Green flag to start Left and right arrows to change slides Please give me art feedback! Artist's commentary: Most characters are shown with their "neutral" faces that appear when the dialogue doesn't convey particularly strong emotion. Slide 0: Oh look some instructions Slide 1 (Ross): Bottom row faces are much better than top row Slide 2 (Pitcairn): Bottom right is my favorite Slide 3 (Muriel): I'm not really happy with how any of these turned out except for top center, so there's definitely some revision to be done Slide 4 (Lilias): Bottom center is perfect Slide 5 (Rory and Elaine): Fun Fact - bottom left was the first portrait I drew. Every other portrait for every character is based off a copy of that costume. Slide 6 (Extra Characters 1): Bottom right is Bruce, one of the earliest characters I designed for Dolor; however, he originally had light skin and blonde hair. I recently redesigned him with dark skin and dark hair (and a few changes to facial structure) and he looks waaay better now. Slide 7 (Extra Characters 2): These are all fairly recent designs; in fact, four of the characters weren't even a part of the story until the most recent rewrite. Read the notes and credits section for more info on Isle of Dolor's development.
Art by me. Music composed by me (with the opening motif taken from Z. Randall Stroope's "Lamentations of Jeremiah") and performed by me on a piano. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MORE INFO: So you might be wondering, "what's going on with Isle of Dolor? Wasn't that game supposed to come out in 2017/2016/2015/2014?" (choose whichever year accurately reflects the projected release date the first time you heard about it). Well, as usual, I'm redoing the game engine. I decided that the gridded 4-direction movement in the old engine felt really clunky, so when I finalized the tiling system I built a new game engine on top of it that allows smooth 8-direction movement similar to classic Zelda games but switches back to 4-direction gridded movement when solving sokoban puzzles. Perhaps a bigger change of plans is the fact that I now intent to release Dolor as an episodic series rather than 3 large games. There are a couple of reasons for this: 1. Scratch games typically aren't very long, so I don't know how long players would stay interested in the game; breaking it into smaller, more manageable episodes would mean the game could be played 10-20 minutes at a time without requiring a complicated save system. 2. I've realized that even though I've come up with ideas for better stories in the past 4 years, I've put so much time into developing Dolor that I really want to explore the characters in a great deal of depth. Interesting plotlines that would be ignorable sidequests in a large game can now become central stories of their own episodes, allowing for more character development. 3. By spreading content out over many episodes, I can get the first installments out sooner and adapt later parts of the story based on player feedback (what gameplay aspects they like or dislike, which characters they want to see more of, what thematic elements are fascinating/boring/too scary, etc). 4. I've gotten really interested in episodic/serial writing lately, so I kind of just want to try it out. Anyway, the current plan is to release Dolor as 3 seasons of 10 episodes each, with each season more or less corresponding to one of the originally planned large games. I'm not going to say when the first episode is coming out, other than eventually. In between seasons I'll work on one or two other projects just so that I don't get overwhelmed by working on Dolor all the time. Scratch on! --Danlo -------------------------------------------------------- 19 Apr 2018-
