Once Upon A Time...

It's been a long time in the works, but we're finally getting ready to launch these kobold themed t-shirts (and other kobold themed goodies)!

If you're interested please consider signing up to help us get as successful a launch as possible and make these shirts a reality!

You can find it here:

Sockmuffin Studio

It's time to join the Yip Yap Crew!

From Sockmuffin Studio - It's time to join the Yip Yap Crew!

itch.io

Spirit Driver by NoodleDonut, Nox, Wayminh, Mashu, graduisc

A short, casual conversation simulator where your choices can affect the fates of people and spirits alike. Good luck!

The season of scare's dark tendrils are ebbing away to make room for winter's symphony but if you have time for one more supernatural story, give Spirit Driver a go.

This wonderfully cozy Halloween story took the first place winner in the Spooktober Visual Novel game jam and I wished I played it sooner!

The game features a cast of humans and supernatural beings and a cab driver who seems to walk in both worlds. There's heart warming dialogue, subtle and witty jokes and lovely pixel graphic art.

If you're thinking about giving it a go, please do!

There's only 16 hours left of the Spooktober Visual Novel Game Jam!

I want to say a big thank you to everyone involved in the game jam this year! The quality has been amazing! So many talented creators are involved this year. You are all magnificent... the developers, artists, music makers, voice actors, streamers, and the organisers!

Of course I want to also give a big shout out to the players. All of you lovely folks give so much to us by playing the games and the feedback helps us to make things better in future.

If you're wanting to get involved, don't worry... there's still time!

Over 270 Spooktober Visual novels await you! Check them out below...

itch.io

Spooktober 6th Annual Visual Novel Jam

A game jam from 2024-09-01 to 2024-10-31 hosted by Nai @ MakeVisualNovels. Event News The Awards Show is October 30th at 8 PM EDT! We'll be

Thanks for stopping by and stay safe my fiendish friends!

Travel Devil - better the devil you know!

There's less than a week left of judging for the Spooktober Visual Novel Jam and it's been a fantastic experience for us so far! Travel Devil has received such wonderful feedback and critiques. We take on board everything that is written to us so we can make better games every time!

So today I'm going to give a little insight into how and why Travel Devil came to be.

Do you wanna know how Travel Devil came to exist?

Originally we put together a game idea for a spooky pet adoptions agency. The game would take place on Halloween and have six pets (3 unlocked and 3 locked) to play with. Each pet was going to have a unique story and minigame associated with it. It was codenamed "Spoopy Pets" and it was far too much for the me and Robert to take on and complete in the Spooktober VN Jam timeframe. We worked on it for the first two days of the jam before we were flagging problems up, so we changed trajectory. It's not a dead idea though, it's in the list of rainy day ideas.

Speaking of the rainy day ideas list, that's where Travel Devil comes in. We thought this up a while ago but just put it on the back burner as there was no time to work on it. The concept was simple - a demon escapes hell and starts a travel log. Then the servants of hell follow in its wake starting the apocalypse march on humanity. When Spoopy Pets became too big we had a look at what we had to play with and Travel Devil just sort of fell into place. Robert started writing and I started drawing.

Character design went pretty smoothly. I went for a mix of cartoon styles, drawing inspiration from things like Dead End, Gravity Falls, The Simpsons and Garfield.

Traditionally, visual novels use anime and manga style design but truth be told, I'm not very good at that style. It takes me ages to make characters look good when I try to draw like that. Hats off to all the wonderful artists in this jam who made beautiful, scintillating characters. I'm so impressed by their dedication to fantastic character art.

One of the first pitfalls I encountered was background art. I like to use sites like Pixabay to get backgrounds but recently it's been flooded with AI artworks. The game jam expressly forbids AI use in your game so we had to get creative.

Fortunately this game revolves around travel vlog creation in Paris and we found loads of creative commons photos of the famous tourist destination. Seriously there are so many fantastic photographers out there and it was a complete life and time saver for the jam. All I had to do was add a translucent white filter to the top of the photos to make the characters pop out and we had our backgrounds!

Development went well once we got on the right track. Travel Devil was made using Ren'py which is a joy to develop with. We did have to wind back our ideas at one point as both Robert and I got sick with a nasty bug but we made it. We stripped back some choices and streamlined the game to make sure we could get finished. Originally, we wanted the player to be able to unlock multiple hidden scenes in one playthrough. As the deadline loomed we simplified it so that the player would only see one of three potential side stories that were growing due to the activities of our main character Tornacense per playthrough. We included 7 unlockable scenes and also 6 unlockable images in our gallery.

There's also a nifty guide to finding all the unlockables right here if you want a more relaxing time while playing.

If you've had a chance to play Travel Devil you may have noticed that we planted some seeds in our side stories that will be big plot points as we go forward. Travel Devil is going to be a series of five games travelling around Europe making video journals and outrunning the underworld.

Tornacense and Kirby will grow, we'll meet lots of new strange and devastating people and love could be just around the corner! Who knows? That choice will be yours.

