Early Development - 1st Reverie

It is noon on December 22nd...

The Early Development Trailer and this itch.io page have been published. The time has arrived to begin talking about this project.

Dungeon of Departure—like most creative endeavors—started with a simple question: how would you escape from a cave-in with no hope of rescue? This took root in daydreams over the course of a few weeks before solidifying itself as a true writing project with decent potential as ideas coalesced. At some point it was decided to mold this idea to fit a medium that would do it the most justice, and so it became a visual novel. This is the first project in this medium from quite adept, and with little experience playing or coding VNs, it should be expected that this project will not follow the established visual novel style or conventions.

That is to say this project is not fully outsider art. It borrows its dialogue style and character positioning from Fire Emblem games of the 2000s-2010s, its writing style from fantasy fiction adventure novels, and is colored throughout with approachable pixel art backgrounds and graphics. And of course, Dungeon of Departure is made in RenPy, the go-to visual novel coding platform. But beyond that, it could be considered a departure from the typical visual novel in terms of story, presentation, and pacing. Hopefully you'll understand what this means as more of the game is revealed.

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Here's where we're at so far:

• Characters - 1 of 3 main characters drawn, animated, and coded (Akari) - 0 of ? side characters drawn and coded
• Artwork - 4 of ? background artwork created - logo completed - GUI artwork about 40% complete
• Music - 5 of 20+ tracks completed
• Dialogue - 7380 words written out of expected 80,000 words across all story paths
• Overall - at this point, the game is approximately 7% complete

That's all for now. Thank you.
- quite adept