs have encountered this problem with Mac builds. I found a few people mentioning it. One was back in 2020, and another was in February this year. However, I could not see any solution posted >.< I have sent a private message to one of the devs who was asking about the issue and how to fix it to see if I can try and find out from them if they ever managed to fix the problem for their game. I have no idea if they will reply to me or not though.
I can also try asking in support myself to see if I get a response from the software dev or any other users who may have run into the issue.
I wish I had a Mac myself so that I could test stuff easier, but without one, it makes it really hard to try and fix any issues that arise with Mac. I don't understand why on earth Macs are so dodgy for getting stuff to run on them >.< It seems like any Mac build I make on Unity only has a 50/50 chance of working.
What version of MacOS are you using? Catherine said they're using Mojave 10.14.6. I just thought I'd ask because if I post in support, the software dev might need to know in order to try and help figure out what the problem is.
Anyways, if it looks like it's not going to be possible to fix, please don't hesitate to contact itch for a refund. If too many people are having this problem and no one can help me to figure out how to fix it, I might just have to scrap the Mac version entirely :(
Sorry for the trouble and I hope you have a good weekend despite this :3
Thank you so much for working so hard to get the problem solved! I'm happy to know it's not a problem with my computer at least. I'm probably not going to ask for a refund, just think of it as a donation for such a cool looking game. My MacOS is Big Sur 11.2.2
Funny name right? Anyways hope you have a good weekend too!
No worries :3 I would really love to get to the bottom of this cos as a dev, it's super frustrating to put so much hard work into a game only to find that some people can't actually play it because of technical problems >.< haha. I really thought that switching from Tyranobuilder to Naninovel would solve all the issues I was having in the past with getting Mac builds to work consistently, but it seems not T_T
Well, thank you very much for supporting the game :3 I really appreciate it a lot! And thanks for that info as well. I will make sure to include it when I make my support request. It is a pretty funny name, yeah x3
Also, I don't know if you saw my second reply to Catherine, but I'll ask you if you could try the same thing as well. Would you be able to download the DD music box for Mac and see if that has the same problem? I only ask this to both of you because it seems like this is a Naninovel problem, and the music box was made in the most recent version of Nani from 2021. Whereas DD Winter Wish was made in an older 2020 build of Nani. I was just wondering if maybe it's a problem with the older version of Nani that has since been fixed by the software dev.
If the same issue still happens with the music box though, then that's extra information I can add to my support request. That the version of Nani hasn't made a difference.
However, if by some miracle the music box does work, it means I can get Winter Wish working by updating the version of Nani that it's currently on! That may take a while though because I've heard that updating Nani to a new version can cause your custom UI to mess up so you have to make it all over again >.<
I've got to go help my dad with some stuff now so I'm not sure when I'll next be able to check back for any responses from you, but I will definitely be able to check sometime before the end of the day.
Hey! Sorry to ping you again with another reply >.< I just wanted to let you know in case you hadn't seen, that Catherine managed to get the game working on Mac. I'll copy/paste what was written so you can see if it works for you, but it's possible it might not because you two are using different versions of macOS I think. Fingers crossed though :3
Yes! It's working! I downloaded the black screen fix and the game opened fine and is running smoothly! I'm very excited, sorry for all the exclamation marks. And sorry again for the late response...I only have time on weekends >.<
Btw, I don't know what difference this makes but I now have the macos Catalina 10.15.7
Huzzah!! That is awesome news :D Phew! I'm so glad to hear that it worked in the end :3 No need to apologise anyhow x3 Thanks for letting me know!
Honestly, I have no idea if it makes any difference either, haha, but I will note it down for future reference because I'm sure there will be more struggles with mac in the future x3
I just finished Castor’s sweet route after getting free copy, thank you so much!
Castor is a sweetheart, I would love to see more of him... I’m still kinda scared to play sinister route though aha- I feel annoyed at the ‘MC’ sometimes for being mean but I feel called out too because sometimes there’s just that one character you don’t really like but gotta play to get all endings.. ahahahah please don’t became reality and kill me irl ^^”
On another note, gosh I feel genuinely scared of Castor like... especially the glitch scene, it was so creepy.... and my laptop turned off at that moment too so extra creepiness😳
Thank you so much for making this game, and your other games too that turns out I’ve played before hahah, you’re truly good at making yanderes. I’ll try my best to support you so that I can finally see the full game<3 Best of luck!
Awesome! I'm glad you had fun with it :D There's definitely more to come from Castor :3 More sweet, and more sinister, of course, haha. The sinister ending of this first episode isn't toooo bad, but it does kinda set up for the continuation of that path in his route, so things go even more downhill from there xD Neither ending is technically the final ending for his route though, just the sorta point at which you branch off in different directions with him. I figured that was a decent-ish place to leave it for the jam though with the deadline looming, haha. Otherwise, it would've likely cut off in a weird place if I tried to add more at the time.
Yeeeah, MC can be pretty abrasive x3 I did kinda want them to be a bit of a shit-stirrer for shenanigans purposes, but I do hope to add more conversation options as I expand the game in order to give better personality preferences and aligning responses when interacting with the characters. Now that you mention being called out though, I remember listening to a drama CD around the time I wrote this episode, and it was one that made me feel so called out I had to pause the audio and sit there with my face like this O.O It was regarding a completely different topic, but maybe it had a subconscious impact on my writing at the time, haha.
Oh, man, that's crazy that your laptop turned off during that glitch scene! If that were me I might have pooped myself T_T That is incredibly bad (or good, depending on how freaked out you like to be xD) timing!
Thank you so much for playing and taking the time to leave such a lovely comment :3 I'm glad you think so! I do love me some yandere goodness, haha. Thank you for your support <3 It means a lot ^-^
Aww, well I'm very honoured that you feel that way and glad it caught your eye :3
No need to apologise at all. It's not really all that clear on the page, so it's my fault >.< Thanks for your question!
I'm about to go on a long ramble, so if you want the TLDR version, scroll down to the bottom, haha.
Right now, the project is in a place where I don't even know what an acceptable price would be to charge for the game once it's eventually finished because I don't have experience with releasing commercial games. I kind of never imaged I would ever have the funding available to me to make something to commercial standards. What I do know going by my outlines, drafts, and the like, is that there will be quite a large amount of content by the time the entire thing is finished. Definitely more than $2 worth of content by a long shot.
If you do decide to get Winter Wish, it's more like a donation towards funding the development of the project than a purchase, but I don't think there's any way for me to show it as such here on itch >.< Because WW is quite short and essentially acts as the introductory episode to one character of many.
The biggest challenge in DD's overall development is that it's a project which is pretty reliant on voice acting. Without the VA, it wouldn't have the same flavour I don't think. But VA isn't cheap. For example, after speaking to my friend Anthony (the voice director for Winter Wish) he informed me that to get Castor & Castoria's next episode fully voiced will cost around $800. And me being unemployed means that the only way I can afford to pay the VAs is through supporters donating funds towards the project.
Right now, I'm quite unsure what the best way to proceed is because it's going to cost a lot of money to get each episode for each set of characters voiced. Which means probably asking for some form of money per episode. At the same time, I don't want to piss anyone off who has already donated towards the project >.< because I really appreciate the support and I don't want anyone to feel like their money is being wasted or anything like that.
The other option, of course, is attempting to run a Kickstarter at some point! However, I'm not really sure if enough people would back it when it requires quite a bit of funding. Especially not when the game isn't yet close to completion. So it's a tough situation really.
One of the main reasons I didn't keep working on DD after the jam is because I figured I would never be able to afford to expand it the way I'd like to in a million years because I don't have the money. So I kept it as a side project to work on and continued developing my main project (Clarity in Qualia.) Unfortunately, CiQ hit a brick wall in that I was hoping to run a KS for that in order to fund VA and a CG artist, but there was very little interest in the game when we posted character intro videos on YouTube and stuff. And it's a shame because that one is fully written and if I were to work on just that, I could have the game finished before the end of the year. But I don't know what to do with CiQ when it seems like there aren't many people interested in playing it. It seems as though it would make more sense to swap them around now and have DD as my main project.
I'm so sorry for rambling anyhow >.<
What I will say though, is that I hope to always be able to offer free copies of my stuff to anyone who can't afford to support with money because I have been in that position all my life and I know how much it sucks.
TLDR
The $2 for DD Winter Wish is more like a donation towards funding the full game than an actual purchase.
I don't know what the full price of the game will be once it's eventually completed, but anyone who has helped with funding will get a discount off of the full game based on what they donated. And hopefully, some sort of extra goodies as well because I'd like to be able to give some kind of extra thank you to those who have supported the development of the game :3
Character intro episodes will likely be released episodically for now based on what I can afford to pay VAs for their work. But if it gets to the point that a Kickstarter might be viable to complete the entire project, I may attempt that. If successful, I'll then just be able to work on completing the remainder of the game in one chunk.
I will always try to offer free copies of my games for those who cannot afford to support with money for whatever reason.
(I realise that getting funding from various methods could potentially end up quite messy when it comes to issuing discounts and rewards in the end, but I'm not sure how else to deal with funding development right now. I'm willing to go over all donations from all sources manually in order to make sure no one is left out come the full release of the project.)
That's really sweet of you :3 Thank you very much for the support! Every bit counts towards helping bring the full game to life, so I really appreciate it.
I hope you end up enjoying this little introduction to one of the characters in the world :3
Oh my god, it's the first time I've seen a game of this kind (that has a male and female yandere) I really love yanders, they scare me when they get angry but otherwise they are all cute :') (I would love to buy it but I have no money in bank accounts :'c. I'll wait until I grow up ;-;)
Woo! I'm a big fan of yanderes myself :D And there will be plenty more of them in DD, haha. Pretty much every character I add will have some degree of yandereness to them! If you have an email address, you can drop me a blank message to: melancholicmarionette@gmail.com if you like and I'll send you a key to download the current episode here on itch for free :3 I would just put a key here in the comment, but I don't know how quickly you will see my reply, and then someone could end up claiming it before you, haha.
thank you very much😭 I really appreciate it, when I have money, I will definitely buy your game, long live the yanderes!!!(❁'◡`❁) greetings from Spain.
I... am in love with Castor??? Rhineer did such a good job with his voice, and the sound editing to make it all glitchy? TERRIFYING. Ugh, and it was so well written! I genuinely felt unsafe when Castor was getting upset. I am so hyped to see the completed Darling Duality!
Also, I didn't realise it at the time, but I played the full ver. on the stream!!! I hope people enjoy me taking myself way too seriously and embarrassing myself! xD
Aww :3 He is quite the sweetheart, at least, sometimes x3 Yeah, Kevin absolutely smashed the role! And I had a hell of a lot of fun editing those lines for the glitchy section, haha. I was sat there with headphones on just chuckling maniacally to myself when I got something I was happy with xD
I'm glad you enjoyed it anyhow! I'm just as hyped to get the full version out there :3 It's a shame I can't clone myself or something because it's slow going on my own, haha. I'll get there in the end though!
That must have been a bit of a shock x3 but hilarious I imagine :P I will definitely make sure to check it out when I get a chance! Thank you for everything ^-^
Glad to hear it :D With any luck, I'll be able to afford to get the VAs back for Castor & Castoria's next episode + some other wonderful VAs for the rest of the cast :3 Not gonna lie though, VA is expensive >.< haha. So everyone's support makes a real difference in bringing the project to life because, by myself, I would never be able to afford to pay VAs for all their hard work and talent!
The full release will likely be a long way off because of how much I have planned, but I will hopefully be able to release some other character episodes individually while still developing the game as a whole.
I would definitely love to have it on both of those sometime in the future :3 With any luck, I should be able to eventually. None of my stuff is on Steam at the moment because the fee for adding a game there is just too steep for me to afford, unfortunately.
In the meantime though, I can give you a key if you want :3 Just drop me a message to: melancholicmarionette@gmail.com and I'll get one sent to ya!
You're welcome to have a key for it if you wanna drop me an email or something :3 I can't refill the community copies cos it seems to be broken at the moment >.< or maybe I just put too many in and can't do any more, I dunno.
But yeah, if you want a key just lemme know: melancholicmarionette@gmail.com
I am also a huge yandere fan :3 As if you couldn't have guessed that from my stuff, haha.
The game is really good! The art and the voice acting are also so beautiful! I'll wait for the continue of Castor story and for the other characters. Really a good work.
The voice acting music & everything is lovely. Thank you for creating this series. I hope it goes far. Also coming from manly play through.
