thelastsecret
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The demo of "Sweet Science – The Grils from Silversee Castle" is out and you can play it on Itch: https://thelastsecret.itch.io/sweetscience
All graphics in this game were produced with the help of an AI software (NovelAI). The full VN will contain five good endings (four of them romantic), several minigames and an original story full of twists and surprises... and we even plan for an original song by Emilia (who already made the songs for "The Last Secret")!
Plot
Find yourself sent back in time – at a weird science camp in a prestigious boarding school in Silversee Castle. Will you solve the mystery of how you ended up there? And will you be able to return to your time? Or will you find love?
Characters
Meet Azuki, the mysterious astronomy girl, Marie, the shy math genius, Patricia, the hyper-energy physicist, and Sylvia, the baroness who couldn't care less about all these nerds, and dive into the adventure of your life!
How to get the full game
The demo only contains the first part of the story, but if you play it through and register, the full game will be available for you for free, as soon as it is completed!
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On 10/23/2022 at 10:44 AM, littleshogun said:
I thought that it's the VN about AI like Re:Lief, only to find out that it's been drawn by AI. Well no much to say here other than good luck with the VN there.
It's probably like: Artificial intelligence = AI = Love in Chinese/Japanese = Many anime names
Thanks for the good wishes!
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On 10/22/2022 at 9:54 AM, ThePenSword said:
Fascinating. I am very curious as to how the advent of AI tools in general will assist in the production of indie visual novels. Lots of people out there with great ideas, but not enough funds to commission art at the rate that is expected by the average VN fan.
Also curious to see how the public's reaction will be once these tools start being used more frequently. Best of luck!Thank you very much! I learn a lot about the possibilities and limitations right now while working on this project, and it's really fascinating. I will start writing about this on my mailing list soon!
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I try to do it like that: I produce a few poses for the sprites (maybe 4 per character) as starting point and then add face expressions manually to get more diversity (maybe 10 in total). The CGs are anyway more free-style, they should be easier. For side characters it will be fewer expressions. After my initial experiments with two of the girls that seems very feasible.
For the final game I will also need sometimes a different set of clothes, but that just means starting over once more. (More work, more time, but the same idea.)
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Everybody is talking about AI art, so I that inspired me to try out something new: a full fledged VN based on AI graphics! It will be called "Sweet Science – the Girls from Silversee Castle".
The tests were so promising that I announced it today officially. If you want to follow its development, please subscribe here: tinyurl.com/TheLastSecret
You can see the first character designs here in the announcement:
It's going to be an exciting experiment about the possibilities and limitations of AI art in VNs. I'm looking forward to your feedback!
Theo
- ThePenSword and Emi
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Maybe for Japanese developers Spanish language is at most an afterthought, but for Europeans it is different: The Last Secret will be released end of the month including Spanish language! While there are improvements still ongoing, most parts of the story in Spanish will be polished by then and the rest with subsequent updates (so it's not only machine translation)! The whole project is non-profit, so it's totally free as well.
You can take a look at the game here: https://the-last-secret.mozellosite.com/home/
and here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1965580/The_Last_Secret/
Now the question: how to make Spanish players aware of the fact that there is a visual novel available in their native language? I would be super happy if you could hep with this!
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Thank you!
I've posted infos in the "Original VN Projects / Released" category. I hope that's the right place.
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Game engine: Ren'PyGenres: Slice of life, science fiction, adventure, high school, romance.Type: Visual novel with puzzlesPlatforms: Windows, Linux, MacLanguage: English, German, Spanish*, Chinese*, Portuguese*, Ukrainian*, Japanese*, Russian* (*=improvement of translations still in progress)Tags:male protagonist, female protagonist, romance, science fiction, puzzles, funny, high school students, music, adventure, mathematics, astronomy, space, Ren'py.The Award-winning adventure
Synopsis:QuoteI really enjoyed this visual novel game. It had great artwork, was well written and had a very deep story. The game features a ton of content and on top of the standard visual novel dialogue style gameplay there are also multiple puzzle/minigames to playthrough as well!
Rating: 8.5/10– XBL Indie Spotlight
QuoteThe cinematics presentation of the game is very strong, characters are likeable and relatable with their quirkiness, it's a game with a lot of thoughts put behind the story.
– Altabestudio
QuoteEntertaining, interactive story, very likeable and a bit quirky heroes.
– DGoZ
You and your friends suddenly discover strange mental abilities. A girl with pink hair seems to be behind it. Join your friends on an epic quest to reveal the "last secret", discover the truth about the world and save your life and the whole earth...
Epic and light-hearted story with lots of puzzles (that mostly can be skipped if you're not into it), the chance for romance (also optional) and 8 good endings.
