Causalitas - Visual Novel

This week, I have worked on my Visual Novel project. It consisted to make a textual narrative type game on the Ren'Py software, thus learning to write a story, characters, universe and creating branching paths. I had already began working on the project last week, but it evolved much more during these past few days. The Story is now close to finish and I will soon have to do a re-read of the whole thing, but for now, this game is called "Causalitas" and is about a girl called Ena and a boy named Genki, both seventeen years old, in High school, trying to uncover mysteries surrounding the multiple deaths of teenagers from their school. The main themes of the scenario are individualism, taking control of our future, our fate, & facing hardships. My main inspirations were actual events from real life that I was going trough with some of my friends and some conversations we had just before the beginning of the project.

Obviously, I faced some obstacles during the week. Firstly, implementing branching paths and choices to the story was tough, because it was disturbing the continuity of the story and the characters' evolution. To fix that, I plan on adding more dialog choices less important to the story that could led to original interactions that could make the player learn more about a character or an other (idea that someone emitted during the playtest afternoon). Beyond that, my game still has not any definitive tracks, backgrounds or even character sprites. This project is supposed to be done by groups of two people, but I was alone working on it, and as a Game designer, I was supposed to focus on the story and not the visual assets. Next week, I will try to find a solution to replace the placeholders, because the good thing is that I have still a lot of time even though the game is near completion, wich means that I will have time to polish everything up. I also add some little bugs within the script but it was not that bad, and with the help of Florian, I managed to fix all of them without much trouble.

My main objective with this project was to tell a satisfying story with character developpement and actual themes approached. In my opinion, this goal was reached good enough. As said, it was the main focus so I did not have any specific objectives other than this one, because I wanted to concentrate on the most important part without going left and right. It helped me learn about storytelling and time management, so I am satisfied with the final result.

For next week, wich will be the second last on this project, I intend to work on re-reading the script, correct the potential misspells, add more choices, sound effects and looking for a solution to fill the assets placeholders with actual artworks. It is gonna be a lot of things to work on but these are some important steps in the creation of a video game.

To conclude, I'm satisfied with where the project is going and I am excited to continue working on it.

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