The voice actor is amazing. The music realky makes you nostlagic of old vns in the past. The art/ fashion is really solid too. Are there behind the scenes or files mobile users can access?
I'm glad you like what you've seen so far! Thank YOU for checking it out :3
I do normally like to include behind the scenes stuff in my games such as bloopers, voice actors interviews, and other little extra bits here and there, but because this part was made for a game jam and the deadline was pretty tight, I didn't get a chance to build any sort of extras section. Once the full game is eventually released though, I hope to have an extras section filled with lots of different kinds of bonus content :D If possible, once the full game is ready, I would also like to release it on mobile as well as PC.
I will be releasing the first audio-only track this week, which you should be able to listen to on mobile since it will just be an audio file. I'm hoping to try and get 1 of the audio-only tracks for Castor/ia released per week while also working on writing for one of the other episodes :3
really loved playing through this game! I really wanna read through more of Castor/Castoria~!! TwT) Really cant wait if there are any updates for more scenarios of the two or the addition of more characters.
Woo! I'm happy you did :D Thank you very much for checking it out and commenting :3
Well, there's definitely more to come from Castor/ia! This is only their episode 1/introduction, so it's certainly not the last you'll be hearing from them ^-^ I think I will probably add the other intro episodes for the rest of the characters first before I start writing for everyone's episode 2 stuff though, just so that folks know what the full cast of characters is gonna look like :3
I can't say for sure exactly when the next character will be released, but I do already have drafts completed, so it'll be a matter of writing the ep in full, getting it voiced if I can, and then putting it all together. I'd like to think I could get at least 1 new character out before the end of autumn this year, quite possibly sooner!
I'm really glad that I found this game through Manly's playthrough of it (like so many others here, evidently, haha), because I really enjoyed pretty much every aspect of it! I think the game's presentation was, in all honesty, close to perfection. Your graphical style was really well-done; Castoria and Castor are drawn beautifully, and I also love how their expressions change as the text progresses. Castoria's voice actress fit the role perfectly, and while I haven't heard Castor's voice actor yet, I'm sure he did, as well. I found the game's writing and theming to be quite fascinating; personally, I think the subtle commentary on Castoria's free will (or lack thereof) in regards to love and being a visual novel character come to life was really neat. Overall, this seems like a great game, and I can't wait to play it! It's well-deserving of my $2 at the very least, and if you have a Patreon, I would most definitely be willing to support you. Keep up the great work!
Yeah, without Manly playing it, I'm pretty sure it would have remained largely unknown forever, haha. I'm so glad you enjoyed it :D Thank you very much for taking the time to play + comment. It's much appreciated!
I can't take much credit for the art as I cannot draw to save my life, sadly :( The sprites come from a sprite pack that I purchased in a sale from a Japanese artist. However, whenever I purchase sprites to use, I like to at least make them somewhat unique to my projects by altering the colours in GIMP if I can, so that they look as different from the originals as I can make them. The original versions have blonde hair, blue eyes, and their outfits are white and blue. I would love to be able to afford an artist someday to make some CGs for the game and maybe even someone who can mimic the art style or redraw in their style so that the sprites can have more poses!
The expressions took a lot of work, so I'm glad that was something that stood out :D The pack basically comes with the eyebrows, eyes, and mouths all separately, and along with the standard sorta mouth shapes, you also get A, E, I, O, U shape mouths to allow you to create quite a decent range of expressions. So I spent an awfully long time putting those together, and then even longer trying to get all the ones mid-sentence to match up with the voice acting, haha.
I'm very excited to get to writing the next episode for Castor/ia, but I think it might make more sense for me to release the introductory episodes for all the other characters first so that folks have an idea of the other characters on the roster :3 With enough support, I might be able to afford to have everyone voiced! So your support really makes a difference.
I do have a Patreon, but honestly, it's not very exciting x3 I've never had many Patrons on there, so I'm a little unsure what sort of content people would actually like to see me putting out as exclusive to Patrons! If everything goes smoothly with DD though, and I can actually afford to fund full voice acting, I might be able to add things on there like use of a person's name by a character of their choice, or exclusive Patron-only episodes.
Of course! I'm always glad to support any game developer I find who clearly is passionate about what they're making and creates good games, and you certainly fit that bill!
I see! My mistake about the art. I can certainly relate, as I'm much more of an author than an artist, myself. Regardless, though, the sprites and general artwork looked lovely, and the adjustments you made to the sprites fit the game very well.
Yeah, the expressions and how they changed as the text progressed really stood out to me! I'm kind of just used to characters in visual novels only having one expression per dialogue box, so seeing Castoria's often change as the text advanced definitely impressed me.
I'm really looking forward to seeing how the Castoriaverse (for that is what I have dubbed it) develops! Personally, I would be glad to support you on Patreon without any consideration of patron-exclusive content or anything, but I definitely get the reason why it's included. I'm certainly glad to provide whatever support I can--and while I'm on the subject of thanks, thank you, as well, for the in-depth response! As someone who has aspirations of creating my own video games in the future, seeing you describe your creative process in regards to making the game was enriching, and I wholeheartedly appreciate it. Your passion for what you do is apparent, and that's awesome! Keep up the great work; I know there'll be more in the future!
I'm glad that shines through cos if there's one thing I do have bucketloads of, it's passion for my projects xD
To be honest, I would love to be able to utilise Live 2D, but when I looked into that I just felt so out of my depth >.< Adding the mid-sentence expression changes was pretty much my answer to being too incompetent/lacking the resources to have Live 2D in the game :3 My brother said I was insane because, as you mentioned, he said that you generally only see expression changes with the start of the next bit text in VNs, but when I showed him the end result, he changed his tune because he said it makes it look kind of animated without actually being animated, haha. I'm not gonna lie though, it's an absolute nightmare to implement xD And it definitely doesn't work for anyone who wants to change the text print speed >.< I plan on keeping it up throughout the game though!
That's super sweet of you regarding Patreon :3 And I'm sorry if I rambled, haha. Sometimes I think I go a little too in-depth because I get so worked up about the stuff I'm passionate about that I type forever >.< aheh. That's awesome that you hope to make stuff too at some point though! You should definitely go for it when you feel ready :3 It may be challenging, but it's so much fun!
Thank you again for all the kind words and support :D
I think the fact that you already implemented the expression changes is impressive in its own right, and I would imagine that you'd only become more proficient in and capable of handling more complex processes like Live 2D as you develop more games. We all have to build up to somewhere, eh?
There's no need to apologize at all, as you definitely didn't ramble! Your enthusiasm for what you're doing really is quite heartwarming. Thank you for the kind words, as well! I definitely have several game ideas drifting around in my head, but I just need to get off my lazy butt and get to work! (Or maybe not, since I would still be sitting down while I work... the phrase is a bit ill-fitting for this particular scenario, but you get my point, haha.)
It's lightheartedly funny how this series of messages has generally consisted of us taking turns thanking the other person, I must admit. I won't contribute to it much more, I promise, as I fear I may be creating some sort of infinite gratitude time loop, but I would like to thank you for these brief interactions, as a whole. I already knew you were a good game developer before, but now I know that you're a good, kind person, as well. My apologies if that was awkward or anything of that sort; I just sort of thought you deserved to know that. I'll leave it here on my end, as I already feel like I've been rambling myself; keep doing what you're doing and making great games!
I guess you're right about becoming more proficient in other stuff as I develop more games :3 I often beat myself up for not being able to do what I want to, haha. But I do try to learn at least 1 new skill or trick with each game I make. There's always room for improvement :3
Hehe, yeah, I get your point :D I wish you much luck with bringing those ideas to life at some point! I have a bunch of ideas that kinda just get put on the back shelf because I need to make sure I'm finishing the stuff I've started before beginning too many side projects and such, haha. Game jams give me a bit of an excuse to revisit my jumble of ideas and actually turn them into something more solid. I think the next jam I attempt to make something for will be the Spooktober VN jam in September if it's going to be running this year! I missed it last year cos I didn't realise it was a September jam and not an October one >.<
I suppose we probably should stop before we get stuck in the loop forever xD I can't bring myself to not say one final thing back though because it feels wrong, haha. So I will send this and shush myself as well x3 You have my thanks for the interactions too as well as the general support :3 It's really nice to hear from anyone who's interested in the stuff I'm working on! Heck, it even gives me motivational boosts on days when I might be feeling down. I'll never be able to put into words just how much I appreciate the support for my stuff, and I'll continue to thank everyone for it until I kick the bucket, haha. There's only so much I can achieve on my own, and having help from folks who like what I'm trying to do really aids me in making everything better than I could make it without that help.
I didn't think it was awkward anyways, I thought it was really sweet :3 So thank you for saying so. I certainly try my best not to be an asshole in life, haha. You seem like a wonderful person yourself!
(One last thank you incoming for now xD) Thank you again for all your kind words :3 You keep on being awesome!
Like many others here, I found this game through Manly's playthrough and I'm really interested! I wanted to see Castor's version myself, but I'm having trouble on both Windows and Linux.
The game shows the "made with unity" screen and then turns black and just stays that way. On windows at least the menu music seems to play but on Linux it doesn't even do that. Clicking around gets no response, nor does waiting around to see if it will load up on its own eventually.
I'm glad you thought it looked interesting enough to want to check out Castor after seeing Manly's playthrough :3 For Linux, I'm gonna be zero help because I have no idea how the heck they work, unfortunately :( I don't even know anyone with Linux that I can ask to help me test those builds. I just use the default build settings on Unity and hope it works >.<
For Windows though, you're not the only person to experience that problem! Another user described the exact same thing happening to them.
Now, this is the first ever game I've made in Unity, and on the deadline night of the jam, I made my first ever build and encountered this very problem myself. After much panicking that I was gonna miss the submission deadline, I managed to figure out that it was the file type of the video on the title screen that caused the problem for me. I had a .ogv video playing. As soon as I changed it to.mp4, it was fixed on my PC and laptop. So, I'm wondering if it's the video file on the title screen still causing problems even though it's fixed for most people.
Last night, I uploaded a possible fix for the other person. If you go to the available files to download, look for the one called 'DD possible fix for LoneDeru'. It's a Windows build and what I did was I got rid of the video background on the title screen and replaced it with a static .png file instead to see if that fixes the problem. Give it a go and let me know if it makes any difference :3 If not, I'm gonna have to ask for some help from other people using Unity because I don't know what else could be causing it >.< I would have guessed possibly a resolution issue, but my laptop is an old windows laptop with a weird/uncommon resolution, and it works fine on that. *Fingers crossed* that removing the video helps anyhow!
Phew! Well, that's a relief :3 I'm glad it solved the problem for you! Still unsure as to why an MP4 file playing a video on the title screen would cause that to happen, but I guess at least it's not something more complicated to fix!
I just started watching mannlybadasshero play this and had to stop. To be honest...I'm getting ready now to buy this game and play it. I'm a small twitch affiliate who is a member of the Doki Doki modding community so sometimes I get bored of vns but this one really caught my eye. I hope you don't mind if I stream this soon because this just looks incredible!
Well, that's awesome :D Before Manly played it, it had next to no views or downloads after the jam finished! I'm glad it caught your eye.
I really need to get round to playing DDLC someday. The problem is, it's kinda stuck in my gigantic backlog of VNs >.< and I seem to spend all my time trying to make stuff now instead of playing things, so my backlog just keeps growing and growing!
I released an update recently which should make it run smoother + I added more custom UI so it will look a little different to how it does in Manly's vid. If you do end up streaming it, that would be awesome :3 Definitely lemme know if you decide to. I'm not that active on social media cos it terrifies me, and I don't exactly have heaps of followers, but I can still make a post or something to give your stream a shout out.
There's a lot more content to come because Winter Wish is where I had to stop in order to submit something standalone for the jam. The full game should include 8+ characters, each with multiple episodes. So this is kinda like Castor/ia's intro episode. I just have to hope I will be able to afford the voice acting cos I think the project wouldn't really be the same without it.
absolutely! if you want ill message on twitter (i followed) when I do! I showed some of the mannly playthrough to my stream and discord mod team and they think it looks awesome. Also i do highly recommend DDLC. The mod I'm making of it is actually a crossover of Corpse Party and DDLC. But Ill make sure I message you as soon as I schedule the stream. Itll be here in the next couple of days! <3
Sure! I shall go check Twitter in a sec and follow you back then :3 I'm still very new to trying to use Twitter xD I'm sure there are many grandmas and grandads across the world who are more adept at it than me, haha. I'm just so scared of social media that I've tried to avoid it for ages x3 but as my friends keep telling me, I do need to try and use it more. I should probably actually get the app on my phone instead of just remembering to check every now and again on my PC!
