what's it about?
chuck lascewicz, recently reunited with her once-abandoned 10 year old daughter, jessica, are stuck on an enormous multi-species space station with no recollection of how they got there. they were found in stasis aboard a mysterious ship by the keepers of the station, the stewardship. the story starts with them being thawed out by the stewards, who hope to figure out where the ship, clearly not human-made, came from.the station itself, vertex 17, is an unfathomably old old pile of junk filled with dozens of alien species, each made up of just as many of cultures. the stewardship struggles to keep the lights on and the rabble in line. they (along with many other important players) are hoping that the mysterious ship and the introduction of a new culture could be just the cards they need to make a play for control of v17. unable to leave the station any time soon, chuck has to navigate these cultural tensions while trying to keep her daughter safe from crumbling space infrastructure - and make up for a decade's worth of missed parenting.
what kind of game is radiolaria?
play-wise, i'm hoping for it to be a visual novel +, something along the lines of ai: the somnium files, danganronpa, necrobarista. a bit more towards the vn side, but something more interactive than a text box and sprites on a background. things like night in the woods or kentucky route zero, but not so much about walking around.in terms of content, radiolaria will likely be something like an "m" rated game. in the final game, i'm hoping to have at least some level of optional content censorship, so any posts on here with images like that will be tagged violence and.. alien sexuality i guess? i'm not really sure how into it i want to get. it depends on how it feels in context. i am a fan of body horror and certain kinds of gore, however, and this is a story that is, at least partially, about some grim stuff. i'd like to be able to have a finish product that can let you skim over anything that feels too gratuitous. my plan for a straightforward visual novel with 3d graphics - a couple characters on top of background art, with a text box - ended as soon as i saw the trailer for necrobarista, it really changed my perception of what a visual novel could really be.
first necrobarista trailer. the final game is very slick.
how's it play?
play-wise, i intend for radiolaria to be mostly reading. i want it to be a first person perspective 3d game with limited animation. scenes will mostly be characters posed around a setting, viewed from a fixed position. the dialogue scenes in ai: the somnium files are a good example of this. for the most part, i'd like to avoid real puzzles or more complex game design, but my experience with 'walking simulators' and other (this is an uncharitable description but bear with me) limited gameplay videogames has shown me that even small ineractions can really add a lot to a story. it's fun to just poke around things, but i never want it to feel frustrating.example of ai: the somnium files: nirvana initiative dialogue scenes... something in the same space as this. this is early, so very light spoilers for AI2.
from a vn standpoint, there will be two main routes, with no 'true' route. within that are multiple character stories of varying detail, centered primarily around six primary alien characters and chuck's daughter, jessica. each character's story will have its own variations and contributions to how the two routes play out. i'd like to structure it somewhat similarly to fate/hollow ataraxia, with a daily choice of optional scenes spread among more mandatory ones, each pushing the game forward in its own way.
i'm hoping for it to be around 25-30 hours total to read both routes.
where did radiolaria come from?
originally it was a webcomic - someday, closer to or after release maybe, i'll share the pages - i fantasized about to make use of a couple of spec-bio alien designs i came up with in high school. comics i enjoyed at the time, specifically yotsuba&! and the webcomic "count your sheep" (which is about a mother, a girl, and her imaginary friend) were in my brain when i started putting it together. i fell off of art for a while and never got more than couple dozen pages.after high school, i decided to work on it again. hesitant to do a webcomic, i was torn between a more traditional novel and a visual novel. in high school i spent a lot of time reading sci fi as well as playing stuff like fate stay/night, ever 17, and clannad, so either path was appealing. i wanted it to stand out, so a visual novel is what i decided on. english visual novels, which had a small scene for a while now, were starting to pick up steam - for reference, katawa shoujo had yet to come out.
originally, i'd intended it to be 2d - i would focus on writing and pay someone to do sprite artwork for me. my designs were a bit complicated though, being aliens, so i wanted to make 3d models as reference. i'd been dabbling a bit after mostly messing with vector art - 3d has a similar feel to it, pushing around points to get stuff into shape. i ended up taking to 3d a lot more than i thought i would! so i says to myself, heck! why not just make a 3d vn!
at some point i saw a tweet, no idea who from or if its even still up, along the lines of "someone should make a shader that makes a game look like pc-98 art, like how cel shaded art makes things look like comics."
multiple years of hell followed and here we are today!
how far along is it?
early stages. i started work 'fully' in january 2021, but radiolaria has been in the works in its modern incarnation for the last five or six years to some degree. i have three main paths to work on - visuals, code, and writing. visual work is partly done - the backbone of the style, the shaders and support code, are mostly there, but i have a lot of work to do with modelling, rigging, animating. writing is.. well, it's a bit complicated. a lot of the meta-work is done in some form - plotting, characterization, etc - but actual you-can-read-it-writing was put on hold until i nailed down how the story would be expressed. a comic, a novel, a film all have very different approaches, and a lot of this depends on what i can communicate visually vs pure narration. coding i feel somewhat confident about. i know it will be a lot of work, but it's a well-trod road and between my peers' help and free resources, i know i can put something together. as for music.. that's another matter.there's a lot to do!
when??
my original goal when i started in 2021 was to release by the end of 2023. covid-19 had been a problem, obviously, but i'd underestimated how much it'd impact me - 2021 had some of the worst months of my life due to isolation and my former job, a second covid infection and months of fatigue.. then a THIRD covid infection in 2022. things have gone slower than i'd like.idk. 2024? we'll see.