Hello, it's Chattercap!

I've released the demo of my new game, The Deepwater Witch, for Once Upon a Time VN Jam 2023, the new fairytale jam by chimeriquement and helen! It's a surreal, romantic retelling of the Little Mermaid set in a post-apocalyptic world.

Synopsis:

In a world ruined by pollution, the oceans have swallowed the lands. Ramil is a scavenger, a lowlife who digs through the trash littering his once idyllic hometown. One day he finds a mysterious girl on the beach. She can't speak, and she says that she doesn't remember where she came from. When Ramil meets her, he is dragged into a surreal dreamscape...but are they dreams or delusions?

As the mysteries surrounding the girl's identity unravel, Ramil is forced to answer a question: What price is he willing to pay to be happy? 

Features for the demo:

• A post-apocalyptic retelling of the Little Mermaid! 
• 25k words (~2 hours playtime)
• 5 CGs, 22 backgrounds
• Live 2D-style animated illustrations
• One mysterious girl
• One prince with neither a heart nor a house of gold
• A sweet, slow-burn romance
• Copious fairytale references
• (Way too much talking about the environment for a romance game)

Development:

I'll release a full "post-mortem" about the story after I release the full version, but I'll say that this is a concept that is near and dear to my heart. I first came up with it during high school as part of a series of "post-apocalyptic fairytales," and "The Little Mermaid" story was always my favorite. The concept has changed a lot from the initial drafts, and I'm very proud of how it evolved. One particular change that you might have noticed is...well, a much larger focus on the environment (perhaps too much of a focus...) The story incorporates a lot of my feelings about how we treat the world that we live in, and the Somnatan District is, in a lot of ways, similar to the place that I live now. 

This is the first game that I've made with Godot! After Unity's pricing structure changes earlier this year, I decided to give a go at switching to Godot, an open source engine. There were a few hiccups, but I'm glad to say that it went very well, all things considered! There are some cons (having to find a lot more things with string literals), but there were a LOT of pros to Godot as well (faster editor, better performance, easier management of UI themes, easier dynamic window resizing). I also took the opportunity to improve the organization of my code and implement some good QOL features (such as a screenshot function, screencaps attached to save slots, and rollback, although that is still a WIP). 

It was quite a bit of work to port my code from Unity to a new engine, but I think I managed to preserve most of the features, and I'm happy with the result! 

Release date for the full version?

The script is 100% complete, and the only assets that need to be made are the remaining CGs for the second half of the game. I won't hammer down a release date right now because there are some additional QOL features that I want to add (most notably rollback, which I disabled in this version because it needs some additional bugtesting). However, I expect to release the full version of the game sometime in January or February. 

Some additional build notes: 

I released Karamu for Windows 64-bit, Windows 32-bit, MacOS, and Android. Unfortunately, after making the switch from Unity to Godot, the animation program that I use currently doesn't support exports to Windows 32-bit or Android. If Android support is added in the future, I'll work on adding a build for it. 

Thanks for reading! :)

Chattercap