Oh, man, you've reminded me of another game in my backlog now xD The Corpse Party stuff is all on there too! I bought the first one + DDLC aaaaages ago and still haven't gotten round to either >.< I think I would need to take like a couple of years break from doing anything else to get through my backlog at this point T_T That sounds like an epic crossover mod though!
Glad you think so :3 Thanks for taking the time to check it out + comment! With any luck, I'll actually be able to pay the VAs for their wonderful work in Castor/ia's next episode :D I still feel awful that I was too poor to pay them for what they did for the jam >.<
Very, very tired and have a headache xD Still recovering from the game jam I finished last week + my body kinda just hates summer >.< I always get loads of headaches in the summer! But more than anything, I need sleep, haha.
Woo! That's awesome :D Glad to hear you guys had fun with it. Thanks for taking the time to play and comment :3 I hope you'll enjoy everything else that's in store for this project too. There's more content in the works for Castor/ia + plans for plenty of other characters to be added as well!
Aww, thanks so much for the support :3 I really appreciate it and I'm glad you like the idea of the game!
It's something I'm very excited to continue developing :D I've got a hell of a lot of stuff drafted out. I think I know which character I'm going to write the introductory episode for next!
I need to do a better job of actually making regular devlogs as I work. I sorta just bury myself in projects and forget to actually write updates half the time >.<
I just got to my PC for the day and saw something weird had happened on itch, haha. I had a notification for a comment you left on DD other than this one, but when I clicked the notification to reply, it said the comment was deleted. I dunno if that's cos you deleted it or cos something went weird with itch, haha. Anyways, what I was gonna say in response was that if that actually did happen, I may have a heart attack, shit myself, or a terrifying combination of both x3 haha.
I watched Manly play a few mins of this before it made me want to try it out myself. I can honestly say I thoroughly enjoyed it <3 It was short and sweet.. and I'm a little sad it ended lol. The design (and voice acting) for Castor was so well done~ I love him!
Keep up the great work!~ I look forward to see what happens with this in the future <3
Well, that's awesome :D Glad to hear it! I wish I could thank Manly because this project was practically unknown before he played it x3 like most of my stuff really, haha.
Thank you so much for the support :3 Every bit helps more than I can even describe! I'm really excited to continue working on the project. I'm not quite sure how to release everything I've got planned because there is a lot of stuff, haha. Around 8-10 characters with 4+ episodes each is what I've got drafted out for the full version! So this is pretty much just Castor/ia's episode 1. I actually had a whole other scene written for their ep 1 that I had to cut because there wasn't enough time to get it done with the jam deadline >.< but it'll just go into ep 2 instead I suppose!
But yeah, it's gonna turn out to be quite a long game by the time everything I have planned is in there :3 I'll be starting to release the audio-only tracks for download soon + making some audio drama stuff for YT if I have the time.
I'm glad you liked it :3 I'm super excited to work on this project some more because I've had lots of stuff for all the characters planned out since making this at Christmas. I owe Manly a lot for shedding some light on the game because before he played it, hardly anyone had viewed or downloaded it since the jam, haha.
Yo so glad I bought this game. Short? Yes. Simple? Yes. But there's clear amount of passion and hard work. I can feel it oozing out the game. That's not something you just put out. That's not something you find anywhere too often. Can't wait to see what comes in the future. Hope you keep doing what you love. CHEERZ
Aww, thank you so much for taking the time to play, comment, and support the game! I really appreciate it :3 I'm glad that you enjoyed it + that the level of effort I put in shows because you're absolutely right, I poured a lot of time and love into this, haha. Just getting all the expression changes to match up with the voice acting took hours upon hours in itself xD As did editing all the audio from the voice actors. I had many sleepless nights trying to get it to some form of completion in time for the end of the jam!
Since this is basically just the first episode for one of many characters (who will all have around 4 episodes each) I have planned, I hope that you'll enjoy the full game even more when it's eventually out :3 There's a hell of a lot more content to come! I just figured I would use the jam as a way to motivate myself to start it. If there had been more time before the end of the jam, I would have made Castor/ia's introductory episode longer.
The game has sort of been in limbo since Christmas because I've got other projects on the go, but also because it's quite reliant on voice acting, and I can't afford to pay voice actors for their time and talent with how poor I am. It wouldn't be right to keep expecting folks to just offer up their skills for free just because I'm broke either. So your support means a hell of a lot because it's the difference between the game's development getting to continue or not :3
Okay sooooooo. I finished the game and got the two endings. I say it's a cute short game. purely a fluff-filled game. Manly played this game and I wanted to try and see Castor's voice. And it didn't disappoint, it was good :D
I do want to point out some of the bugs I encountered:
- Sometimes there is so much text in the box that sometimes it breaks out of the text box and into the text box frame when using Castor/Castoria text box.
- The black text box keeps changing in size because there is too much text said by the MC (isn't really a bug but it's a little UI management)
- The voice lines would still be playing even after I skipped their text, which happens when I use the skip button. (again not really a bug, but it's a bit of a tease waiting for it to finish, instead of the game just skipping the voice lines too as it usually does in VN games)
I'm glad you enjoyed it despite the fact that it's basically just an introductory episode to the first of many characters that I have planned for this game as a whole :3 I would have done more with it, but since I finally decided to get to work on the idea when the game jam came around, I was pretty short on time cos of the jam deadline, so there's a lot that I didn't have time to include and fix, unfortunately >.<
It's a long way off, but in the final version of the game, each character (Castor/ia included) will have a story around quadruple the length of the current download. While I did manage to make it a sort of standalone game in time for the end of the jam, the whole thing is far from finished :3 I've got 8-10 character routes planned, and as each character's story unfolds, there will be more story + player choices alongside the fluffy stuff, haha. In the end, there will be far more than just 2 endings per character, and choices will make a much bigger difference if all pans out the way I have it planned.
Yeah, unfortunately, due to the jam time limit, I didn't get too much of a chance to do anything with UI :( As you say, there are issues with padding in the text boxes, among other things >.< The only reason I haven't already fixed stuff like that is because I've been focusing on other projects, and I never imagined in a million years that this would get such a boost in exposure xD Practically no one played it outside of the jam until Manly made that video! I had planned to just leave everything as it was until I add the next character's first episode, but since the game has more views/downloads now, I'm already working on tidying up the UI as I type this to you :3 Hopefully, I'll be able to get the padding sorted out + I'm creating some new stuff for menus and such since I had to just use the default UI for the most part in order to make sure I had something playable for the end of the jam.
The only thing I'm not sure I will be able to change is what you mentioned regarding the voice lines still playing when text is skipped. If they were set as sound effects, I know I could stop them, but I've assigned them using the voice map utility within Naninovel. I notice it has the option to make sure voices don't overlap (which I have active), but I don't see any options at all to make it stop playing when text is skipped >.< Either it's not possible with the way the software works, or there's an option that I'm missing somewhere. I'll have to ask in the support if anyone knows a way to make it force stop voice map audio because I personally find it quite irritating when skipping myself, haha.
Anyways, thanks so much for taking the time to play the game and leave a comment! All your feedback is much appreciated :3 I hope that you'll enjoy the full game when it's eventually out!
Sadly, it wasn't :( I can't draw to save my life, haha T_T The only game of mine currently that features completely original sprites is Apartment No.9 because I was able to team up with artists for the jam.
For my other games, I'm forced to use sprites that I either created in generators I've bought or sets that I purchased on sale and edited.
The sprites in DD come from a Japanese artist called sasAIchi who has sold a couple of packs of sprite art online for use in games. I don't like to use them as they come though because I want to make them at least somewhat unique to my games, so what I did was heavily edit the colours using GIMP. The original versions of these sprites are blonde with blue eyes + clothing is white and blue, haha.
I'm glad you think so :3 I certainly pour all of my love into them, haha. It's a shame that I suck so badly at drawing because if I could draw, I'd be able to do so much more!
I'm very thankful for Manly playing a couple of my games :3 It makes a huuuuge difference because my social anxiety is too bad for me to use social media very often, so I'm a fairly unknown dev with no way of getting my stuff out there. If not for people like him showing indie games on streams, I'd stay an unknown dev forever, haha.
Thank you for the luck! I will certainly need it with everything I've got planned :D And all the best to you too! Thank you so much for all your kind words :3
Hey there! Fellow game dev here, I noticed you switched from Tyrano (a pretty play by numbers builder) to Unity. Did you find Unity to be a better experience for making this VN? I'm typically a Ren'Py stan, but I've been eyeing unity for some time now. I'm just paranoid that shifting any projects over to it will be a huge time sink. I already procrastinate enough as it is. d:
Hey hey! Yeah, I was beginning to get pretty frustrated with all the issues Tyrano had that just weren't getting fixed by the engine devs after years. They actually released a huge update for Tyrano recently, which really shocked me because I thought it was dead support-wise! It looks like a decent update, but I doubt I'll be using it again.
I found Unity (specifically using Naninovel) a much smoother experience for creating than Tyrano by a long shot. It was so easy to pick up! I would absolutely recommend Unity with Nani over Tyrano any day. But over Ren'Py? I'm not so certain there. I feel like a lot of the games I've played that were made with Ren'Py are really smooth and I love the default sorta UI setup. I'm still kinda wrestling with Unity's UI and find it a bit of a nightmare to deal with, haha.
I haven't released any games made with Ren'Py, but I did start learning how to make stuff using it before I bought Tyrano on sale. From what I learned back then, I thought Ren'Py was fantastic. I only checked out Tyrano because I thought it might save time over learning Python. I do regret that decision now though because while Tyrano was super easy to get to grips with, I feel like the visual system really slows down the pace of development as opposed to typing everything up in Visual Studio Code like I do now.
If you're already very comfortable with Ren'Py, I'd say that maybe it's not worth switching to anything else. But I do highly recommend Naninovel despite that. It's very easy to use + the creator is constantly updating it with new features that the community requests, so the overall support for it is fantastic.
Sorry if I wasn't all that helpful >.< It's hard to give a good answer when I'm not overly familiar with using Ren'Py. It's just, from the little time I spent using it + the games I've played made with it, it seems to me like the best option around still considering it's completely free. If you do decide to check out Nani, it does go on sale on the Unity asset store quite often. I got it at 75% discount in the winter sale. There's no way I could afford it at full price >.<
This was actually super helpful! Seeing as your library didn't include any games made in Ren'Py I didn't expect you to have much experience with it, so no worries. I will look into Naninovel though!
See, my main reason for considering walking away from Ren'Py is that I am not a particularly code savvy person. I'm a writer who picks up bits of code from all over the Internet and shoves it together to try and get what I want. This is all well and good, but it also leads to me not finishing my games as I find myself needing to find other people to help me code, and as I have no money, I feel bad if I can't compensate them well for their skills and time. Especially when coding is so integral to the creation of any game. (I also am not an artist, but that's a bit easier to work around with placeholder art I make myself until I can get money together and hire someone to make exactly what I need.)
Plus, Ren'Py does have some limits as to what you can do gameplaywise. It is designed with the traditional VN structure in mind, and if you want to step beyond that, you need some real coding chops to skirt about the limitations of the engine. Don't get me wrong, Ren'Py is an amazing engine, and I would highly recommend it to anyone out there. Especially given its price point is very good. (Free.) I'm just not sure it's the best engine for what I want to make these days.
After seeing what you managed with Unity on this game here, I'm thinking it may be the better way to go. I actually have a somewhat similar idea I've been working on for some time now, (No worries, it isn't about a digital person becoming real, which is a very cool concept and I wish you loads of luck getting it finished, I did love what I saw so far. It's a Princess Maker style game where you teach a robot how to be human.) and it will be a lot easier adding JRPG style elements to it in unity, I believe. Having never touched unity I'm not sure how seamless it would be to combine two very drastic coding needs together.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to reply to me! The games I've seen from you so far are very neat, and line up pretty strongly with my tastes, so I will be following you from here on to see where things go. (I'm also an audio design nerd, and adored the digital manipulations you did with the VA's here.) It'll be sad not to hear them in future installments, but I absolutely get wanting to pay them very well for their work, and just not having the cash to do that sort of thing. Perhaps as this project progresses you can make a kickstarter and add voicework in as a goal. It's actually not that bad of a process, the team I worked with for the last game I finished did one and it really helped us get on our way. However, I would not recommend including merch as a donation tier! That really bit us in the butt later.
