My New Release (Demo)

It occurs to me that I forgot to post anything here about my new game!

Not that it's exactly in the same genre (or even particularly close to it), but it is (vaguely) Trojan War-related, so I figure I might as well, yes?  Though it's still only a demo at the moment; we ran out of time before the game jams (YaoiJam21 and SuNoFes) ended, and were only able to post the opening days of the two week long game.

The game is a visual novel called A Song of Warriors, and it transports/transforms some of the action of the Iliad to the 1980s in a fictional (but rather Detroit-like) American city.

Instead of being warriors, Achilles (Ace Lee) and Hector are rock musicians in the local indie scene, competing for the same award.  But things go awry, and the award is taken away from Achilles to be given to Hector...which irrationally makes Achilles enraged with his manager, Agamemnon (Ankit Ganesh), because...uh...because that's how the story goes.  :teardrop:

Yeah.  It doesn't work perfectly, but that particular variant on Achilles is even more unstable than the original, so...best I could come up with.  ;)

The soundtrack is really epic, and the sprites are excellent.  (The backgrounds range from excellent to rushed to mangled-by-me, but the backgrounds are also not final, whereas the sprites are.)  The script is...well, I'm too close to it to have an unbiased view of it.  :P

The game really leans into the romantic relationship between Patroclos (Pat Rock) and Achilles, so if you're a fellow Patroclos/Achilles shipper, please check it out!  (And even if you're not all that big on m/m romance, if you're interested in alternate universe versions of the Trojan War, please check it out.  Due to its inclusion in SuNoFes, there is no R18+ content.  Uh, except swearing.  There's lots and lots of that.  But I figured that was probably not what the rules for SuNoFes referred to by R18+ content.)

Due to our programmer having prior commitments for the month of September, I am taking over the programming for the rest of A Song of Warriors, so...well, I can't quite wrap my head around Ren'py, and am having to code it in TWINE and then use a TWINE-to-Ren'py converter (found here on itch.io!), therefore there's a lot of question marks in the timeline right now.  I'll have a better idea about the final release date after I've finished the base TWINE coding and tried converting it to Ren'py.  (Fair warning:  since I'm starting over like this, save games from the demo will likely not carry over to the final release.)  I'm making good progress on the TWINE programming, though, which is a hopeful sign.

After I'm done with the TWINE programming on A Song of Warriors (and hopefully the successful release of it in Ren'py, but if the converter doesn't do the job, I may have to wait until a Ren'py programmer can transfer it over manually), I may do one other short Ren'py game as an experiment (largely no longer needed, since it was to teach myself about Ren'py and the converter, but since I've already done some of the prep work, I may as well make it), before getting back to my more important projects.

The second novel in the series started with Scions of Troy still needs another rewrite, so that's supposed to be my next project.  (I know myself better than to assert that anything will happen next..)  Then after that I want to dive into learning how to program in something other than TWINE--RPG Maker or Pixel Game Maker, perhaps, so there's less programming/coding to tax my inadequate gray cells--with the hope of finally being able to remake this as a proper game.  (I'm thinking a strategy/resource management kind of thing.  So, like, the same as this except all your decisions actually matter, instead of most of the middle years  being just meaningless clicking.)