Grata Monstrum - Eldritch Visual Novel

[StormCat]

Hi there!

As part of the recent Secret Santa Jam 2022, I ended up making a short eldritch visual novel with a couple of friends. It was a lot of fun to make and it was my first time trying something less actiony in love2d and I think turned out pretty well!

The game is a visual novel with turn based fighting and puzzle segments, all in a hand drawn style. It follows your journey to rid a town of monsters, or perhaps help them instead. It has 3 different endings and a bunch of branching dialogue as well.

Here is the link if you want to try it out: https://succulantics.itch.io/grata-monstrum

Happy new year to the most lövely game dev community!

[Gunroar:Cannon()]

Heheh, funny enough I already saw this a few days ago when I randomly searched for black and white games. Downloaded it but yet to play, but already loving the art and eldritch stuff.

[StormCat]

Lol, what are the odds. Thanks for checking it out as well!

[Gunroar:Cannon()]

Pretty good. Heheh. The puzzles kind of became tedious after the third monster (when I realized I still had 3 more to go). But the style. The ooze! The art! The jiggly fonts! The story! All 3 in the team did a good job.

Those texts though. I even learnt something from looking at the code Any more ways to code special text effects? It was amazing. (My favourite monster was... Terrence? I dunno, the first one)

Oh, and I think there's a bug in the second last monster where after it leaves your inner thoughts still have its name as if it's the one talking, though it left..

Edit: also it's playable on Android. Just fix up the res a little with Resolution Solution or something.

[StormCat]

Thanks for playing! Glad that you enjoyed it.

I had not even thought of running it on android, but it's all mouse based so in theory it should work. I'll have to look into that.

Text effect wise, that was one of my favourite parts. The main thing I did was write a handler that split the text into individual letters, which then lets you do things like move or colour them individually. You could really do about anything with them at that sort of point.
For this project I only ended up using it for shaking, wavy and coloured text, but stuff like text that fades in/out, text that tries to move away from the cursor, text that slides in from off screen or about anything you could apply to a normal positional entity could be reasonably done.

[Gunroar:Cannon()]

For this project I only ended up using it for shaking, wavy and coloured text, but stuff like text that fades in/out, text that tries to move away from the cursor, text that slides in from off screen or about anything you could apply to a normal positional entity could be reasonably done.

Thanks for the ideas. Working on melding it with my custom gooi lib