Tunnel Vision And How To Summon A Demon. Spooktober Visual Novel Showcase!

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Catting Sim by DragonQuills

Like a dating sim except you're a cat and you don't date anyone

Mr Fuffington is out in the wild! DragonQuills over on itch.io made a cozy, wonderful visual novel about finding a place to live for the winter.

I've played through the first story and the writing is delightful and has a great sense of humour. Also there's an adorable romance between the humans.

(Also the opening music is Pawtastic!)

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

Game jam stuff - today the writer wanted a tiger for the labyrinth!

A tiger getting ready to strike...

So I know I'm not gonna get time to hand draw a vicious tiger so I thought I'd see what I could cobble together from available images on pexels and pixabay.

With a bit of tweaking and some filters I came up with a tiger. This project is getting big so I'm having to resort to some quick and dirty tactics. Here's hoping it works!

Lydia's Labyrinth is coming to the Spooktober Visual Novel Jam 2024 - now with a tiger!

A sneak peek at Lydia's Labyrinth... Mwah Darlings!

It's day 2 of the Spooktober VN jam! Here's a quick image drop to show off the look we're going for in Lydia's Labyrinth!

As always, royalty free photos from pixabay are doing the heavy lifting for backgrounds and graphic design. I add a lot of colouring and effects to make it look more vampy.

I've also started the coding in Renpy and Robert is working on the writing, maze design and sound effects. So it's all go and I hope we can get this dangerous labyrinth finished!

Hope your all having a great Spooktober and keep healthy during the jam!

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.

Travel DevLog 2.5 - making work for idle hands.

Been sick. Have been drawing lots to get through it. Here's Kirby with his hair in a towel.

Proper devlog will come next week.

Thanks for stopping by :)

DoubleFree

Spooktober Visual Novel Game Jam - Judging is LIVE!

And we got our game finished!

Hi and welcome everyone!

It's been a whirlwind this September but I'm delighted to annaounce that Travel Devil is live and a part of the jam!

itch.io

Travel Devil by Valhallions, DoubleFree

The essential demonic guide for touring the human world.

It's a short VN about a botched demonic summoning turning into the adventure of a lifetime. Our host, Tornacense, finally escapes the administrative department of hell to pursue his dreams of becoming the hottest new content creator on Doomtube! But will all this exposure lead to unwanted attention from the upper echelons of demon society?

Travel Devil was made in collaboration with Robert from Valhallions. He was fantastic to collab with and got stuck in with all aspects of the game.

I worked on the coding, character design, image manipulation and GUI. I'm so glad we got it finished on time! It was a mad rush at the end and there were times we weren't sure we would make it. I'm still so tired but so happy!

Also, I can't wait to try the other entries in the jam. This is my favourite time of the year, it's going to be so much fun!

You can check all the games out here:

itch.io

Spooktober 5th Annual Visual Novel Jam

A game jam from 2023-09-01 to 2023-10-28 hosted by Remort Studios & Crystal Game Works. Are you a streamer looking to stream for the jam? Be

Thanks for stopping by!

DoubleFree

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!

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...

itch.io

Spooktober 6th Annual Visual Novel Jam

A game jam from 2024-09-01 to 2024-10-31 hosted by Nai @ MakeVisualNovels. Event News The Awards Show is October 30th at 8 PM EDT! We'll be

Thanks for stopping by and stay safe my fiendish friends!