Well, that's good then, haha. Yeah, Nani is definitely worth looking into!
Ahh, in that case, I said that Nani would probably be right up your alley :3 I'm the same really. I sorta learned bits of code here and there, but ultimately, it gives me a headache >.< I just want to be able to write and build the stories/games. I have to say, Nani does do an excellent job of helping you do that relatively easily and quickly. I still have a lot to learn, but it's certainly easy to get started with.
While I haven't tried anything outside of traditional VN gameplay with Nani yet, I have seen on the guides that it's supposed to be pretty easy to integrate with other Unity assets in order to make hybrid games such as RPGs with heavy dialogue systems :3 From what I understand, you're supposed to be able to switch between Nani and other stuff pretty seamlessly. Since I've not looked into it in detail though, I couldn't tell you how easy it is to do. But it does sound like Nani would be ideal for what you're looking to do :D
Also, that sounds like a very fun idea for a game! I would absolutely play that :3
No worries! Actually, I would love to ask you some questions regarding Kickstarter if you have a spare moment to talk about that because while I have looked into it before, from what I've read, it's super hard to make a successful campaign >.< so it would be great to hear how you guys went about it to get some tips :D No worries if you're too busy or you don't feel like talking about it though! I guess if you want to, you can just drop me an email here: melancholicmarionette@gmail.com
And gosh, yeah, I can imagine merch being quite the nightmare x3 haha.
Hey hey ! I apparently didn't gave my opinion on this game, so... It was GREAT ! Both routes, and I tried both Castor and Castoria (Castor's voice reminds me of Byakuya Togami or Nagito Komaeda from Danganronpa ehe), the voice actors are great ! Loved them ! Also, ManlyBadassHero just played your game apparently, congrats ^^
Edit : as a Monika stan, from DDLC, I downloaded the After Monika mod recently, and she reminds me a lot of Castoria. Tho I'd say Castoria might even be cuter ^w^
I'm glad you enjoyed it :3 I really need to go back and fix my messy code because this was the first thing I made in Unity, and I think if you're not using a scroll wheel to advance the text, there are likely a lot of unnecessary mouse clicks in this because I was a noob when I made it >.< haha.
Yeah, the voice actors certainly did an amazing job with the character! I'm hoping that by the time I finish writing Castor/ia's next episode, I'll actually be able to afford to pay them for their work because I feel awful that they volunteered their time and talent and I'm too poor to give them something back :(
I still haven't played DDLC x3 I really should someday! The only thing that's put me off for all this time is that it's all girls and not dudes xD Give me DDLC with dudes and I'll be straight in there, haha.
I don't think so ! I only used the scroll wheel to scroll back when I clicked on accident and skipped text TwT, I don't think it was that bad !
Ah yeah... I have that problem too, kinda, with the game I'm creating rn, cause a friend of mine is creating the musics and some of the sprites, but since we're both like 15 it's no big deal for them... Still I feel bad asking him all that stuff while I'm making so little advance on the coding in itself TwT
You really should ! I'm not just saying that cause it's a game that marked me almost as much as Undertale, but also cause it's a great experience in itself and could inspire you with your games since there's some similarities ^^
Tho it's your choice haha, I'm sorry for being so insistant ! I really tend to do that with things I love (I'm still yelling on my friends telling them they really should play Omori TwT)
Lmfao, as a bi/pan????? disaster I usually love games when you have the choice to choose between male and female characters (or non-binary pals but gosh it's sooooo rare), so it doesn't bother me at all ^^ But really, DDLC is way more than a romance game, so it's a great experience even if you don't like girls :)
Hmm, maybe it's not as bad as I thought then. I will still look into it though cos if there are any in there, it will be really frustrating for players who can't use a scroll wheel like if they're on a laptop or something >.<
That's pretty darn awesome that you're both working on creating a game at such a young age though! Try not to worry about how long it's taking because if you stick at it, it'll all come together in time :3 I'm nearly 30 myself xD But because of my poor mental health, I'm not employed very often since companies here tend not to be very understanding of people suffering with mental health problems >.< They're not supposed to discriminate, but as soon as they find out you have autism, I'm pretty sure they just throw your CV away :( If I had a job with regular income, I could put the money towards game development, but because I don't, I'm completely reliant on donations to try and pay anyone who is helping me out. So far, everyone has been kind enough to volunteer their skills, but that can't continue forever cos it's just not right when they deserve to be paid.
I will get round to DDLC one day, haha. I kinda have a horrendously huge backlog of VNs, let alone other video games xD I want to start playing some, but my brain screams at me to keep working on things instead >.< I've actually managed to avoid a lot of DDLC spoilers over the years since I figured I'd play it someday, haha. I've heard some of the stuff that happens without full spoilers. I just feel like maybe it would lose its impact on me because I'm not likely to really care about the characters very much with them being cute girls x3 but ya never know! Actually, Undertale is another game I've never gotten around to trying (I'm terrible, I know xD)
But yeah, I don't mind you being insistent :3 It's nice that you're so passionate about em!
Well, I really want to try and be as inclusive as possible with my games :3 Sometimes it's kinda hard cos of the extra work that's required in adding different options, and when it comes to the art for player characters, I don't really have the option of including like multiple skin tones and stuff since I can't draw to save my life and have to rely on stock sprites or purchased generators >.< I wanted to just try and keep DD as gender-neutral where we never see the player character and have everything in first-person + the choice of sprites and voices for each character to give the player more of an option of what they wanna hear/see. But then I also realised that writing certain scenes in a gender-neutral way is quite difficult, haha. My own sexuality still confuses me though xD I think I'm ace/demi!
Feel free to ramble as much as you like :D I do a hell of a lot of rambling myself, haha.
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I'm really glad that I stumbled upon this game, it's so well written and I just love Castoria! I'm really excited to see how the next episodes go too! Keep up the amazing work! I'm cheering you on!
I'm glad you think so :3 Thanks for the support! It's much appreciated. With any luck, I'll be able to manage to get another episode out before the end of the year.
i love the ui sm tbh it looks so clean and proffesional! this whole game looks professional!
That's great it comes across that way! I'm glad you think it does :3 I still have a fair bit of work to do on the UI, especially with making it adapt better to other resolutions because right now, it just refuses to do that and I don't really know why because I'm not very clued up on how to get the codey stuff behind it functioning the way I want it to >.< But I'll most likely be keeping the current look with a few additional tweaks here and there.
I'm not an artist so I find it super hard to design UI that I'm actually happy with x3 This one is probably the one I've put the most effort into so far though and it's growing on me!
Thats so amazing! make sure you take care of urself, and im looking forward to the finished product. <3
this game seems very cool, do you have any plans for spanish sub? it would be really cool
I'm glad you think so :3 Right now I don't have any plans for subs just because I'm going through a lot of crappy personal stuff and I don't have much time and energy to spend on my projects in general, so any work I do get done will be towards making new content. However, at some point in the future, I would absolutely love to have the game available with subs in as many languages as possible :D
Now this. This is what I like. Hopefully theres more to the story soon!
I'm glad you found it to be your cup of tea :D With any luck, I'll manage to get at least one more episode out before the end of this year (I'm hoping 2-3 more, but that might be pushing it!) I'm going through a pretty rough patch at the moment, so it's difficult to really put a timescale on things, but yeah, hopefully, it won't be too long before I can put something out :3 Thanks so much for your comment!
Wish I could get this but I don't really have any money to spend right now :(
You're welcome to drop me an email and I'll send you a key if you want :3 melancholicmarionette@gmail.com
Thanks! I will probably do that soon.
I got your email and sent a reply :3
I saw! Thanks for the game, It's realy great!
This game is amazing the art style is amazing and this game actually has very good voice acting which is very cool.This game clearly shows the amount of passion that went into this game. It even has nice Easter eggs like when Castoria's 'i' first had a diamond as a dot then when you progress you either get a skull or a spiral depending on your choice which is very cool. Please keep up with these amazing idea and I have no doubt this game will blow up in popularity so for me this game is a 5/5 as of right now. Keep up the good work
I'm glad you like it :3 The UI still needs a lot of work so it's probably gonna be several updates before I get the final look nailed down, but I'll get there in the end, haha. I just hope that as I eventually get each update out, it will manage to stay fun :D
Thank you for your awesomeness :3
Luckily this was cheap, because this just wasn't for me. A big thing was the ambiguousness of the descriptions. I don't enjoy playing as female characters, so lacking description kills part of the fun for me.
Thanks for your honesty and feedback :3 It helps with the game's future development.
I know what you mean because I can't get into games as much if the only option for me is to play as a male character. It just sorta kills the immersion. This small taster was made for a game jam though, so I didn't really have time to do much in terms of giving players pronoun choices and writing multiple versions of scenes. I figured the easiest way to go for maximum self-insertability within the jam timeframe was to leave MC without a specified gender and allow players to make MC whoever they wanted MC to be.
The game is still in development anyhow :3 I've not yet settled on whether to keep with things being ambiguous, or add pronoun choices and varying versions of certain scenes that do reference different genders.
Saw your game via YouTube's ManlyBadassHero. I'm buying the Full Version plus an extra 2 dollars, because Manly didn't risk showing the 'suggestive' parts on YouTube and for support in hopes you succeed with this project. I'd give more but i just don't make enough to give more sadly. I like what I saw so far, I'll be trying both male and female routes, looks great~<3
Edit: Okay I see why that part wasn't shown on YouTube, still for the sake of clarification, I sorta realized after the fact I may have implied something with how I worded this post, and I didn't mean anything suggestive by my wording. I simply wanted to see the whole thing, and now that I have, I gotta say, I can't wait to see where this goes!
More than willing to pay a couple dollars (or more) per update or however its done! Might even be willing to pay a couple dollars a month depending how I'm doing money wise if there is a thing for that! Let me know if there is anything like that? This looks promising~! <3
Ahh, yeah, I saw that in his vid, haha. It's really not all that suggestive, but I totally get why he wouldn't wanna risk it x3
Thank you very much for the support :3 Don't worry about it anyhow because any amount really helps me a lot in bringing the game to life! It might take a while since I'm working on it alone, but I'll get there in the end :D With any luck, by the time I eventually finish it completely, there should be a hell of a lot of content. And thanks to everyone's combined support so far, at least 1 more episode will get to be fully voiced, which is incredible. I never expected to receive that kind of support in a million years :3
So yeah, thank you very much for supporting the game and taking the time to leave a comment ^-^
I just bought this and omg I love it so much!! I can't wait to see what other ideas you have for other games in the future.
I'm so glad that you enjoyed it :D Thanks so much for your support! I'm hoping to add much, much more content to DD for Castor & Castoria, but I also have plans to add quite a few more characters to the game as well :3
Provided I can get my game jam head on when the time comes, I'll be attempting to create something during September for Spooktober VN jam which will be a free release at the end of September!
I can't thank you enough for your kind words in comments and ratings/reviews :3 I got a really angry 1* review on Apartment No.9 today that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. As though the person writing it had neglected to read about the game on the page before playing it, and also somehow managed to miss the fact that I personally suffer with mental health problems. It's so easy for one person's negativity to sort of knock you back when you already have very little confidence in yourself, so it means the world to me when I read the lovely things that anyone has written. It helps to lift my spirits immensely. So again, thank you ^-^
Holy shit, the game seems incredibly polished and professional, especially with the voice acting in addition to other minor details, such as the skull/spiral appearing on the I in Castoria's name or her very accurate facial expressions.
That the game will be updated with some more content too is great news indeed - and I have no doubt I'll enjoy watching Lets Plays of this game on YouTube.
I'm sad I didn't find this sooner when it was released to get the free version. I would love to support this game, however, I have no money :/
That aside, best of luck mate.
That's awesome to hear that you think so :D It's the first thing I made when I switched to using Naninovel in Unity instead of Tyranobuilder, so I'm still sorta learning the ropes as I go. The UI still needs a lot of work overall, but it'll get there eventually, haha. Thanks to the support I've had so far, it looks like at least one more episode will be able to be fully voiced :3
You can still have a key for the game if you want to drop me an email to melancholicmarionette@gmail.com I just can't refill the community copies anymore is all.
Thank you for the luck and kind words, I will certainly need it with all that I have planned for the game :3
I bought this game after playing through your other ones (Solipsism Reigns and Imposter was awesome btw!!) and it was super enjoyable to play!
The glitch scene scared the heck out of me though, not going to lie, aha.
