Winter Visual Novel Jam 2022 On Itch.io
Winter Visual Novel Jam 2022 on itch.io
Hello and welcome everyone!
Hope you’re all having a wonderful wintery time. This year, I’m a bit disappointed as I won’t have time to make a game for the annual Winter Visual Novel Jam but I’m still really excited to try out some of the wonderful offerings that other developers have made.
So without further ado...
Winter Cube Story by daddykidos
So first of all this game runs in browser. This was super handy for just jumping right in. The story lasts about 5 minutes and I had a nice, chilly time reading it. I’ll give a little insight into the story but I won’t give too much away.
We’re following the journey of Cuki, the Winter Cube. Cuki wants to see things that they’ve never seen before and explore. Hopefully a snowy day in the mountains can live up to their wanderlust.
The game was made using HTML and JS and runs perfectly. The art is charming and simple. If you like the sound of all this, I would recommend giving it a try.
I'm going to try and look at some more games in this jam over the Winter.
Be well my friends!
More Posts from Doublefreegames and Others
Always happy to see a good grisly mystery! Just played "Disconnected" a fantastic visual novel by Teharra Rose.
You're a 911 dispatcher. You're taking to a woman who wakes up in an ice bath. She doesn't know how she got there. Can you save her life?
There's only 16 hours left of the Spooktober Visual Novel Game Jam!
I want to say a big thank you to everyone involved in the game jam this year! The quality has been amazing! So many talented creators are involved this year. You are all magnificent... the developers, artists, music makers, voice actors, streamers, and the organisers!
Of course I want to also give a big shout out to the players. All of you lovely folks give so much to us by playing the games and the feedback helps us to make things better in future.
If you're wanting to get involved, don't worry... there's still time!
Over 270 Spooktober Visual novels await you! Check them out below...
Thanks for stopping by and stay safe my fiendish friends!
Travel Devil - better the devil you know!
There's less than a week left of judging for the Spooktober Visual Novel Jam and it's been a fantastic experience for us so far! Travel Devil has received such wonderful feedback and critiques. We take on board everything that is written to us so we can make better games every time!
So today I'm going to give a little insight into how and why Travel Devil came to be.
Do you wanna know how Travel Devil came to exist?
Originally we put together a game idea for a spooky pet adoptions agency. The game would take place on Halloween and have six pets (3 unlocked and 3 locked) to play with. Each pet was going to have a unique story and minigame associated with it. It was codenamed "Spoopy Pets" and it was far too much for the me and Robert to take on and complete in the Spooktober VN Jam timeframe. We worked on it for the first two days of the jam before we were flagging problems up, so we changed trajectory. It's not a dead idea though, it's in the list of rainy day ideas.
Speaking of the rainy day ideas list, that's where Travel Devil comes in. We thought this up a while ago but just put it on the back burner as there was no time to work on it. The concept was simple - a demon escapes hell and starts a travel log. Then the servants of hell follow in its wake starting the apocalypse march on humanity. When Spoopy Pets became too big we had a look at what we had to play with and Travel Devil just sort of fell into place. Robert started writing and I started drawing.
Character design went pretty smoothly. I went for a mix of cartoon styles, drawing inspiration from things like Dead End, Gravity Falls, The Simpsons and Garfield.
Traditionally, visual novels use anime and manga style design but truth be told, I'm not very good at that style. It takes me ages to make characters look good when I try to draw like that. Hats off to all the wonderful artists in this jam who made beautiful, scintillating characters. I'm so impressed by their dedication to fantastic character art.
One of the first pitfalls I encountered was background art. I like to use sites like Pixabay to get backgrounds but recently it's been flooded with AI artworks. The game jam expressly forbids AI use in your game so we had to get creative.
Fortunately this game revolves around travel vlog creation in Paris and we found loads of creative commons photos of the famous tourist destination. Seriously there are so many fantastic photographers out there and it was a complete life and time saver for the jam. All I had to do was add a translucent white filter to the top of the photos to make the characters pop out and we had our backgrounds!
Development went well once we got on the right track. Travel Devil was made using Ren'py which is a joy to develop with. We did have to wind back our ideas at one point as both Robert and I got sick with a nasty bug but we made it. We stripped back some choices and streamlined the game to make sure we could get finished. Originally, we wanted the player to be able to unlock multiple hidden scenes in one playthrough. As the deadline loomed we simplified it so that the player would only see one of three potential side stories that were growing due to the activities of our main character Tornacense per playthrough. We included 7 unlockable scenes and also 6 unlockable images in our gallery.