If you want to check out the first installment of Travel Devil you can nab a pentagram portal and find it right here.

Travel Devil was made for the 5th Annual Spooktober Visual Novel Jam in under 30 days. The next one will be made with a lot more time dedicated to it!

Thanks for stopping by!

DoubleFree - Artist and coder for Travel Devil

itch.io

CHEATERS (demo) by Venado Artificial

A dangerous ritual, one big mansion, two friends, and three days. (IN DEVELOPMENT)

Played a great visual novel demo today! Super writing and lore which I'm looking forward to seeing more of.

Also thanks for using Mr Fuffington as the cat!

Anyone else love getting back to the basics? Been having a blast working up these paragraph dividers using a ballpoint pen and pencil!

itch.io

Catting Sim by DragonQuills

Like a dating sim except you're a cat and you don't date anyone

Mr Fuffington is out in the wild! DragonQuills over on itch.io made a cozy, wonderful visual novel about finding a place to live for the winter.

I've played through the first story and the writing is delightful and has a great sense of humour. Also there's an adorable romance between the humans.

(Also the opening music is Pawtastic!)

Candy, Costumes, & Canines?!? and Eldritch Idol - Trying out games for the Spooktober Visual Novel Jam

For the past couple of days I've been trying to make a web build in ren'py of my visual novel for the jam but my efforts have proved less than stellar. The sound cues are slightly wrong and as Travel Devil relies on sound effects and music to play a part in the humour and narrative it's looking like a bust for now.

Ah well... At least I know how to do a web build now so that's good.

And it leads nicely into a game I tried recently that's web build worked great.

Candy, Costumes, & Canines?!?

itch.io

Candy, Costumes, & Canines?!? by Colorsqueaks

Mysteries and dogs in costumes. What more could you want?

Canines, Costumes & Canines?!? is a visual novel made in ren'py for the Spooktober 23 game jam and it's a cozy Hallowe'en narrative game. It features adorable costumes (seriously the sausage dog costume is delightful) and well designed cartoon style characters.

The story is about a canine costume contest and follows a mystery of how one of the contestants got poisoned. It has a nice twist and good ending.

The game has slight flickering on the character sprites in the browser version but that is far from a deal breaker. It's definitely charming and it's easy to get past that.

Eldritch Idol

itch.io

Eldritch Idol by ebi-hime

An idol-raising statsim with a Lovecraftian twist. Do your best to raise Cthulhu into a cute idol! ♡

I'm really enjoying cute games this year so naturally I had to check out Eldritch Idol.

The presentation here is strong.

Eldritch Idol is another ren'py devloped visual novel with a whopping 28 endings! The GUI and menus are really well designed and just feel so polished.

There's a couple of nice character choices for you as the producer to Kuku the cute, if terrifying, idol.

The story features plenty of reminders that this world is full of unspeakable abominations but Kuku presents it all in a perky and adorable way.

The gameplay follows managing Kuku's stats by doing daily activities to improve her abilities all in the hopes of creating the ultimate idol. There's sweet costumes and romance options too.

Eldritch Idol is a great, well made visual novel with an irrestable charm.

I'm not sure what I'll be playing next as I'm still going to battle with my own entry in the jam to try and get that web browser build done! I have a couple of ideas on how to make though, so fingers crossed!

Thanks for stopping by!

DoubleFree

Introducing Lydia...

We're getting ready for Spooktober season with our upcoming escape visual novel - Lydia's Labyrinth!

Can you escape from her evil clutches and solve the mystery of your shared past?

For the third year we're taking part in Spooktober visual novel jam. Can't wait to see what everyone creates!

Travel devil 2 - Shame the Devil, tell the truth - DevLog 4

Well folks it's been such a week. I've had some extra work on this week but fear not... Travel Devil 2 continues its march through development.

This week I have

Designed some additional menu assets

Worked on a talk show set

Designed some apocalypse assets based in Paris

Learned about the national dish of the Netherlands - Stamppot (critical cultural research and tonight's dinner)

Paris has fallen to the unholy march.

Unfortunately the talk show set is still a work in progress as it's not coming together in a way that I like. Also things are going a bit slower than I’ve expected. Just gotta keep my head up and keep on with it.

I've also got some news about the writing. Robert has been leading the story development and has

Been writing many new scenes

Started a point of view chapter for our new character Chloe (art reveal coming soon!)

Finished a secret scene

Carried out location research about demonic art in Amsterdam

Poster for the play "Lucifer" from 1910 painter by Richard Roland Holst (1868 -1938) - https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=urn:gvn:WITS01:109324, Public Domain

I'm glad to say that things are still moving forward. These devlogs help me to recognise that. Next week is going to be hectic as well so I'm going to try and focus on character art. I'm also hoping to make some time to play some visual novels. There's a few I've been meaning to try and I always find it inspiring to see what magical creations other people are making.

If you’d like to see how the infernal story began you can download the original Travel Devil narrative game for free on the Valhallions itch page. You can also see my side projects and asset packs on the DoubleFree itch page.

Take care everyone!

DoubleFree