Plato Protagoras
A downloadable game for Windows
Plato’s Protagoras converted to a Kinetic Visual Novel for the Sega Mega Drive.
Full credit for all the text goes to Project Gutenberg.
The actual e-book that was used for the creation of this VN can be found at: Plato’s Protagoras.
Tools used VNMD, SGDK, Aseprite
and Graphics were A.I. generated with Stable Diffusion.
This “game” was made for the Sega Mega Drive aka Sega Genesis, but can be run on any emulator.
NOTE
I realized that I had the ages of several characters wrong. For example, Socrates in this Work is probably around 34. Callias 16 or 21 and so on. When I was doing this, I thought that the work was placed between 424 and 420 BC, but as it looks like it is around 434 BC.
Also, Socrates was older from the beginning, because I thought that it will be better to have an image of him that it is more recognizable, but now I think this was wrong.
I may update the images in the future.
Download
Development log
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
What it is I do not now, it is the simulacrum of itself!
For real, it evokes for some reason that "altered beast" vibe... which also had some greek architecture in the first levels as background.
Great stuff and great work.
On a sidenote, it could absolutely benefit from a custom width font engine and/or typewriter effect on the text. Righth now I suspect you're changing the background and sprites using a counter? Could benefit from a bit more image trickery.
Thank you for the comment.
The "font" is like that because it is 8x8 pixels per letter, the game is made for the Mega Drive, so the actual resolution of the game is 320x224.
I really dislike the typewriter effect and never bothered to implement it on my vn engine.
There is no counter but the speed of a retro machine (Sega Mega Drive). What I mean is that the time between the background display and the display of the character (foreground) is that of the time it takes to put the tiles from the cartridge to the vram and then on screen.
I am probably forcing all my preferences on my VN engine, but in my mind VN are a way to tell a story and all the effects, like typewriter or image transitions, etc are relics of the past that nowadays do not add too much to the actual experience.
On the other hand, the engine uses an easy scripting language and "translating" the game to another engine more advanced with all the classic effects can be a matter of minutes.
very good