Starting Arbiter

…ok, so. I’ve been suffering from 50 projects syndrome again, and I’ve been spending the last few weeks making a small(ish…) visual novel with the following goals:

• improve my dialogue / interactive fiction engine in anticipation for using it in [other projects]
• get out of my writer’s block
• doing something that isn’t just programming, because my day job has been stressful!

And I really thought I’d just do it for a bit and get it out of my system, but oops, I’ve somehow committed to polishing this up (at least a bit) and writing music and drawing backgrounds. So…I figure I should actually share some of that progress.

Anyway, arbiter (extremely working title) is a short (15k-ish words?) modern fantasy visual novel about four strangers who got stuck in a magical rift for three months, and the awkward recovery period of trying to go back to their normal lives after they escape.

I’m creating all of the assets because I didn’t think to collaborate for this project, and the game is written in Javascript as a web app. I’m planning on releasing it for free when I’m done, and hopefully soon – if I get to the end of April without something showable, I’ll probably be a little sad.

Anyway, here’s a screenshot of what it looks like right now!