#realityvn

Great news, everyone! ＜/reality＞ is now live on Steam! And it's 15% off until the 25th!

We hope you’re as excited as we are!

＜/reality＞ will also be available on Itch.io and via Humble shortly. EDIT: Itch.io and Humble are now up!

The Story

＜/reality＞ is a philosophical visual novel about a ground-breaking new neural VR device that simulates a world indistinguishable from reality (questions about what is real ensue). The story is told from two perspective characters, Lilya, a beta tester who is trying out this VR device, and Jacob, the creator of the device.

A Few Facts:

The game is around 70k words long. Depending on your reading speed, it may take ~5-7 hours to finish one playthrough.

It's difficult to say exactly how many endings/routes there are. There are 4 very major and distinct endings, however, each of these endings can be modified in more minor ways depending on your choices. There are 12 epilogue panels that will change with each different playthrough, to  wrap up different aspects of the story.

There is some romantic content (3 possible pairings), but no adult content.

There are 14 character sprites, 13 background scenes (some of which are double wide for panning), 13 full CGs, and many small image overlays.

If you haven’t yet, this is the perfect time to check out the updated free Demo, over on Itch.io.

Please help us spread the word about the launch! And if you already have the game in hand, please share your screenshots and reactions using the hashtag #RealityVN on social media! We’d love to hear what you think!

Welcome to Round 3 of our EVN demo reading group!

Last week, we enjoyed the dramatic Falconers: Moonlight demo. Many thanks to everyone who participated in the Live Let's Read and/or submitted feedback! The live reading was well attended, and together we learned some very important things. Now we know that going "into the bush" is most certainly a euphemism, Nai makes an excellent whisky-toting obaa-san, and things really should be measured relative to nipple height. This session was recorded, so if you want to hear our extremely professional(tm) voice acting skills, check out the youtube video linked at the end of this post.

This week, we will be reading the demo of ＜/reality＞, a near-future sci-fi about a withdrawn VR nerd who signs up to test a new neural device, but ends up getting into much more than she bargained for.

Please join us if you can!

Download the demo here

＜/reality＞ Reading Schedule

Live Let's Read (on Discord): Sunday March 26th, 8PM GMT/4PM EST/1PM PST

Read by/feedback due by: Tuesday March 28th (send your feedback to: [email protected])

Check out the Schedule to see what we'll be reading in the future, or the About page for more info.

The goal of this activity is to provide feedback to EVN developers on projects currently in development, and also have some fun as readers, by checking out things we may not have thought to try otherwise.

Hey everyone! We released the ＜/reality＞ beta of Book 3 - the final part of the story - via Steam last night, for beta-access backers. And, there are only 4 days left until the official full release! We hope you’re getting as excited as we are! Please check out our Coming-soon Steam page and add the game to your Wish list if you’d like a reminder upon release!

Book 3 - "Truth"

Book 3 is the final - and, as the name suggests - most revelatory part of the story. All of the story threads we’ve been weaving through books one and two come together here, and your choices begin having a larger impact than ever before. The heavy branching in Book 3 and the Epilogue was definitely an editing challenge - however, we think it adds a lot (especially to replay value)! It’ll be fun watching people compare their epilogues and the very different paths they can take!

Here are a few [mostly] spoiler-free screenshots from Book 3:

^ In more ways than one...? o.o

^ But is it good? That’s the question.

Over the last few weeks our composer, Chase, has produced a ton of new and wonderful music tracks! You can listen to one of the new tracks, “Remorse,” right here.

Stretch Goal Post-Launch Update

Unfortunately we haven’t had time to add in all the extra CGs and art for the stretch goal, and we didn’t want to postpone the launch date again. Instead, we are planning to release an update in mid-May with all of the extra art (along with some other non-essential updates and polish). The game that will be released on April 18th is a full and complete experience that we’re proud of, but if you want a little extra art and prettiness, you can wait for the May update - we’ll leave that up to you!

Backer Rewards

Because of the crunch to release on time, we will be sending out all the Kickstarter backer rewards (besides the game itself) post-launch. Digital copies of the game (DRM-Free + Steam) will be sent out via HumbleBundle on April 18th, and all other rewards will be sent out within the following month.

Spread the Word!

As ever, thank you for all your support, and for coming this far with us! This has been an amazing journey. All your help spreading the word has been greatly appreciated - please keep at it - on social media and beyond - as launch nears. Let's build some hype! And once you have the game in hand, please share your screenshots and reactions using the hashtag #RealityVN! We can’t wait to hear what you think!

The </reality> Kickstarter campaign ended just about a month ago now. But if you missed it, not to worry! </reality> now has a brand-new, shiny, official website! And it offers pre-order/late backing options via paypal!

Check it out right here: http://fancyfishgames.com/reality/

Please help us spread the word! For those who aren’t able to use Kickstarter, or were short on cash during the campaign due to the impending holiday season, this will be exciting news!

We will probably be fairly quiet over the next few weeks as we continue to focus on script editing, as opposed to art, which is easier to share. To tide you over, enjoy these fun gifs featuring some new character expressions:

Over the weekend, we participated in the Phoenix Global Game Jam, teamed up with 3 awesome gamedevs (Tyler Coles, Quinn Larson, and S.A. Welland), and made a neat little puzzle game called Wavebreakers! We also survived driving home through a snow storm. Overall it was an exciting and truly valuable weekend. We are so glad we were able to take part! Can you play the game, you ask? Well, technically, yes. There is a link to download it on the Global Game Jam site: http://globalgamejam.org/2017/games/wavebreakers

However, it is still quite rough around the edges. It was made in 48 hours, after all. We plan to polish it up, add some elements we didn’t have time to add (such as a tutorial >.<), and release a more complete version soon-ish! So look out for that announcement!

For now, it is right back to work on </reality> - we still hope to release Chapter 3 close to the end of the month, so beta-backers, you don’t have long to wait! Here’s a little sneak-preview  - a portion of a new CG in Chapter 3:

We have just released version 0.2.06 of the </reality> Demo, which you can download and play here.

This update includes the following changes:

Many editing passes to improve the pacing and flow of the story. Scenes have been cut, re-arranged and added, and we feel that the story is much stronger and more concise now! We also cut the prologue, as it wasn’t immediately relevant, and was confusing to many readers. The prologue sequence will now appear later in the game.

New art to help bring some scenes to life, and show instead of tell.

More character art to make the characters more expressive.

Removed the character glow on speaking, and replaced it with some scaling and darkening, which relates who is currently speaking without feeling out of place. We’ve also done some minor improvements to the UI (although this is still an alpha version - more UI fixes will be coming).

Added the updated Full Realms VRMMO music track to replace the old, placeholder one.

Added a login screen for Full Realms.

Check out more images/gifs from the new demo in our Kickstarter update!

The demo (chapter one) isn’t completely done - we still have some placeholder assets to replace and more music/sound effects to add. But, it’s starting to feel more polished and we are very pleased with the pacing! Chapter one is the first thing players experience, so we want to make sure it’s very exciting and interesting.

As always, many of these changes have been thanks to awesome player feedback! If you play through the demo and have any thoughts for us, please don’t hesitate to share them via our google feedback survey!