Devlog #1 - Introduction: Alchemilla Studios, Norvale

Hello! we’re Alchemilla studios and we’re here to present to you our very first devlog for Norvale!

Alchemilla Studios

First things first, we want to introduce to you Alchemilla studios and how we came to be.

We’re currently just a two-person team, consisting of Mari and nana, and a few years back we thought of making a visual novel and actually had an idea for a really big concept. However, we thought that it would be too much time and effort for beginners like ourselves, so we put that vn idea at the side and thought of making a simple one first and that led to Norvale.

While coming up with the name for our group, we thought using a flower’s name based on its meaning would help encompass the type of content we want to make. The floriography for Alchemilla means “a comforting love”, which felt like a good fit for us since we mainly want to create simple, easygoing content for people to enjoy while they relax and unwind after a stressful day. We might throw in a little angst here and there (lol), but for the most part, we want to try and create things that give people a sense of comfort in the midst of their busy lives.

As for the medium of our projects, we’re currently focusing on visual novels and are interested in creating webnovels as well. We’re still figuring things out but we hope to branch out into more mediums in the future!

Norvale

1. Concept

We came up with the plot for Norvale on a whim really lol

I (nana) thought to make a cute little story about someone that visited their childhood home again and relived the memories they had with a friend and a promise they made. The story went through a lot of changes and ideas to the point Mari had no idea what the story was even about anymore, before we decided on the current plot of Norvale.

The core idea was always to have a simple story since this is the first time making a visual novel for both of us. We’re the only two people working on it so we didn’t want to add too many elements and get overwhelmed.

As for how we came up with the name Norvale…it was a name we picked from a list of generated town names lol

2. Development

Story and Characters

Like we mentioned before, we wanted to keep the story simple and straightforward. As such, we broke the main story into 3 places that the player can visit. Where they go will be based on which item is chosen: the Marble, the Candy Wrapper or the Button.

Each place visited has a different character(s) the player gets to interact with. All the characters that you’ll run into are people the player character, Morgan has spent time with as a child.

※ Only the Candy Wrapper route is available in the demo.

Character Design

In line with keeping things simple for Norvale, the characters are also fairly simple in design! I was initially going to add shading and highlights to the sprite art but I quite like how the flat base colors look so I left it like that. It also personally makes it faster to deal with any adjustments or changes required when I don’t have to worry about shading and highlighting an area over again lol

Background Art

Backgrounds were probably the biggest difficulty art wise since I’ve never really drawn them before. And the few that I did draw in the past…weren’t very good lol

So I’m probably the most surprised by how decent they turned out 😂

There’s still lots of room for improvement but I’ve learned a lot from drawing the bgs in the demo so please look forward to (hopefully) better looking backgrounds from now on (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧

UI design

We sort of had a general concept to use a scrapbook/journal design for the UI. Since the premise of the story was for Morgan (player character) to reminisce about their time in their childhood town. So a scrapbook and journal type of design was what we envisioned. 

It’s still quite a simple design as we’re still getting used to designing UI (tools and techniques) for visual novels 😅

I mostly used photoshop and figma. I used figma to design some of the components while I used photoshop to lay them out and other design/color customization.

I’m still figuring out the best tools for me, so hopefully I’ll get better.

Ren'py Dev

Developing on Ren’py was relatively easy to pick up, however other customizations, I (mari) needed to figure out and research online, especially for some features that nana wanted to implement, but had to push back to the full version as I didn’t know how to do them in time for the demo release.

But I definitely learned alot in developing vns on Ren’py, and hopefully I get to do more UI and feature dev to fully customize our future projects.

3. Demo

We released our demo in time for SuNoFes 2022, as we thought it would be a good place to get feedback as well as place a deadline on ourselves, since we both just went on our own pace when developing the assets.

We definitely went through alot of trial and error with the art, sprites and development on ren’py, but we were figuring it out our vision for the game as we went along. 

We’re still figuring out a proper workflow for the both of us, as well as the practices other visual novel groups do for their projects. If you have any suggestions, we’re open to them! hehe

Moving Forward

Current Progress In Norvale Post-Demo:

We recently finished finalizing the story for the Craft Store and are currently working on character designs for the characters that will be present in it.

Further Improvements After the Demo Release:

We’ve received feedback on the demo from players via our satisfaction survey and will be improving the game based on that. We also plan to rework certain assets we felt could be polished a bit more, namely the backgrounds and UI design.

The start screen will definitely be changed! As we plan to use an art CG for it, do look forward to it!

We also had issues with implementing sound into the demo, so we’re looking into that as well and hopefully be able to add sfx and music into the game.

And that’s it for our first devlog! We hope you could follow us along this journey as Alchemilla Studios and for Norvale!

Links

Carrd: Alchemilla Studios

Twitter: @Alchemil_Studio

Instagram: @Alchemil_Studio

Itch.io: Alchemilla Studios