What I would most like to change about this


There are a lot of things about this work of lightly interactive fiction that could stand improvement.  I know that.  Most of them have to do with the text itself, and are either outside of my skill level to fix, or needed an outside eye to point out necessary changes.  (Needless to say, I am willing to make those changes I am capable of if someone wants to act as a belated beta reader.)

What bothers me about the current format is the images, in several different respects.

First, you have the photographs that I have clumsily tried to make look a little bit like frescoes by use of an extremely old (and thus easier to use) version of PhotoShop.  Yes, I've used photos of the real places (sort of; the ones of Lesbos were not necessarily taken anywhere near Methymna), but the real places as they look  now, not as they looked in the Late Bronze Age.  And of course they don't look anything like frescoes.

Then you have the photos of ancient art.  Some of it is precisely right--the Mycenaean frescoes are from the correct era and culture--while also being quite wrong, as in most cases very little of the image is the original ancient fresco, being mostly reconstruction.  (The one on the sidebar of the two girls in the chariot?  Those grimy-looking spots are the ones that are the original fresco.  The majority of it is reconstruction.)  But there's also a lot that's chronologically incorrect.  There's a Hittite sculpture that's about four hundred years too old.  Also a Mycenaean ring that's likewise about four hundred years too old.  There's some Archaic Greek art that's about four or five hundred years too recent.  And one Classical Greek item that's more like eight hundred years too recent.  And I have absolutely no idea when the Assyrian relief of a Phoenician ship dates to, because the Wimikedia Commons page doesn't say, and the Assyrians were around for about two thousand years, so there's a wide window of possibility there!

Ideally, I would like it if I could redo this game with original art drawn in the style of Mycenaean frescoes.  The problem with that is that I have less than no artistic ability (witness my hideous attempt at Aias' grave marker, clumsily rendered in air dry clay and then pathetically attempted to make look like stone in PhotoShop), no friends who are talented artists willing to donate their time, and no money with which to pay an artist to create the images I would need.

I think if I had the necessary artistic resources, doing this as a full visual novel (well, more like a kinetic novel, really) in Ren'Py would really let it feel a lot more fresh, but...dang, that would be a lot of art I would have to commission.  I shudder at the thought of how much that would cost.

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Scions of Troy.zip 7.3 MB
Mar 22, 2021

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