It's Been A Long Time In The Works, But We're Finally Getting Ready To Launch These Kobold Themed T-shirts

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Truly Sublime by DoubleFree

An audition on a private island paradise becomes a struggle for survival for girl band "Truly Sublime."

What a wonderful night for a quick throwback! I'd like to introduce you to the game which started my Spooktober journey.

You play as Penelope, who's just about ready to give up on her dream of being a singer, until she finds an audition notice for the opportunity of a lifetime... An audition for a reality TV show on a private island which turns into a fight to survive and may see some dark truths come to light.

Truly Sublime was created for the Spooktober Visual Novel Jam two years ago and it's nice to look back on it. Back then, this was my second game that I had published so it's got a couple of rough edges but I want to leave it as it is until I get time to make a shiny, better version.

There was so much cut from the game to make it work in the jam's timeframe so it might be a fun one to return to one day and explore the untold stories, especially with the character Lucinda. She had her own story and endings planned too.

Thanks for checking out my nostalgia ramble and I hope you're having a lovely Autumn evening!

Cheers for stopping by and take care!

It's October 1st, you know what time it is!

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Lydia's Labyrinth by Valhallions, DoubleFree

Welcome to my labyrinth darling! Do please try not to die too quickly, will you?

Lydia's Labyrinth is out just in time to hit that Spooktober Visual Novel Jam release deadline!

We wanted to mash up the feel of a choose your own adventure book and a mystery story. Then we threw in a hearty helping of a larger than unlife, thirsty vampire who seems to know a lot about you.

Don't keep her waiting darling!

Introducing Lydia...

We're getting ready for Spooktober season with our upcoming escape visual novel - Lydia's Labyrinth!

Can you escape from her evil clutches and solve the mystery of your shared past?

For the third year we're taking part in Spooktober visual novel jam. Can't wait to see what everyone creates!

Travel DevLog 2 - Working with the devil on my shoulder.

Week 2 of development has been going well on Travel Devil 2. We’re setting it straight after the first game so you get to see how the dynamics of Tornacense and Kirby are changing as they get used to being around each other.

Tornacense and Kirby facing an unhinged street preacher in the first game.

It’s great returning to these characters. I’m trying to make their drawings more exciting and dynamic. I’ve got a lot more time to make the character drawings now as I’m not working to game jam timeframes. I’m also going to learn to use the Renpy Action Editor to add more options to the movements in the game.

I’ve been working on many different aspects of the Travel Devil 2 to keep things interesting and motivating. Here’s what I’ve been up to:

Many more concept sketches were drawn. Now I need to get them looking swish on the computer.

Backgrounds and video footage of Amsterdam have been sourced to showcase in the vlog parts of the game.

Set up a Bluesky profile – now I just have to learn to use it :S

Spent a lot of time updating software – yay!

Planned some fancy menus for 1st game recap, unlockables and character profiles

Coded some of the game framework in Renpy

Drank a lot of tea (Woo rock and/or roll!)

I've been using the plot outline to build the framework for the game. Robert has been working away on the writing. He's already written the recap of the first game and the opening scene which we’ve been hammering out together.

We’re hoping to get Travel Devil 2 out this year if we can. However if you can’t wait, you can pop on the old humask and check out the (short) first installment here on itch.io.

Thanks for stopping by and I hope March is treating you well!

No filters and hot off the drawing table! These are some work in progress sketches for an upcoming project...

Lydia's Labyrinth has received some wonderful feedback during the Spooktober Visual Novel Jam. We aimed to make a choose your own adventure story with a healthy dose of mystery and a cute and deadly host and thanks to some helpful comments and suggestions from amazing players, we're going to bring out a game book of the story 😁

It's going to be the first book in our "Choose Your Fate" series and we hope to bring many of our ideas and stories to the table under this project. The sketches above are for dividing sections of the story and feature props and elements from Lydia's game.

Thanks to everyone who has played our game! It's the most downloaded one we've ever made and it really means a lot to me and Robert.

If you want to see the original jam version of the game you can check it out here...

itch.io

Lydia's Labyrinth by Valhallions, DoubleFree

Welcome to my labyrinth darling! Do please try not to die too quickly, will you?

Thanks for stopping by and take care!

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!

itch.io

CHEATERS (demo) by Venado Artificial

A dangerous ritual, one big mansion, two friends, and three days. (IN DEVELOPMENT)

Played a great visual novel demo today! Super writing and lore which I'm looking forward to seeing more of.

Also thanks for using Mr Fuffington as the cat!

Ooh, excited to play this one! Looking great :)

itch.io

A Great Hunger by goldieclaws

A demon offers a woman a terrifying proposal: to kill the man she once loved.

Hiii I finally finished and uploaded my submission to itchio! Please consider checking it out if you like demons, branching storylines, and watching mean men get beat up by said demon lmao

A short Dark Fantasy game made as a submission for the Spooktober 5th Annual Visual Novel Jam, being worked on during the month of September.

This game is set in an already existing universe, but can be experienced as a standalone story.

Game made in Ren'py

Roughly 6.2k word count

About 30 minutes of gameplay

5 different endings

Hand-drawn backgrounds, illustrations, and character sprites

Story, Artwork and Backgrounds - GoldieClaws

Music - Kevin MacLeod

Reblogs appreciated, thank you!! 💖✨

So things were hectic for many reasons last week, and thus I wasn't able to finish "Forget Me Nots Club" despite trying to throw myself into it at times!

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Forget Me Nots Club (Demo) by BibiXP

A Halloween club party with interdimensional friends. What can go wrong?

I think I'm just going to need to admit to myself that I'm a perfectionist without a huge amount of time and thus "Forget Me Nots Club" is going to have to wait a little more to be done, so this time I won't give an exact time for when it'll be done as I'm uncertain when I'll be satisfied, so I'll just say soon! Hopefully before the end of November! :3

So right now, just check out the demo while I get this done and...

Might as well give another music sneak peek! :D

This one is Carmel's! For some reason I felt the need for theirs to stick out and be a bit different, probably since they look so different from the rest of the friends and almost completely enjoy the club with no drawbacks!... At first at least!

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