Thanks so much for playing through all of those and supporting my projects :D And for taking the time to leave a comment too :3 Much appreciated! I'm really glad you had fun with them. I sure had a lot of fun making them, and yeah, that glitch scene took me quite a while to put together x3 Editing the audio from the voice actors alone took a few days, haha. It was super fun to create though!
I hope I can remake SR someday because there's a lot about it that I'm not too happy with (including large chunks of my early writing, haha) + content that I'd love to add in order to flesh out the game a bit more. I need to finish the BxG version before I remake the otome one though, haha. And work on DD too :3
I found this game from playthroughs on youtube and loved it so I had to buy it for myself! I have to ask simply out of curiosity though: Was this series inspired by Period Cube: Shackles of Amadeus or Dot Kareshi: We're 8bit Lovers? They're both otome games set in video game settings.
In Period Cube out of all the LIs there's an NPC that becomes sentient and turns out to be a yandere! With Dot Kareshi, all the LIs are NPCs turned sentient <3 I only ask this because of my love for those series and this game and I saw some similarities. I can't wait to support more of your work in the future!
Woo :D Well, thanks so much for taking the time to leave a comment + for your support :3 It's very much appreciated!
The main inspiration for the game as a whole came from a mixture of my love for yandere characters in general + some Japanese drama CDs that I've listened to in the past where they have a white side and a black side to the CD. The white side contains the character speaking to you in sweet scenarios and is full of fluff, whereas the black side is where things tend to get a little bit psycho x3 I really wanted to try my hand at making my own series of characters who each have a white side and a black side, haha. Which is where the sweet & sinister bit comes from.
As for Castor & Castoria specifically, the biggest inspiration between them was the track that I use in Winter Wish when creepy shenanigans are about to happen, haha. I bought a music pack to use in my projects in general, and the moment I heard that track, it just sparked a character and story in my head. I decided to call the track “Glitch in the System” for the purpose of the game, but I'm not sure what the original Japanese name of the track translates to because the Japanese language pack on my PC broke at the time and just displayed nonsense characters >.< I'll have to go look at some point though!
However, I do love both Period Cube + Dot Kareshi! Heck, I'd go as far as to say that the Dot Kareshi series might be one of my favourite otome games of all time even though it's pretty casual in terms of story :D So, it's entirely possible that either or both of those games influenced me subconsciously, haha. I also did a 'gamer' route in my first game (Solipsism Reigns) and that route was inspired by stuff like .hack and SAO, so I wanted to expand on that a little, but instead of making it about an MMO to have it be about a visual novel :3
Thank you again for the support :3 I'm very excited to bring more of Castor & Castoria's story to life as well as introduce some of the other characters that I have planned for the future of DD ^-^
PS. I love your username :D
I'm in love with everything in this game.... I wish I had found this game sooner to get the free version（；へ：）
I'm glad you like the look of it :D I can send you a download key if you let me know where to contact you. Or you can just drop me a message: melancholicmarionette@gmail.com
It's more like a donation to help fund the rest of the project than a purchase because there's lots more content to come, but hiring voice actors and such is very expensive, so that's why it didn't stay free after the new year :3
tysm! you can contact me on my twitter! @lirriesl
wish i could help with the donation, hope i can soon ꉂ(ˊᗜˋ*)♡
I think I typed the name in right and managed to find you on twitter, but it shows as you having dms switched off x3 I'm still very new to how twitter works, haha. I guess I can just tweet it to you. Let me know if you got it okay cos I guess it's possible for anyone who happens to see the tweet to use the key if they want to, haha.
Hello, I am a Mac user and I've been experiencing problems with the game. It is not an opening problem, the game opens fine. Instead, the game seems to freeze completely before the title screen even comes up, leaving me with only a blank gray screen. The loading symbol does show up, but it's only there for a second before it disappears. I really don't know what issue the game or my computer is having, since this is honestly the first time this has ever happened. Usually the only problems I experience with Mac is the opening part, but it's opening fine so I'm just so confused. :(
I did take a look at your Mac helping post, but that mostly mentioned just opening the game and not a problem like this sooo....if there's anyone that can help, much appreciated!
Hey hey. Really sorry to hear that you're having that problem with the Mac version. If you have a look at the most recent comment on the thread about getting the game to open on Mac, it seems as though that person is having the same issue. I responded to them a little earlier with something to try, but I don't think it's going to work. Still, feel free to read through my reply there to the person with the username 'Catherine' because I've gone into more detail there.
Since both of you have managed to get the game to launch, it seems to be a problem with Naninovel rather than with Unity. Likely a Nani initialisation issue. I browsed the Nani support channel on Discord to see if any other devs have encountered this problem with Mac builds. I found a few people mentioning it. One was back in 2020, and another was in February this year. However, I could not see any solution posted >.< I have sent a private message to one of the devs who was asking about the issue and how to fix it to see if I can try and find out from them if they ever managed to fix the problem for their game. I have no idea if they will reply to me or not though.
I can also try asking in support myself to see if I get a response from the software dev or any other users who may have run into the issue.
I wish I had a Mac myself so that I could test stuff easier, but without one, it makes it really hard to try and fix any issues that arise with Mac. I don't understand why on earth Macs are so dodgy for getting stuff to run on them >.< It seems like any Mac build I make on Unity only has a 50/50 chance of working.
What version of MacOS are you using? Catherine said they're using Mojave 10.14.6. I just thought I'd ask because if I post in support, the software dev might need to know in order to try and help figure out what the problem is.
Anyways, if it looks like it's not going to be possible to fix, please don't hesitate to contact itch for a refund. If too many people are having this problem and no one can help me to figure out how to fix it, I might just have to scrap the Mac version entirely :(
Sorry for the trouble and I hope you have a good weekend despite this :3
Thank you so much for working so hard to get the problem solved! I'm happy to know it's not a problem with my computer at least. I'm probably not going to ask for a refund, just think of it as a donation for such a cool looking game. My MacOS is Big Sur 11.2.2
Funny name right? Anyways hope you have a good weekend too!
No worries :3 I would really love to get to the bottom of this cos as a dev, it's super frustrating to put so much hard work into a game only to find that some people can't actually play it because of technical problems >.< haha. I really thought that switching from Tyranobuilder to Naninovel would solve all the issues I was having in the past with getting Mac builds to work consistently, but it seems not T_T
Well, thank you very much for supporting the game :3 I really appreciate it a lot! And thanks for that info as well. I will make sure to include it when I make my support request. It is a pretty funny name, yeah x3
Also, I don't know if you saw my second reply to Catherine, but I'll ask you if you could try the same thing as well. Would you be able to download the DD music box for Mac and see if that has the same problem? I only ask this to both of you because it seems like this is a Naninovel problem, and the music box was made in the most recent version of Nani from 2021. Whereas DD Winter Wish was made in an older 2020 build of Nani. I was just wondering if maybe it's a problem with the older version of Nani that has since been fixed by the software dev.
If the same issue still happens with the music box though, then that's extra information I can add to my support request. That the version of Nani hasn't made a difference.
However, if by some miracle the music box does work, it means I can get Winter Wish working by updating the version of Nani that it's currently on! That may take a while though because I've heard that updating Nani to a new version can cause your custom UI to mess up so you have to make it all over again >.<
I've got to go help my dad with some stuff now so I'm not sure when I'll next be able to check back for any responses from you, but I will definitely be able to check sometime before the end of the day.
Thanks again :3
Hey! Sorry to ping you again with another reply >.< I just wanted to let you know in case you hadn't seen, that Catherine managed to get the game working on Mac. I'll copy/paste what was written so you can see if it works for you, but it's possible it might not because you two are using different versions of macOS I think. Fingers crossed though :3
This is what Catherine said:
“So what I did was, I downloaded the Possible Black Screen Fix (Mac) file, did the 'Open Anyways' step, then executed the commands on https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/408752/the-message-you-do-not-have-per...".
I did this too for the normal file previously and it hadn't worked, so I had low expectations, but strangely this time it worked!”
Yes! It's working! I downloaded the black screen fix and the game opened fine and is running smoothly! I'm very excited, sorry for all the exclamation marks. And sorry again for the late response...I only have time on weekends >.<
Btw, I don't know what difference this makes but I now have the macos Catalina 10.15.7
Huzzah!! That is awesome news :D Phew! I'm so glad to hear that it worked in the end :3 No need to apologise anyhow x3 Thanks for letting me know!
Honestly, I have no idea if it makes any difference either, haha, but I will note it down for future reference because I'm sure there will be more struggles with mac in the future x3
I hope you have a super weekend anyhow :3
I just finished Castor’s sweet route after getting free copy, thank you so much!
Castor is a sweetheart, I would love to see more of him... I’m still kinda scared to play sinister route though aha- I feel annoyed at the ‘MC’ sometimes for being mean but I feel called out too because sometimes there’s just that one character you don’t really like but gotta play to get all endings.. ahahahah please don’t became reality and kill me irl ^^”
On another note, gosh I feel genuinely scared of Castor like... especially the glitch scene, it was so creepy.... and my laptop turned off at that moment too so extra creepiness😳
Thank you so much for making this game, and your other games too that turns out I’ve played before hahah, you’re truly good at making yanderes. I’ll try my best to support you so that I can finally see the full game<3 Best of luck!
Awesome! I'm glad you had fun with it :D There's definitely more to come from Castor :3 More sweet, and more sinister, of course, haha. The sinister ending of this first episode isn't toooo bad, but it does kinda set up for the continuation of that path in his route, so things go even more downhill from there xD Neither ending is technically the final ending for his route though, just the sorta point at which you branch off in different directions with him. I figured that was a decent-ish place to leave it for the jam though with the deadline looming, haha. Otherwise, it would've likely cut off in a weird place if I tried to add more at the time.
Yeeeah, MC can be pretty abrasive x3 I did kinda want them to be a bit of a shit-stirrer for shenanigans purposes, but I do hope to add more conversation options as I expand the game in order to give better personality preferences and aligning responses when interacting with the characters. Now that you mention being called out though, I remember listening to a drama CD around the time I wrote this episode, and it was one that made me feel so called out I had to pause the audio and sit there with my face like this O.O It was regarding a completely different topic, but maybe it had a subconscious impact on my writing at the time, haha.
Oh, man, that's crazy that your laptop turned off during that glitch scene! If that were me I might have pooped myself T_T That is incredibly bad (or good, depending on how freaked out you like to be xD) timing!
Thank you so much for playing and taking the time to leave such a lovely comment :3 I'm glad you think so! I do love me some yandere goodness, haha. Thank you for your support <3 It means a lot ^-^
This would be the very first time I buy something on itch.io since your lovely game really got my attention.
I apologize for my ignorance, but if I buy it right now, I can have access to the rest of the updates? If so, then I'm willing to buy it right away.
Keep up the work! You're doing great.
Greetings from (BCS)Mexico
Aww, well I'm very honoured that you feel that way and glad it caught your eye :3
No need to apologise at all. It's not really all that clear on the page, so it's my fault >.< Thanks for your question!
I'm about to go on a long ramble, so if you want the TLDR version, scroll down to the bottom, haha.
Right now, the project is in a place where I don't even know what an acceptable price would be to charge for the game once it's eventually finished because I don't have experience with releasing commercial games. I kind of never imaged I would ever have the funding available to me to make something to commercial standards. What I do know going by my outlines, drafts, and the like, is that there will be quite a large amount of content by the time the entire thing is finished. Definitely more than $2 worth of content by a long shot.
If you do decide to get Winter Wish, it's more like a donation towards funding the development of the project than a purchase, but I don't think there's any way for me to show it as such here on itch >.< Because WW is quite short and essentially acts as the introductory episode to one character of many.
The biggest challenge in DD's overall development is that it's a project which is pretty reliant on voice acting. Without the VA, it wouldn't have the same flavour I don't think. But VA isn't cheap. For example, after speaking to my friend Anthony (the voice director for Winter Wish) he informed me that to get Castor & Castoria's next episode fully voiced will cost around $800. And me being unemployed means that the only way I can afford to pay the VAs is through supporters donating funds towards the project.
Right now, I'm quite unsure what the best way to proceed is because it's going to cost a lot of money to get each episode for each set of characters voiced. Which means probably asking for some form of money per episode. At the same time, I don't want to piss anyone off who has already donated towards the project >.< because I really appreciate the support and I don't want anyone to feel like their money is being wasted or anything like that.
