A to Z: Umbra the Unknown

 

    Yeah, this one's weird, but really!  How many names start with U?  (And yes, I do know that "Umbra" is not usually a name.  But it's what I had.)

    So...I wanted to make a quick visual novel for Winter Jam 2022, but I didn't want to have to deal with artists, because I don't work well with others.  Fortunately, there are plenty of artists who sell (or sometimes make available for free) their work on itch.io for people to use to make games.  And after looking around for a while at my choices, I decided on a pair of little cuties...

Character art by Minttydrops

    But the names they came with didn't fit what I was going for, so I wanted to give them new names.  And I settled on Lux and Umbra.  The plot of the game is quite simple:  the two little girls are on the wrong side of a forest and it's almost dinner time, so they decide--or rather Lux decides and drags Umbra with her--to pass through the forest instead of going around it.  It's a menu-driven exploration game, essentially, with a few adventure game-style item puzzles to proceed (though hopefully the puzzles don't quite exhibit the full moon logic of some of the classic adventure games of the 1990s), and it's impossible to lose, because the girls aren't in any danger.  (Plus they both pick up and use the necessary items automatically, so even if a player feels stuck, all they have to do is visit every single location and something will happen.)

    Umbra is an oddity of a character.

    On the one hand, she is serious and often left extremely alarmed by the actions of the zany, flighty Lux.

    On the other hand, she talks exclusively in emojis.

Animated emojis at that.

    This made it challenging trying to "write" her dialog, of course!  (In more ways than one, as a typo could render her dialog into an error message, or even crash the game. 😰)

    But I hope that I at least mostly managed to make it clear roughly what she was trying to say...

    The odd part is that Lux can clearly understand her.

    Yeah, I...I can't explain it.  😅

    But she's certainly different from my usual character types!

    The Forest of Fractured Time can be found on itch.io, where it's available to play in-browser or to download and play offline.  The browser version doesn't run as well, but is otherwise identical.  (Both versions are completely free, of course.)