There's also a nifty guide to finding all the unlockables right here if you want a more relaxing time while playing.
If you've had a chance to play Travel Devil you may have noticed that we planted some seeds in our side stories that will be big plot points as we go forward. Travel Devil is going to be a series of five games travelling around Europe making video journals and outrunning the underworld.
Tornacense and Kirby will grow, we'll meet lots of new strange and devastating people and love could be just around the corner! Who knows? That choice will be yours.
If you want to check out the first installment of Travel Devil you can nab a pentagram portal and find it right here.
Travel Devil was made for the 5th Annual Spooktober Visual Novel Jam in under 30 days. The next one will be made with a lot more time dedicated to it!
Thanks for stopping by!
DoubleFree - Artist and coder for Travel Devil
Anyone else love getting back to the basics? Been having a blast working up these paragraph dividers using a ballpoint pen and pencil!
This was so much fun last year! I've already got some game ideas brewing!
Look, i`ve never been too good at talking politics, but i do wish to make a statement that what happened today in the US elections was fucked. A whole lot of people are going to be fucked. If you are one of those stuck there....please...just do your best to stay alive...
Once upon a time...
I wrote a story about a powerful spirit trapped in a tree and the bard that helps to break the curse.
It was written for a very special little bard who was just learning to read. Some years have passed and the bard has grown and now we're adapting the story into a visual novel using Ren'Py.
We're working on bringing the fairytale to life for the Once Upon a Time VN Jam, including the magical song.
I'm working on it using a kalimba as it's a great portable little instrument... Perfect for a travelling bard.
Hopefully I can make a song worthy of such a special quest.
Hell yeah, I'm back! Travel Devil 2 - DevLog 3
Good news! Was sick. Got better! It wasn't anything major, just sucked for a while.
Bad news - Game development was pretty loosey goosey, but stuff still happened! Here's what I've been working on:
Storyboard of the prologue is planned.
Started working on a talk show set.
Concept sketches done for a demonic talk show host.
Menu art done.
Worked with the writer on the flow and pacing of the writing.
Many pose sketches done for CGs.
Development is going well, just a bit slowly but that's to be expected. We're still on track for a 2024 release on Travel Devil 2 but if you want some fiery, decision-making action you can check out the original narrative game here - Travel Devil - Episode 1 Paris. We hope you'll join us on our demonic travel vlog across Europe featuring your host Tornacense.
Thanks for stopping by!
Candy, Costumes, & Canines?!? and Eldritch Idol - Trying out games for the Spooktober Visual Novel Jam
For the past couple of days I've been trying to make a web build in ren'py of my visual novel for the jam but my efforts have proved less than stellar. The sound cues are slightly wrong and as Travel Devil relies on sound effects and music to play a part in the humour and narrative it's looking like a bust for now.
Ah well... At least I know how to do a web build now so that's good.
And it leads nicely into a game I tried recently that's web build worked great.
Candy, Costumes, & Canines?!?
Canines, Costumes & Canines?!? is a visual novel made in ren'py for the Spooktober 23 game jam and it's a cozy Hallowe'en narrative game. It features adorable costumes (seriously the sausage dog costume is delightful) and well designed cartoon style characters.
The story is about a canine costume contest and follows a mystery of how one of the contestants got poisoned. It has a nice twist and good ending.
The game has slight flickering on the character sprites in the browser version but that is far from a deal breaker. It's definitely charming and it's easy to get past that.
Eldritch Idol
I'm really enjoying cute games this year so naturally I had to check out Eldritch Idol.
The presentation here is strong.
Eldritch Idol is another ren'py devloped visual novel with a whopping 28 endings! The GUI and menus are really well designed and just feel so polished.
There's a couple of nice character choices for you as the producer to Kuku the cute, if terrifying, idol.
The story features plenty of reminders that this world is full of unspeakable abominations but Kuku presents it all in a perky and adorable way.
The gameplay follows managing Kuku's stats by doing daily activities to improve her abilities all in the hopes of creating the ultimate idol. There's sweet costumes and romance options too.
Eldritch Idol is a great, well made visual novel with an irrestable charm.
I'm not sure what I'll be playing next as I'm still going to battle with my own entry in the jam to try and get that web browser build done! I have a couple of ideas on how to make though, so fingers crossed!
Thanks for stopping by!
DoubleFree
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Hey there! I'm an indie narrative game developer.I love to make story games steeped in myth and fable using characters like vampires, demons and wraiths.
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