I have finished making the first version of my Ren’Py game, the premise has you playing as a scholar who has traveled to the Reserve of Overweight Hybrids on behalf of the Hybrid Research Society (HRS), you’ll meet up with the owner and hear the stories of the ROH’s inhabitants.
The game currently features no music, sound, or visuals, it’s good ol’ text-based goodness.
There are currently around 17,000 words worth of content and plenty of replay value.
The game currently has a single character, who fills a cat girl maid archetype. She’s about 2/3rds done in terms of content and will feature several endings.
If you are curious as to the lack of visuals it’s because I don’t have the skills nor the budget to have art made for this game. I could use AI art but that’s still quite the contentious topic, so I’ll choose to avoid it for now.
Similar story with music, though I also don’t know how Copyright works when it comes to this sort of project, I might add some in later.
If you liked this, make sure to also check out my DeviantArt account where I upload written stories.
Ultimately if you need art, and can learn AI art making then you should just do it. If you didn’t have the funds to pay an artist in the first place then no one has lost work and if someone volunteered art for free they would be operating at a net loss so really you’re not actually hurting anyone. People are just melodramatic.
Royalty free music is pretty easy to get and you can also find sound effects but I’d save that for polish at the end. There are few hells worse than the same generic songs playing forever. Moreover people tend to just mute the music unless it’s original and really slaps for some reason.
For music and assets you can check out opengameart.org
They have some decent stuff on there. At most you’ll have to drop an attribute in your game somewhere if you use an artists work.
I think it would add a lot just to have backgrounds for the scenes, even if you don’t have character art. That you can do with AI fairly easily.
As for the game, I really enjoyed what you have so far. You appear to be an excellent writer, and I am very much looking forward to playing more of this, even if some moments were slightly incestuous.
Much as I loved the game, I do want to bring up a few things that could make it even better. I think it would be really cool if the decisions you make had some effect on Layla’s gain. Something like she gains 15lbs if you focus on gold/favor, or gains 25lbs if you eat a bunch. I also wish there were more weeks. I would love it if we could go through several rounds of choosing activities and seeing the effects, rather than do it once and jump several weeks. I know that would be a fair bit more work, and it may well be beyond the scope of what you want to do with this game, but the writing is just so good that I can’t help but want more.
@moonslashx Thank you for your advice, not making any promises but I’ll keep it in mind for future releases.
@Zabi I understand that some people would see it that way but to be clear, that wasn’t my intention. Some interactions will be ‘steamy’, nothing too out of the ordinary as to this sort of game but it also won’t ‘jump the shark’ so to speak. In short, there won’t be anything too explicit or sexual acts between any of the characters, I’m not really into that stuff.
As to your comments on the game, they are very much appreciated! I’m glad you liked it, as to the structure of the game, I didn’t want to be too ambitious for a first release, but as I learn more about game design and story planning, I’ll try to give it a try at some point.
@blargballs Thank you very much! I’ll work hard on making the next version as good as it can be.
