Rewrite Our Narrative

This is the blog for Rewrite our Narrative, a video game by Lumes & Co. under the direction of @an0lumi.

Rewrite our Narrative is an indie RPG that tells the story of Simon, a boy living in the suburbs of Vanilleir, Hanaeri. He and his two best friends, Lilia and Gina, become the universe's guardians, and Simon gains powers of creation. However, the three of them have broken and misplaced the Key to the Realms, which could plunge their world into darkness when in the wrong hands. It's up to them to retrieve the Key before it's too late. You can see more about the game here.

On this blog, the many members of Lumes & Co. will talk about the game itself and post some concept art, among other things. The main posters are @an0lumi (director), CreateSource (lead programmer), @bigboot16 (producer), and @birdb0rb (programmer). We all think Rewrite is cool, and we hope you do too!

Ok, time to put out the new Devlog this month of Apr-

oh? what's that? JULY?

ehm so a lot has changed. We have had multiple Rewrite rewrites and completely new systems implemented, as well as a updated map for Simon to more freely roam around! Here's the biggest improvements to focus on:

Practically every file had to be renamed. For most of the entire project, we have simply allowed files to kinda be named whatever, which is fine, except for when there's now 3 different versions of the same image with different file name stylizations. After a couple discussions, we decided on snake_case (and sometimes flatcase) for all assets, scenes, scripts, and anything else you can think of.

Scene transitions now work completely differently. Before, they used signals (basically telling anyone who wants it "hey, the world is changing!") to tell the game where the next map was going to load, and it placed Simon in one spot every time. Now, we have a more elegant system: A object can call a "scene transition" cutscene, which specifies both a scene and where Simon should be placed. This cutscene then directly communicates with the camera and the game on where to put the player and the camera.

"Cutscenes" have been in the game for a while, but they've been split in twain: camera actions, which do things that are generally lower-level, such as positioning, zooming, and some special functions like dialogue and setting up the next map. These are not meant to be called by anything other than the cutscenes. Those can be used by any object that needs it, and use the actions to create something more meaningful.

The map has been updated heavily! Before, it was a unfinished neighborhood smacked into a scene I made years ago of the edge of a river. Now Lumi's done great work making the map look much closer to the actual design of Vanilleir (and, in my opinion, much better). The only thing left is to replace these developer tiles I made that look like Minecraft Alpha with some real art by real artists.

...and so much more! The amount of little bug fixes and big bug fixes would be too much to write about here. Next month should be just as exciting as this one, there's still a lot to do, so make sure to follow for updates! Also checkout Lumi's new game here: https://ultra-radia.itch.io/reversals!

Lumes & Co. is looking for new members to help out with Rewrite our Narrative!

Right now, we’re hoping to add new programmers, pixel artists, animators, and musicians to the team. If you’d like to contribute your skills to our game, we’d love to have you on board!

Apply today! -> https: //discord.gg/Ka5JW8WzZA

Welcome to devlog speedrun edition, here we go:

We updated to the next version of Godot (4.6), which didn't do much for us besides make the editor look a little different

We're in the middle of UI functionality, with the inventory, cutscenes, dialog, and pause menu all being worked on

There's some fundamental functionality being formatted

For the longest time, Simon had trouble properly interacting with objects. Just like, staying behind them, doing stuff with them. That's been properly fixed

I wanted to include a cool group drawing with this... but the team was too busy to participate. Anyway,

Rewrite has been in development for a year now! Everyone on the team has made so much progress. The game's files exist, for one, and they're getting closer to looking like the groundwork for Rewrite every week that passes. I'm also editing the plot to make a much cooler story, and the game's characters and locations are slowly coming to life.

Making a video game is very hard, especially when you're juggling academics and jobs. But everyone at Lumes & Co. is doing amazing, and I couldn't be prouder of them! I'm also pretty proud of myself, as it's magical to see a silly idea I had one day progress towards fruition with the help of some of my dearest friends. Putting Rewrite together can be a chore sometimes, but I don't think I would have chosen anything else.

Here's to many, MANY more years of hard work! I know it'll all pay off once we get this story out into the world.

voice acting was implemented, turns out it was broken for a long time and no one noticed

the map for vanillier was tweaked, and it now looks nicer

here’s a song that lumi made, i’ve been told to post this here

The happiest of holidays from all of us at Lumes and Co.!

Things have been quiet on this blog, and that's because life has thrown ALL of us for a loop. Everyone's had to endure the hell that is finals season, and I've taken a short break from directing the game due to some personal issues I'd prefer not to elaborate on at the moment. But we're all taking the time to rest this yuletide so we can come back strong next year! And I'm just about ready to get back to Rewrite myself, breaks are boring.

Welcome back Rewriters to another devlog! Because we missed last month's devlog, we'll include all the updates from then here as well. Here's what we did during all of September and October:

First off, we finally added some more player functionality. We'd been talking about this happening for months, but now Simon is actually able to walk through doors! It doesn't look pretty (neither the transition, nor the door), but it's something that took us a while to put in the game. This was mainly because one person (me) thought it was really complicated but actually was like nothing and they were doing it really stupid and weird.

Anyway, next up, Vaniller. The place itself is slowly becoming what it should be. The town is now connected through roads like it should be.

We also added a LOT of images. Like the amount of art in this game grew by a ton during this time. I'm talking about talking sprites, characters moving, Simon drinking coffee, plants, beds, carpets, chairs, and so much more.

Finally, a funny bug that happened during development. Simon's huge and moves at lightning speed!

(Unfortunately, we couldn't find a video/image)

Vaniller has a tilemap made up of 16x16 tiles, first scaled to 4x in the image and then halfed in size ingame. This is simply a holdover from when we were first starting out, didn't really know the ins and outs of the software. Now, when Simon's house was added, we forgot about this and kept the pixel art at its original scale in both ways. This includes sprites, which aren't part of the tiling. When we found out it was too small, which was when we enabled Simon to go through doors, the whole house was already decorated! Safe to say, that took a lot of time to fix.

Thanks for reading!

hey its @birdb0rb this time I'm filling in for boot while theyre out sick I suppose (Hi, Boot here, not sick just tired and busy) we've been working on rewrite more, some houses are being furnished as i write this (supposedly), and more and more systems and functions are being created

a proper inventory is now included in the journal

we've also built a dialogue system, however its not much to see yet as no UI has been made

returning to those houses, they sure are furnished

I updated Weber's design sheet, though hardly anything about our favorite robot assistant has changed!

The updated reference sheets for Simon, Lilia, and Gina! It's up to them to save the universe from utter collapse... whether they like it or not.

Welcome back to our blog for another devlog post!

Since my post last month we've mostly been working on adding functionality to our ingame player menu!