Main characters:
Four of the heroes of the game: Karina, Anna, Honghong und Meilin:Time to introduce the case of The Last Secret in a bit more details... Here we go!
Let's start with your childhood friend, Meilin...
The second of the main cast: kind and smart Honghong...
Here comes Karina: the sweet and nerdy math girl with a love for strange hoodies...
Not one of your high school friends, but instead an international music star: Ben Benjamin... Where will you manage to meet him?
And finally, the mysterious girl with pink hair... Is she behind all these strange events happening? And *what* is she?
Game play:
The Last Secret is a visual novel with a complex story and lots of mini games and puzzles. You can play as female or male protagonist. Activating the "rainbow mode" allows you to get close to same-gender characters. If you're only into story and romance, you can always skip the puzzles (just ask your smart friends like Karina to do it for you). If you're only into story and puzzles, you can skip the romantic part and enjoy the game nevertheless. (If you're not into story - why are you on this forum???
)
Here's one of the puzzles the heroes have to solve on their way: connect lights of the same color along the lines, but no lights of different colors!Fun in the sun (you wouldn't guess where this is):
A pic from one of the romantic endings of the game:
Opening songs (in English and Chinese) and trailer on the Youtube channel:Karina's math dream (in English):Content:
- Interesting and rich story line with many hours of game play
- 8 good endings, numerous bad ones
- Playable as male and female, you can chose to date different gender or same gender characters.
- Tons of nice background graphics, simple but cute character design (300+ images)
- Full original soundtrack, including several songs with vocals (in English or Chinese with subtitles) plus a few songs from Lemmino
- Many puzzles to be solved on the way, none of those similar to the others
- German, English, Spanish and Chinese version available, more languages to come with (and after) the final release
Player comments:“Fantastic and deeply moving story”
– Lan"Good story and great characters - a fun game for everyone."
– Heijko"Great puzzles"
– Thomas, software engineer"Beautiful graphics"
– Lea"What is more mysterious? The great story or the game of Go? Well ... try it out!"
– Rainer, programmer and Go player"Excellently written SF Visual Novel with entertaining puzzles and minigames."
– XH, anime fanConclusions:
Okay, enough of a hook: you will now best whether you like it!
Try out the game - since if you don't, Meilin will be pretty angry with you:(And she can be scary, you know!)
Download:
The game can be downloaded for Windows, OSX and Linux on itch.io - for free, but if you are a bit more patient: the full release will be on 31 August 2022! Here you can wishlist already on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1965 ... st_Secret/
More infos, also in other languages, here:
https://the-last-secret.mozellosite.com/home/
If you like to provide feedback and ideas or want to review the game or play it on Twitch: please contact me!
(This is a non-profit project, so please be patient with me if I cannot reply immediately.)
Thank you and have fun with "The Last Secret"! -
Hi, I'm Theo, the developer of The Last Secret. I'm new here in the forum and I'm sad that I haven't found it earlier. So much great information here and lively discussions!
- Plk_Lesiak and Kosakyun
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I haven't used DeepL for playing VNs, but for making them:
I used DeepL to make a first run of translations for my game (The Last Secret) that then has been improved by human editors. I' ve written a Python program that makes an auto-translation of the Ren'py translation files in the language of choice using DeepL (with license), so that this step works fairly fast now.
I've started with German as base language, since it has more information on genders and politeness forms than English. The translation into English was usually spot on, and merely required polishing. The polish still improved the game a lot. The translation into Spanish and Chinese needs a bit more time to take care of well, so at release we won't be done completely with them. (In Spanish, there's also the additional difficulty that gender differentiation in language is at times even higher than in German requiring if-constructions in the translation files.) For Japanese and Ukrainian we are still looking for volunteers to help with this, so not much experience there yet. Unfortunately, I cannot read Japanese, so I can't judge how good that translation is. I guess similar to Chinese which is most of the times understandable, but has mistakes.
Visual Novels and AI images – how terrible is it?
in Visual Novel Talk
Posted · Edited by thelastsecret
Slight improvements directly after posting
In October, I had announced here the making of the visual novel "Sweet Science" that would use entirely AI graphics. In the meanwhile, we have explored the possibilities and also the limitations of AI art quite throughly: from the utter failure of producing a simply cell phone pic to the beauty of an autumn forest generated by AI. – To cut a long story short: it mostly works! (More on that in my blog: https://the-last-secret.mozellosite.com/news/)
But judge by yourself: a pretty big demo for the game is already out there. You can test play it on itch (even simply in the browser): https://thelastsecret.itch.io/sweetscience
But it's more than an interesting experiment: The game offers a light-hearted and cozy story with lots of fun and surprises. Here is what critics say about it: