Iron & Rust
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Pitch
Iron & Rust is a Visual Novel (an adventure game with little player interaction) with a deep plot (including Time Travel) and Hard SF inspirations through a 3 to 5-hour adventure containing 6 different endings.
2016. Marius Friedrich is a young student during the day and a hacktivist at night. When he discovers the track to a top-secret program on artificial intelligence, DARPA's project "Thunderbird", and he steps on unknown and dangerous ground, begins an adventure that will lead him to the limits of human understanding.
Origin
Iron & Rust is an old project of mine, started back in December 2015. I was discovering my first visual novels, notably Steins;Gate which was a major inspiration on this project. I started working on a scenario and then I tried different Visual Novel engines and eventually retained Ren'Py. I team up with a friend of mine to have cool assets.
The project was very long to make, but step by step it was finished in May 2018.
Team
Myself, Matthieu RIBOULOT – Scenarist, Writing, Programming
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Clément NGUYEN – Game Art, parts of the music
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What I did
As a Visual Novel based on time travel, and as the main scenarist, to have a clear vision of the actions I want to depict is very important. Here's my chart for the first chapter.
One of the originalities of the project was to have 2 different futures interacting with the same past (with 2 different versions and personalities of the same android).
The plot also borrows a lot from conspiracy theories and hacktivist mythology.
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I was responsible for the entire writing of the project. (5 hours of reading or 7000+ lines)
It was originally written in French with the Ren'Py language and then fully translated into English.
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Post-Mortem
Iron & Rust was a difficult project to complete, to be honest.
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The promise of a complex scenario and the willingness to do something ambitious almost led to it being abandoned several times because of the workload on other areas. But it's also the first major project I've shown to the general public.
The reception was fairly modest, with most people enjoying the experience, but the number of people really interested in this type of project was relatively small, giving me insights to better consider my target audience.
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However, I really enjoyed the experience and the script and have since made other visual novel prototypes. I think it's a genre that still has a lot of sides to explore.