The other option, of course, is attempting to run a Kickstarter at some point! However, I'm not really sure if enough people would back it when it requires quite a bit of funding. Especially not when the game isn't yet close to completion. So it's a tough situation really.
One of the main reasons I didn't keep working on DD after the jam is because I figured I would never be able to afford to expand it the way I'd like to in a million years because I don't have the money. So I kept it as a side project to work on and continued developing my main project (Clarity in Qualia.) Unfortunately, CiQ hit a brick wall in that I was hoping to run a KS for that in order to fund VA and a CG artist, but there was very little interest in the game when we posted character intro videos on YouTube and stuff. And it's a shame because that one is fully written and if I were to work on just that, I could have the game finished before the end of the year. But I don't know what to do with CiQ when it seems like there aren't many people interested in playing it. It seems as though it would make more sense to swap them around now and have DD as my main project.
I'm so sorry for rambling anyhow >.<
What I will say though, is that I hope to always be able to offer free copies of my stuff to anyone who can't afford to support with money because I have been in that position all my life and I know how much it sucks.
TLDR
(I realise that getting funding from various methods could potentially end up quite messy when it comes to issuing discounts and rewards in the end, but I'm not sure how else to deal with funding development right now. I'm willing to go over all donations from all sources manually in order to make sure no one is left out come the full release of the project.)
I really want to support your game, thus I'll pay for it righty now. And hope eventually more people get to know your game and support it as well.
Also, if your game gets fully developed I don't mind paying more. It's your effort and of your mates after all.
edit: Bought and downloaded it, I'm looking forward to playing it:D
That's really sweet of you :3 Thank you very much for the support! Every bit counts towards helping bring the full game to life, so I really appreciate it.
I hope you end up enjoying this little introduction to one of the characters in the world :3
Great game<3
Oh my god, it's the first time I've seen a game of this kind (that has a male and female yandere) I really love yanders, they scare me when they get angry but otherwise they are all cute :') (I would love to buy it but I have no money in bank accounts :'c. I'll wait until I grow up ;-;)
Woo! I'm a big fan of yanderes myself :D And there will be plenty more of them in DD, haha. Pretty much every character I add will have some degree of yandereness to them! If you have an email address, you can drop me a blank message to: melancholicmarionette@gmail.com if you like and I'll send you a key to download the current episode here on itch for free :3 I would just put a key here in the comment, but I don't know how quickly you will see my reply, and then someone could end up claiming it before you, haha.
thank you very much😭 I really appreciate it, when I have money, I will definitely buy your game, long live the yanderes!!!(❁'◡`❁) greetings from Spain.
I... am in love with Castor??? Rhineer did such a good job with his voice, and the sound editing to make it all glitchy? TERRIFYING. Ugh, and it was so well written! I genuinely felt unsafe when Castor was getting upset. I am so hyped to see the completed Darling Duality!
Also, I didn't realise it at the time, but I played the full ver. on the stream!!! I hope people enjoy me taking myself way too seriously and embarrassing myself!xDhttps://www.twitch.tv/videos/1087270019
Aww :3 He is quite the sweetheart, at least, sometimes x3 Yeah, Kevin absolutely smashed the role! And I had a hell of a lot of fun editing those lines for the glitchy section, haha. I was sat there with headphones on just chuckling maniacally to myself when I got something I was happy with xD
I'm glad you enjoyed it anyhow! I'm just as hyped to get the full version out there :3 It's a shame I can't clone myself or something because it's slow going on my own, haha. I'll get there in the end though!
That must have been a bit of a shock x3 but hilarious I imagine :P I will definitely make sure to check it out when I get a chance! Thank you for everything ^-^
Good game, enjoyed my time playing it, really excited for the full release, props to the voice actors as well they did a really good job
Glad to hear it :D With any luck, I'll be able to afford to get the VAs back for Castor & Castoria's next episode + some other wonderful VAs for the rest of the cast :3 Not gonna lie though, VA is expensive >.< haha. So everyone's support makes a real difference in bringing the project to life because, by myself, I would never be able to afford to pay VAs for all their hard work and talent!
The full release will likely be a long way off because of how much I have planned, but I will hopefully be able to release some other character episodes individually while still developing the game as a whole.
Thanks for playing and commenting :3
man i would buy it if its on steam or google play cuz i dont have a credit card:(
I would definitely love to have it on both of those sometime in the future :3 With any luck, I should be able to eventually. None of my stuff is on Steam at the moment because the fee for adding a game there is just too steep for me to afford, unfortunately.
In the meantime though, I can give you a key if you want :3 Just drop me a message to: melancholicmarionette@gmail.com and I'll get one sent to ya!
Im waiting for that day to come:)
aww i just found out this game..... i like yandere games a lot too ;;-;; too bad the free one has ran out...... maybe in another life
You're welcome to have a key for it if you wanna drop me an email or something :3 I can't refill the community copies cos it seems to be broken at the moment >.< or maybe I just put too many in and can't do any more, I dunno.
But yeah, if you want a key just lemme know: melancholicmarionette@gmail.com
I am also a huge yandere fan :3 As if you couldn't have guessed that from my stuff, haha.
omg thank you so much!!! i'll dm you in an instant and i'll write review too after it ehehehhe
The game is really good! The art and the voice acting are also so beautiful! I'll wait for the continue of Castor story and for the other characters. Really a good work.
I'm glad you think so :D Thanks so much for checking it out and taking the time to leave a comment as well! Much appreciated :3
The voice acting music & everything is lovely. Thank you for creating this series. I hope it goes far. Also coming from manly play through.
The voice actor is amazing. The music realky makes you nostlagic of old vns in the past. The art/ fashion is really solid too. Are there behind the scenes or files mobile users can access?
I'm glad you like what you've seen so far! Thank YOU for checking it out :3
I do normally like to include behind the scenes stuff in my games such as bloopers, voice actors interviews, and other little extra bits here and there, but because this part was made for a game jam and the deadline was pretty tight, I didn't get a chance to build any sort of extras section. Once the full game is eventually released though, I hope to have an extras section filled with lots of different kinds of bonus content :D If possible, once the full game is ready, I would also like to release it on mobile as well as PC.
I will be releasing the first audio-only track this week, which you should be able to listen to on mobile since it will just be an audio file. I'm hoping to try and get 1 of the audio-only tracks for Castor/ia released per week while also working on writing for one of the other episodes :3
Thank you for everything
here from ManlyBadassHero, nice game! Love the art/characters. :)
Aww, thank you for stopping by to say that! :3 I'm glad you like what you see so far :D Hopefully, the full game will not disappoint!
really loved playing through this game! I really wanna read through more of Castor/Castoria~!! TwT) Really cant wait if there are any updates for more scenarios of the two or the addition of more characters.
Woo! I'm happy you did :D Thank you very much for checking it out and commenting :3
Well, there's definitely more to come from Castor/ia! This is only their episode 1/introduction, so it's certainly not the last you'll be hearing from them ^-^ I think I will probably add the other intro episodes for the rest of the characters first before I start writing for everyone's episode 2 stuff though, just so that folks know what the full cast of characters is gonna look like :3
I can't say for sure exactly when the next character will be released, but I do already have drafts completed, so it'll be a matter of writing the ep in full, getting it voiced if I can, and then putting it all together. I'd like to think I could get at least 1 new character out before the end of autumn this year, quite possibly sooner!
I'm really glad that I found this game through Manly's playthrough of it (like so many others here, evidently, haha), because I really enjoyed pretty much every aspect of it! I think the game's presentation was, in all honesty, close to perfection. Your graphical style was really well-done; Castoria and Castor are drawn beautifully, and I also love how their expressions change as the text progresses. Castoria's voice actress fit the role perfectly, and while I haven't heard Castor's voice actor yet, I'm sure he did, as well. I found the game's writing and theming to be quite fascinating; personally, I think the subtle commentary on Castoria's free will (or lack thereof) in regards to love and being a visual novel character come to life was really neat. Overall, this seems like a great game, and I can't wait to play it! It's well-deserving of my $2 at the very least, and if you have a Patreon, I would most definitely be willing to support you. Keep up the great work!
Yeah, without Manly playing it, I'm pretty sure it would have remained largely unknown forever, haha. I'm so glad you enjoyed it :D Thank you very much for taking the time to play + comment. It's much appreciated!
I can't take much credit for the art as I cannot draw to save my life, sadly :( The sprites come from a sprite pack that I purchased in a sale from a Japanese artist. However, whenever I purchase sprites to use, I like to at least make them somewhat unique to my projects by altering the colours in GIMP if I can, so that they look as different from the originals as I can make them. The original versions have blonde hair, blue eyes, and their outfits are white and blue. I would love to be able to afford an artist someday to make some CGs for the game and maybe even someone who can mimic the art style or redraw in their style so that the sprites can have more poses!
The expressions took a lot of work, so I'm glad that was something that stood out :D The pack basically comes with the eyebrows, eyes, and mouths all separately, and along with the standard sorta mouth shapes, you also get A, E, I, O, U shape mouths to allow you to create quite a decent range of expressions. So I spent an awfully long time putting those together, and then even longer trying to get all the ones mid-sentence to match up with the voice acting, haha.
I'm very excited to get to writing the next episode for Castor/ia, but I think it might make more sense for me to release the introductory episodes for all the other characters first so that folks have an idea of the other characters on the roster :3 With enough support, I might be able to afford to have everyone voiced! So your support really makes a difference.
I do have a Patreon, but honestly, it's not very exciting x3 I've never had many Patrons on there, so I'm a little unsure what sort of content people would actually like to see me putting out as exclusive to Patrons! If everything goes smoothly with DD though, and I can actually afford to fund full voice acting, I might be able to add things on there like use of a person's name by a character of their choice, or exclusive Patron-only episodes.
Thank you again for your support :3
Of course! I'm always glad to support any game developer I find who clearly is passionate about what they're making and creates good games, and you certainly fit that bill!
I see! My mistake about the art. I can certainly relate, as I'm much more of an author than an artist, myself. Regardless, though, the sprites and general artwork looked lovely, and the adjustments you made to the sprites fit the game very well.
Yeah, the expressions and how they changed as the text progressed really stood out to me! I'm kind of just used to characters in visual novels only having one expression per dialogue box, so seeing Castoria's often change as the text advanced definitely impressed me.
I'm really looking forward to seeing how the Castoriaverse (for that is what I have dubbed it) develops! Personally, I would be glad to support you on Patreon without any consideration of patron-exclusive content or anything, but I definitely get the reason why it's included. I'm certainly glad to provide whatever support I can--and while I'm on the subject of thanks, thank you, as well, for the in-depth response! As someone who has aspirations of creating my own video games in the future, seeing you describe your creative process in regards to making the game was enriching, and I wholeheartedly appreciate it. Your passion for what you do is apparent, and that's awesome! Keep up the great work; I know there'll be more in the future!
I'm glad that shines through cos if there's one thing I do have bucketloads of, it's passion for my projects xD
To be honest, I would love to be able to utilise Live 2D, but when I looked into that I just felt so out of my depth >.< Adding the mid-sentence expression changes was pretty much my answer to being too incompetent/lacking the resources to have Live 2D in the game :3 My brother said I was insane because, as you mentioned, he said that you generally only see expression changes with the start of the next bit text in VNs, but when I showed him the end result, he changed his tune because he said it makes it look kind of animated without actually being animated, haha. I'm not gonna lie though, it's an absolute nightmare to implement xD And it definitely doesn't work for anyone who wants to change the text print speed >.< I plan on keeping it up throughout the game though!
That's super sweet of you regarding Patreon :3 And I'm sorry if I rambled, haha. Sometimes I think I go a little too in-depth because I get so worked up about the stuff I'm passionate about that I type forever >.< aheh. That's awesome that you hope to make stuff too at some point though! You should definitely go for it when you feel ready :3 It may be challenging, but it's so much fun!
Thank you again for all the kind words and support :D
I think the fact that you already implemented the expression changes is impressive in its own right, and I would imagine that you'd only become more proficient in and capable of handling more complex processes like Live 2D as you develop more games. We all have to build up to somewhere, eh?
There's no need to apologize at all, as you definitely didn't ramble! Your enthusiasm for what you're doing really is quite heartwarming. Thank you for the kind words, as well! I definitely have several game ideas drifting around in my head, but I just need to get off my lazy butt and get to work! (Or maybe not, since I would still be sitting down while I work... the phrase is a bit ill-fitting for this particular scenario, but you get my point, haha.)
