created during 2021 as trading collectible stickers (no, they are not en-eff-tees)

INTRODUCTION

Hey, I'm Ianthe Rosingbird. A solo game dev who loves to read and create fantasy, romance and horror visual novels/adventure games. The game I'm currently working on is Glassheart, and while the story is still influx due to me changing a few narrative elements here and there the basic structure goes something like this:

Anya-Torre, is a young woman attending a prestigious boarding school when she's suddenly thrusted into a conflict involving witches, a guild sworn to eradicate all threats to their kingdom and a mysterious society of alchemists. She acts as an aid to the two princes, Ademeus and Radmes as they seek to protect the secrets of the Glassheart; a relic with the power to rewrite causality and unravel the strings of fate.

GAMEPLAY

Since this is a visual novel, there will be the obvious dialogue scenes as well as choices to make, though I don't want the choices to be dialogue based. Instead, I want Anya to use a bunch of items stored within her inventory or snippets of information she gathered throughout the story to make certain events unfold.

For example; If she overhears two people talking about another person, I want her to be able to store that information for use at a later stage. She can also collect objects that you might need at a later date, especially herbs and flowers for spells.

This brings us to the second type of gameplay I want to implement; exploration. I've already began work on this feature as you can see in the gif below, but basically Anya will be able to go from room to room by rotating the camera and clicking on doors. The wand will glow on objects of note and doorways as a handy guide so that you're easily alerted to what is clickable.

The third type of gameplay will be potion making. Since Anya is an aspiring alchemist, she's able to use guides and spell books to whip up all sort of potions that will allow her to access different rooms or defend against obstacles. Invisibility is one of those, but I'm hoping to have a whole list of spells planned out by the next dev log.

The final type of gameplay is still up in the air, but I might do an RPG battle system for cases where characters need to fend against witches and other foes, but we'll see.

There's also going to be dress-up game elements but those aren't as important. I just want to create a lot of pretty outfits for the characters. It's very self-indulgent.

CHARACTERS

In terms of characterisation a lot is up in the air(mainly cos I did a last minute pivot with the lore of the world and the themes of the story so I'm currently shifting things around). The one thing I can guarantee though is that it's going to be messy and very LGBTQ+. So yah. That's all I feel comfortable saying until I commit to some ideas.

The lack of commitment to characterization seems perfectly illustrated in the two outfits I rendered for Anya's sprite.

AESTHETIC

For this game and all the other games I'm planning to make moving forward, I want to go for a 90s anime type aesthetic, with subtitles and basically no UI elements. You're still able to access your setting via a drop down menu but I want you to feel like you're watching an anime rather than playing a game.

Later on down the line, I plan to add some character animations like mouth movement and evnr a few little gestures to give each character a unique flare but I want to get the basic character sprites done first.

I also want to dedicate an entire log to going over my artistic influences and well as the style I was able to develop for this project. Just for fun.

TIMELINES

Glassheart is still in it's infancy. In terms of coding I've got most of the dialogue and choice system down as well as the navigation but I still need to work on saving and loading and other boring things. The story's also going to have a tonne of characters and I'm not even half way through the cast at the moment and I'm even more far behind on the backgrounds so it may take a while before I can confidently release a demo. I'm hoping I'll be able to do that by December which seems to me like a reasonable goal but if I could get everything done much earlier...or later.
Hopefully it's the former.

Meanwhile, I might begin a YouTube Dev Log to also show you the actually gameplay footage as well as the tracks I've been working on for the game so I'll keep you posted on that. In the meantime I uploaded a YouTube video of a third year project I did for college if you'd like to see a sample of some of the stuff I've done. It's very much the aesthetic I'm going for.

And with that I think that end's my Dev Log. I'm hoping to have one of these lengthier logs every week or so but I'll also try to post some art and progress gifs every so often as well as some interesting info about the characters and the world.

Thanks for reading all this and have a good day!!

Ianthe