A few more details

First of all, let me brief you on the quick and dirty:

- over 100,000 words of text
- over 15 unique endings
- single playthrough approximately 2 hours; full gane should be at least 8 hours of reading time
- unique "adventure-style" first act, much more focused on exploration than most visual novels
- original theme song and voiced introduction
- all-original art
- engaging "hard sci-fi" plot with a mystery behind it that will keep you on your toes

Visually, Adrift is my finest game so far, the reason being two great artists whose help I was lucky to enlist. The main artist calls herself Luna Hoshi, also known as Mangaka Luna from the Lemmasoft Forums. She both designed and drew all of the character art, all of the backgrounds, the title screen and a significant part of the game's CGs. A few examples of her art:

The little helicopter robot in above picture is an example of what my other artist, G_D_I_, created for me: the usually underrated "additional art". Really, without "additional art", most games would be nothing; without those little contributions, a lot of the mood just wouldn't be there, and the GUI would be crap instead of this:

This is the interface for the first third of the game: it shows a graphical overview of the city of Bluetide, the location of four robots you can control (currently, all of them are in the central section) and which robot you currently control (the humanoid guy on the right side of the screen). Pick a 'bot, pick a location, robot moves there, do stuff there. Essentially, a map you can use to move through the underwater city. Simple, but neat, just how I wanted it.

Most of the music for my games comes from open-source directories, and it's no different for Adrift. My choice was "Celestian Aeon Project", a group of very talented electronica musicians who are masters at writing ambient tracks that convey just the right mood. The main title, however, was originally composed by another member of the Lemmasoft Forums named Mihel, and for the intro, I was able to get the help of a professional voice actress known as sake-bento. It all fits together so well that I really think I should have made this a commercial project.

Ah, done is done, and I'm satisfied with the final result. I hope you're too.

Oh... and that secret Karaoke Contest I mentioned last time... if you can find it and contact me about it, I'll have you design an original character in my next VN. That, and maybe give you a free release of my next few commercial titles. Because it's inevitable there will be commercial releases from me. Sometime over 2012.

Big plans, I know. But feasible plans.

Shoulda been "a few more months"...

...but it is finally done! Grab the multi-platform download at this location!

More about the game... and the secret Hinami Karaoke Contest to follow here!

Only a few more days

Okay. Not much longer until Adrift finally releases. I guess I should start explaining what Adrift actually is, right?

Adrift is a science-fiction visual novel. For those unfamiliar with the term "visual novel", it's a multi-ending piece of narrative fiction you read on your computer. It's called "visual" because, you see, along with the text you read, you also get pictures. Pictures like that one:

These four lovely young women are the main characters of the story, though they are not the protagonist. But I'll get to that in a minute.

Adrift takes place in the far future, a few hundred years from now. Earth is so overpopulated that a large path of humanity now lives in huge cities on the bottom of the sea. One of these communities is Bluetide, currently housing over seven million people. The cities are entirely self-dependent; they create their own energy with tidal power plants, they grow their own food, they recycle everything they cannot produce themselves perfectly.

Very elaborate artificial intelligences take care of the cities, controlling life support, production, safety, even education. The residents of the cities do not have to work for a living; everything is provided for them, and they are free to spend their time however they want. Many are artists and writers, and the AIs encourage them to find their hidden talents.

Of course, any malfunction with the AIs could be devastating to the citizens. This is why there is one safeguard: Each underwater city has a Supervisor, a single human whose only task is to oversee the work of the AIs. In order to keep up with the speed at which the AIs are working, this Supervisor is kept in a constant state of sleep, his subconscious wired into the positronic network that links the AIs.

Adrift is about the question what happens when that Supervisor suddenly loses control.

You, the player, are the Supervisor.

Interested? Thought so.

So I guess it's time I started...

So this is it. This is going to be the homepage of my latest Visual Novel, ADRIFT. And this from me, the guy who sucks at creating homepages. And with a Blogspot account too.

Okay, I really hope I'm up to that challenge...