It's lightheartedly funny how this series of messages has generally consisted of us taking turns thanking the other person, I must admit. I won't contribute to it much more, I promise, as I fear I may be creating some sort of infinite gratitude time loop, but I would like to thank you for these brief interactions, as a whole. I already knew you were a good game developer before, but now I know that you're a good, kind person, as well. My apologies if that was awkward or anything of that sort; I just sort of thought you deserved to know that. I'll leave it here on my end, as I already feel like I've been rambling myself; keep doing what you're doing and making great games!
I guess you're right about becoming more proficient in other stuff as I develop more games :3 I often beat myself up for not being able to do what I want to, haha. But I do try to learn at least 1 new skill or trick with each game I make. There's always room for improvement :3
Hehe, yeah, I get your point :D I wish you much luck with bringing those ideas to life at some point! I have a bunch of ideas that kinda just get put on the back shelf because I need to make sure I'm finishing the stuff I've started before beginning too many side projects and such, haha. Game jams give me a bit of an excuse to revisit my jumble of ideas and actually turn them into something more solid. I think the next jam I attempt to make something for will be the Spooktober VN jam in September if it's going to be running this year! I missed it last year cos I didn't realise it was a September jam and not an October one >.<
I suppose we probably should stop before we get stuck in the loop forever xD I can't bring myself to not say one final thing back though because it feels wrong, haha. So I will send this and shush myself as well x3 You have my thanks for the interactions too as well as the general support :3 It's really nice to hear from anyone who's interested in the stuff I'm working on! Heck, it even gives me motivational boosts on days when I might be feeling down. I'll never be able to put into words just how much I appreciate the support for my stuff, and I'll continue to thank everyone for it until I kick the bucket, haha. There's only so much I can achieve on my own, and having help from folks who like what I'm trying to do really aids me in making everything better than I could make it without that help.
I didn't think it was awkward anyways, I thought it was really sweet :3 So thank you for saying so. I certainly try my best not to be an asshole in life, haha. You seem like a wonderful person yourself!
(One last thank you incoming for now xD) Thank you again for all your kind words :3 You keep on being awesome!
Like many others here, I found this game through Manly's playthrough and I'm really interested! I wanted to see Castor's version myself, but I'm having trouble on both Windows and Linux.
The game shows the "made with unity" screen and then turns black and just stays that way. On windows at least the menu music seems to play but on Linux it doesn't even do that. Clicking around gets no response, nor does waiting around to see if it will load up on its own eventually.
Is it maybe just a specs issue or something?
I'm glad you thought it looked interesting enough to want to check out Castor after seeing Manly's playthrough :3 For Linux, I'm gonna be zero help because I have no idea how the heck they work, unfortunately :( I don't even know anyone with Linux that I can ask to help me test those builds. I just use the default build settings on Unity and hope it works >.<
For Windows though, you're not the only person to experience that problem! Another user described the exact same thing happening to them.
Now, this is the first ever game I've made in Unity, and on the deadline night of the jam, I made my first ever build and encountered this very problem myself. After much panicking that I was gonna miss the submission deadline, I managed to figure out that it was the file type of the video on the title screen that caused the problem for me. I had a .ogv video playing. As soon as I changed it to.mp4, it was fixed on my PC and laptop. So, I'm wondering if it's the video file on the title screen still causing problems even though it's fixed for most people.
Last night, I uploaded a possible fix for the other person. If you go to the available files to download, look for the one called 'DD possible fix for LoneDeru'. It's a Windows build and what I did was I got rid of the video background on the title screen and replaced it with a static .png file instead to see if that fixes the problem. Give it a go and let me know if it makes any difference :3 If not, I'm gonna have to ask for some help from other people using Unity because I don't know what else could be causing it >.< I would have guessed possibly a resolution issue, but my laptop is an old windows laptop with a weird/uncommon resolution, and it works fine on that. *Fingers crossed* that removing the video helps anyhow!
It works! Thank you so much for your help!
Phew! Well, that's a relief :3 I'm glad it solved the problem for you! Still unsure as to why an MP4 file playing a video on the title screen would cause that to happen, but I guess at least it's not something more complicated to fix!
I just started watching mannlybadasshero play this and had to stop. To be honest...I'm getting ready now to buy this game and play it. I'm a small twitch affiliate who is a member of the Doki Doki modding community so sometimes I get bored of vns but this one really caught my eye. I hope you don't mind if I stream this soon because this just looks incredible!
Well, that's awesome :D Before Manly played it, it had next to no views or downloads after the jam finished! I'm glad it caught your eye.
I really need to get round to playing DDLC someday. The problem is, it's kinda stuck in my gigantic backlog of VNs >.< and I seem to spend all my time trying to make stuff now instead of playing things, so my backlog just keeps growing and growing!
I released an update recently which should make it run smoother + I added more custom UI so it will look a little different to how it does in Manly's vid. If you do end up streaming it, that would be awesome :3 Definitely lemme know if you decide to. I'm not that active on social media cos it terrifies me, and I don't exactly have heaps of followers, but I can still make a post or something to give your stream a shout out.
There's a lot more content to come because Winter Wish is where I had to stop in order to submit something standalone for the jam. The full game should include 8+ characters, each with multiple episodes. So this is kinda like Castor/ia's intro episode. I just have to hope I will be able to afford the voice acting cos I think the project wouldn't really be the same without it.
Thanks so much for the support :3
absolutely! if you want ill message on twitter (i followed) when I do! I showed some of the mannly playthrough to my stream and discord mod team and they think it looks awesome. Also i do highly recommend DDLC. The mod I'm making of it is actually a crossover of Corpse Party and DDLC. But Ill make sure I message you as soon as I schedule the stream. Itll be here in the next couple of days! <3
Sure! I shall go check Twitter in a sec and follow you back then :3 I'm still very new to trying to use Twitter xD I'm sure there are many grandmas and grandads across the world who are more adept at it than me, haha. I'm just so scared of social media that I've tried to avoid it for ages x3 but as my friends keep telling me, I do need to try and use it more. I should probably actually get the app on my phone instead of just remembering to check every now and again on my PC!
Oh, man, you've reminded me of another game in my backlog now xD The Corpse Party stuff is all on there too! I bought the first one + DDLC aaaaages ago and still haven't gotten round to either >.< I think I would need to take like a couple of years break from doing anything else to get through my backlog at this point T_T That sounds like an epic crossover mod though!
Okie dokies :3
Nice game, the voice acting was really good. Keep the good work !
Glad you think so :3 Thanks for taking the time to check it out + comment! With any luck, I'll actually be able to pay the VAs for their wonderful work in Castor/ia's next episode :D I still feel awful that I was too poor to pay them for what they did for the jam >.<
hi
Hey ^_^/
hi
hiow are u british woman
Very, very tired and have a headache xD Still recovering from the game jam I finished last week + my body kinda just hates summer >.< I always get loads of headaches in the summer! But more than anything, I need sleep, haha.
This game was a good one!! I really enjoyed it ! I played it with my friends and we had a blast !!
Woo! That's awesome :D Glad to hear you guys had fun with it. Thanks for taking the time to play and comment :3 I hope you'll enjoy everything else that's in store for this project too. There's more content in the works for Castor/ia + plans for plenty of other characters to be added as well!
My friends and I can't wait !!
˙ʇdǝɔuoɔ ☆☆☆☆☆ ˙ǝɹǝɥʇ lɐᴉʇuǝʇod ɟo ʇolɐ s'ǝɹǝɥ┴ ˙ǝɯɐƃ ɹnoʎ ǝʇɐᴉɔǝɹddɐ I 'ǝɹǝɥʇ ɹǝɥ
Aww, thanks so much for the support :3 I really appreciate it and I'm glad you like the idea of the game!
It's something I'm very excited to continue developing :D I've got a hell of a lot of stuff drafted out. I think I know which character I'm going to write the introductory episode for next!
I need to do a better job of actually making regular devlogs as I work. I sorta just bury myself in projects and forget to actually write updates half the time >.<
I just got to my PC for the day and saw something weird had happened on itch, haha. I had a notification for a comment you left on DD other than this one, but when I clicked the notification to reply, it said the comment was deleted. I dunno if that's cos you deleted it or cos something went weird with itch, haha. Anyways, what I was gonna say in response was that if that actually did happen, I may have a heart attack, shit myself, or a terrifying combination of both x3 haha.
I watched Manly play a few mins of this before it made me want to try it out myself. I can honestly say I thoroughly enjoyed it <3 It was short and sweet.. and I'm a little sad it ended lol. The design (and voice acting) for Castor was so well done~ I love him!
Keep up the great work!~ I look forward to see what happens with this in the future <3
Well, that's awesome :D Glad to hear it! I wish I could thank Manly because this project was practically unknown before he played it x3 like most of my stuff really, haha.
Thank you so much for the support :3 Every bit helps more than I can even describe! I'm really excited to continue working on the project. I'm not quite sure how to release everything I've got planned because there is a lot of stuff, haha. Around 8-10 characters with 4+ episodes each is what I've got drafted out for the full version! So this is pretty much just Castor/ia's episode 1. I actually had a whole other scene written for their ep 1 that I had to cut because there wasn't enough time to get it done with the jam deadline >.< but it'll just go into ep 2 instead I suppose!
But yeah, it's gonna turn out to be quite a long game by the time everything I have planned is in there :3 I'll be starting to release the audio-only tracks for download soon + making some audio drama stuff for YT if I have the time.
Thank you again ^-^
i watched manly play this game and i really liked it! i plan to definitely keep a eye on this project. Great job dev and love the art!
I'm glad you liked it :3 I'm super excited to work on this project some more because I've had lots of stuff for all the characters planned out since making this at Christmas. I owe Manly a lot for shedding some light on the game because before he played it, hardly anyone had viewed or downloaded it since the jam, haha.
Thank you for your kind words :3
Yo so glad I bought this game. Short? Yes. Simple? Yes. But there's clear amount of passion and hard work. I can feel it oozing out the game. That's not something you just put out. That's not something you find anywhere too often. Can't wait to see what comes in the future. Hope you keep doing what you love. CHEERZ
Aww, thank you so much for taking the time to play, comment, and support the game! I really appreciate it :3 I'm glad that you enjoyed it + that the level of effort I put in shows because you're absolutely right, I poured a lot of time and love into this, haha. Just getting all the expression changes to match up with the voice acting took hours upon hours in itself xD As did editing all the audio from the voice actors. I had many sleepless nights trying to get it to some form of completion in time for the end of the jam!
Since this is basically just the first episode for one of many characters (who will all have around 4 episodes each) I have planned, I hope that you'll enjoy the full game even more when it's eventually out :3 There's a hell of a lot more content to come! I just figured I would use the jam as a way to motivate myself to start it. If there had been more time before the end of the jam, I would have made Castor/ia's introductory episode longer.
The game has sort of been in limbo since Christmas because I've got other projects on the go, but also because it's quite reliant on voice acting, and I can't afford to pay voice actors for their time and talent with how poor I am. It wouldn't be right to keep expecting folks to just offer up their skills for free just because I'm broke either. So your support means a hell of a lot because it's the difference between the game's development getting to continue or not :3
Okay sooooooo. I finished the game and got the two endings. I say it's a cute short game. purely a fluff-filled game. Manly played this game and I wanted to try and see Castor's voice. And it didn't disappoint, it was good :D
I do want to point out some of the bugs I encountered:
- Sometimes there is so much text in the box that sometimes it breaks out of the text box and into the text box frame when using Castor/Castoria text box.
- The black text box keeps changing in size because there is too much text said by the MC (isn't really a bug but it's a little UI management)
- The voice lines would still be playing even after I skipped their text, which happens when I use the skip button. (again not really a bug, but it's a bit of a tease waiting for it to finish, instead of the game just skipping the voice lines too as it usually does in VN games)
But overall, a nice short game :D
I'm glad you enjoyed it despite the fact that it's basically just an introductory episode to the first of many characters that I have planned for this game as a whole :3 I would have done more with it, but since I finally decided to get to work on the idea when the game jam came around, I was pretty short on time cos of the jam deadline, so there's a lot that I didn't have time to include and fix, unfortunately >.<
It's a long way off, but in the final version of the game, each character (Castor/ia included) will have a story around quadruple the length of the current download. While I did manage to make it a sort of standalone game in time for the end of the jam, the whole thing is far from finished :3 I've got 8-10 character routes planned, and as each character's story unfolds, there will be more story + player choices alongside the fluffy stuff, haha. In the end, there will be far more than just 2 endings per character, and choices will make a much bigger difference if all pans out the way I have it planned.
Yeah, unfortunately, due to the jam time limit, I didn't get too much of a chance to do anything with UI :( As you say, there are issues with padding in the text boxes, among other things >.< The only reason I haven't already fixed stuff like that is because I've been focusing on other projects, and I never imagined in a million years that this would get such a boost in exposure xD Practically no one played it outside of the jam until Manly made that video! I had planned to just leave everything as it was until I add the next character's first episode, but since the game has more views/downloads now, I'm already working on tidying up the UI as I type this to you :3 Hopefully, I'll be able to get the padding sorted out + I'm creating some new stuff for menus and such since I had to just use the default UI for the most part in order to make sure I had something playable for the end of the jam.
The only thing I'm not sure I will be able to change is what you mentioned regarding the voice lines still playing when text is skipped. If they were set as sound effects, I know I could stop them, but I've assigned them using the voice map utility within Naninovel. I notice it has the option to make sure voices don't overlap (which I have active), but I don't see any options at all to make it stop playing when text is skipped >.< Either it's not possible with the way the software works, or there's an option that I'm missing somewhere. I'll have to ask in the support if anyone knows a way to make it force stop voice map audio because I personally find it quite irritating when skipping myself, haha.
Anyways, thanks so much for taking the time to play the game and leave a comment! All your feedback is much appreciated :3 I hope that you'll enjoy the full game when it's eventually out!
Sadly, it wasn't :( I can't draw to save my life, haha T_T The only game of mine currently that features completely original sprites is Apartment No.9 because I was able to team up with artists for the jam.
For my other games, I'm forced to use sprites that I either created in generators I've bought or sets that I purchased on sale and edited.
The sprites in DD come from a Japanese artist called sasAIchi who has sold a couple of packs of sprite art online for use in games. I don't like to use them as they come though because I want to make them at least somewhat unique to my games, so what I did was heavily edit the colours using GIMP. The original versions of these sprites are blonde with blue eyes + clothing is white and blue, haha.
I'm glad you think so :3 I certainly pour all of my love into them, haha. It's a shame that I suck so badly at drawing because if I could draw, I'd be able to do so much more!
I'm very thankful for Manly playing a couple of my games :3 It makes a huuuuge difference because my social anxiety is too bad for me to use social media very often, so I'm a fairly unknown dev with no way of getting my stuff out there. If not for people like him showing indie games on streams, I'd stay an unknown dev forever, haha.
Thank you for the luck! I will certainly need it with everything I've got planned :D And all the best to you too! Thank you so much for all your kind words :3
Hey there! Fellow game dev here, I noticed you switched from Tyrano (a pretty play by numbers builder) to Unity. Did you find Unity to be a better experience for making this VN? I'm typically a Ren'Py stan, but I've been eyeing unity for some time now. I'm just paranoid that shifting any projects over to it will be a huge time sink. I already procrastinate enough as it is. d:
Hey hey! Yeah, I was beginning to get pretty frustrated with all the issues Tyrano had that just weren't getting fixed by the engine devs after years. They actually released a huge update for Tyrano recently, which really shocked me because I thought it was dead support-wise! It looks like a decent update, but I doubt I'll be using it again.
I found Unity (specifically using Naninovel) a much smoother experience for creating than Tyrano by a long shot. It was so easy to pick up! I would absolutely recommend Unity with Nani over Tyrano any day. But over Ren'Py? I'm not so certain there. I feel like a lot of the games I've played that were made with Ren'Py are really smooth and I love the default sorta UI setup. I'm still kinda wrestling with Unity's UI and find it a bit of a nightmare to deal with, haha.
I haven't released any games made with Ren'Py, but I did start learning how to make stuff using it before I bought Tyrano on sale. From what I learned back then, I thought Ren'Py was fantastic. I only checked out Tyrano because I thought it might save time over learning Python. I do regret that decision now though because while Tyrano was super easy to get to grips with, I feel like the visual system really slows down the pace of development as opposed to typing everything up in Visual Studio Code like I do now.
If you're already very comfortable with Ren'Py, I'd say that maybe it's not worth switching to anything else. But I do highly recommend Naninovel despite that. It's very easy to use + the creator is constantly updating it with new features that the community requests, so the overall support for it is fantastic.
Sorry if I wasn't all that helpful >.< It's hard to give a good answer when I'm not overly familiar with using Ren'Py. It's just, from the little time I spent using it + the games I've played made with it, it seems to me like the best option around still considering it's completely free. If you do decide to check out Nani, it does go on sale on the Unity asset store quite often. I got it at 75% discount in the winter sale. There's no way I could afford it at full price >.<
This was actually super helpful! Seeing as your library didn't include any games made in Ren'Py I didn't expect you to have much experience with it, so no worries. I will look into Naninovel though!
See, my main reason for considering walking away from Ren'Py is that I am not a particularly code savvy person. I'm a writer who picks up bits of code from all over the Internet and shoves it together to try and get what I want. This is all well and good, but it also leads to me not finishing my games as I find myself needing to find other people to help me code, and as I have no money, I feel bad if I can't compensate them well for their skills and time. Especially when coding is so integral to the creation of any game. (I also am not an artist, but that's a bit easier to work around with placeholder art I make myself until I can get money together and hire someone to make exactly what I need.)
Plus, Ren'Py does have some limits as to what you can do gameplaywise. It is designed with the traditional VN structure in mind, and if you want to step beyond that, you need some real coding chops to skirt about the limitations of the engine. Don't get me wrong, Ren'Py is an amazing engine, and I would highly recommend it to anyone out there. Especially given its price point is very good. (Free.) I'm just not sure it's the best engine for what I want to make these days.
After seeing what you managed with Unity on this game here, I'm thinking it may be the better way to go. I actually have a somewhat similar idea I've been working on for some time now, (No worries, it isn't about a digital person becoming real, which is a very cool concept and I wish you loads of luck getting it finished, I did love what I saw so far. It's a Princess Maker style game where you teach a robot how to be human.) and it will be a lot easier adding JRPG style elements to it in unity, I believe. Having never touched unity I'm not sure how seamless it would be to combine two very drastic coding needs together.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to reply to me! The games I've seen from you so far are very neat, and line up pretty strongly with my tastes, so I will be following you from here on to see where things go. (I'm also an audio design nerd, and adored the digital manipulations you did with the VA's here.) It'll be sad not to hear them in future installments, but I absolutely get wanting to pay them very well for their work, and just not having the cash to do that sort of thing. Perhaps as this project progresses you can make a kickstarter and add voicework in as a goal. It's actually not that bad of a process, the team I worked with for the last game I finished did one and it really helped us get on our way. However, I would not recommend including merch as a donation tier! That really bit us in the butt later.
Well, that's good then, haha. Yeah, Nani is definitely worth looking into!
Ahh, in that case, I said that Nani would probably be right up your alley :3 I'm the same really. I sorta learned bits of code here and there, but ultimately, it gives me a headache >.< I just want to be able to write and build the stories/games. I have to say, Nani does do an excellent job of helping you do that relatively easily and quickly. I still have a lot to learn, but it's certainly easy to get started with.
While I haven't tried anything outside of traditional VN gameplay with Nani yet, I have seen on the guides that it's supposed to be pretty easy to integrate with other Unity assets in order to make hybrid games such as RPGs with heavy dialogue systems :3 From what I understand, you're supposed to be able to switch between Nani and other stuff pretty seamlessly. Since I've not looked into it in detail though, I couldn't tell you how easy it is to do. But it does sound like Nani would be ideal for what you're looking to do :D
Also, that sounds like a very fun idea for a game! I would absolutely play that :3
No worries! Actually, I would love to ask you some questions regarding Kickstarter if you have a spare moment to talk about that because while I have looked into it before, from what I've read, it's super hard to make a successful campaign >.< so it would be great to hear how you guys went about it to get some tips :D No worries if you're too busy or you don't feel like talking about it though! I guess if you want to, you can just drop me an email here: melancholicmarionette@gmail.com
And gosh, yeah, I can imagine merch being quite the nightmare x3 haha.
I'm happy to answer any questions you have, and I'll shoot you a message soon so that this comment section doesn't get too bogged down.
Hey hey ! I apparently didn't gave my opinion on this game, so... It was GREAT ! Both routes, and I tried both Castor and Castoria (Castor's voice reminds me of Byakuya Togami or Nagito Komaeda from Danganronpa ehe), the voice actors are great ! Loved them ! Also, ManlyBadassHero just played your game apparently, congrats ^^
Edit : as a Monika stan, from DDLC, I downloaded the After Monika mod recently, and she reminds me a lot of Castoria. Tho I'd say Castoria might even be cuter ^w^
I'm glad you enjoyed it :3 I really need to go back and fix my messy code because this was the first thing I made in Unity, and I think if you're not using a scroll wheel to advance the text, there are likely a lot of unnecessary mouse clicks in this because I was a noob when I made it >.< haha.
Yeah, the voice actors certainly did an amazing job with the character! I'm hoping that by the time I finish writing Castor/ia's next episode, I'll actually be able to afford to pay them for their work because I feel awful that they volunteered their time and talent and I'm too poor to give them something back :(
I still haven't played DDLC x3 I really should someday! The only thing that's put me off for all this time is that it's all girls and not dudes xD Give me DDLC with dudes and I'll be straight in there, haha.
Hehe, I'm glad I enjoyed it too X3
I don't think so ! I only used the scroll wheel to scroll back when I clicked on accident and skipped text TwT, I don't think it was that bad !
Ah yeah... I have that problem too, kinda, with the game I'm creating rn, cause a friend of mine is creating the musics and some of the sprites, but since we're both like 15 it's no big deal for them... Still I feel bad asking him all that stuff while I'm making so little advance on the coding in itself TwT
You really should ! I'm not just saying that cause it's a game that marked me almost as much as Undertale, but also cause it's a great experience in itself and could inspire you with your games since there's some similarities ^^
Tho it's your choice haha, I'm sorry for being so insistant ! I really tend to do that with things I love (I'm still
yelling on my friendstelling them they really should play Omori TwT)Lmfao, as a bi/pan????? disaster I usually love games when you have the choice to choose between male and female characters (or non-binary pals but gosh it's sooooo rare), so it doesn't bother me at all ^^ But really, DDLC is way more than a romance game, so it's a great experience even if you don't like girls :)
(I should stop rambling on DDLC and LGBT X') )Hmm, maybe it's not as bad as I thought then. I will still look into it though cos if there are any in there, it will be really frustrating for players who can't use a scroll wheel like if they're on a laptop or something >.<
That's pretty darn awesome that you're both working on creating a game at such a young age though! Try not to worry about how long it's taking because if you stick at it, it'll all come together in time :3 I'm nearly 30 myself xD But because of my poor mental health, I'm not employed very often since companies here tend not to be very understanding of people suffering with mental health problems >.< They're not supposed to discriminate, but as soon as they find out you have autism, I'm pretty sure they just throw your CV away :( If I had a job with regular income, I could put the money towards game development, but because I don't, I'm completely reliant on donations to try and pay anyone who is helping me out. So far, everyone has been kind enough to volunteer their skills, but that can't continue forever cos it's just not right when they deserve to be paid.
I will get round to DDLC one day, haha. I kinda have a horrendously huge backlog of VNs, let alone other video games xD I want to start playing some, but my brain screams at me to keep working on things instead >.< I've actually managed to avoid a lot of DDLC spoilers over the years since I figured I'd play it someday, haha. I've heard some of the stuff that happens without full spoilers. I just feel like maybe it would lose its impact on me because I'm not likely to really care about the characters very much with them being cute girls x3 but ya never know! Actually, Undertale is another game I've never gotten around to trying (I'm terrible, I know xD)
But yeah, I don't mind you being insistent :3 It's nice that you're so passionate about em!
Well, I really want to try and be as inclusive as possible with my games :3 Sometimes it's kinda hard cos of the extra work that's required in adding different options, and when it comes to the art for player characters, I don't really have the option of including like multiple skin tones and stuff since I can't draw to save my life and have to rely on stock sprites or purchased generators >.< I wanted to just try and keep DD as gender-neutral where we never see the player character and have everything in first-person + the choice of sprites and voices for each character to give the player more of an option of what they wanna hear/see. But then I also realised that writing certain scenes in a gender-neutral way is quite difficult, haha. My own sexuality still confuses me though xD I think I'm ace/demi!
Feel free to ramble as much as you like :D I do a hell of a lot of rambling myself, haha.