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Thief's Roulette

Created by hiromu656

A Puzzling Thriller inspired by the Zero Escape and Danganronpa series. All purchases help support the development of the game.

Latest Updates from Our Project:

Update Time
almost 3 years ago – Sat, Jul 03, 2021 at 03:38:28 PM

Back to our scheduled updates. 

Here's what I've been working on since the last update:

  • Challenge Room 2 is finished and polished (every other room but 1 is finished, but not polished).
  • I finally expanded on the HELP button during dialogue. It was pretty simple to setup, so I'm sorry for not getting that done in time for the Demo. Essentially as you progress through the Challenge Room, which could be picking up an item, opening something, etc, I simply change a numbered variable called the "Room Phase." So when you enter C-Room 1 (for example), the Phase is 0, when you pickup the Key, the Phase goes to 1. If you talked to the characters and ask for Help, they will have different responses if you're on phase 0, 1, and so on. It's a decent amount of work, but I think it'll make the game feel really polished. 
  • Touched up the character art that needed little adjustments. Now I'm getting back to finishing the different sprite expressions/poses.
  • I have a big pile of rough CGs that I need to finish, and that's what I've been getting into as well. Being honest, some of these will wind up being cut, but I'll try my best to get as many CGs into the game as I can. 
  • I added a monologue style sequence to many of the game's cutscenes that you'd find in most other visual novels. The main character is not a silent protagonist, btw. Not sure if that was ever stated, and I wanted to give him more moments to express himself. 
  • I've been addressing much of the Demo's feedback. For example, one thing that I never actually took note of, is when you pickup an Item, it takes the place of your equipped item. This could lead to minor annoyances if you wanted to use an item that was previously in that slot before you picked up something new. So you'd be forced to open the Inventory and switch back to the item before doing what you had in mind. So I simply added an option, "Auto Equip Item" (maybe theres a better way to say that). What it does is allows you to choose if you want new items you pick up to be automatically equipped or not. So if you prefer to pick things up and still be holding the item you initially had equipped, you can do just that.

It's getting cramped in there, so next thing I'll do is give the Controls display its own panel. 

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Another short one, but that'll do it for this update. What would make for a cool next update, would be me showing off one or more of the game's CGs, so I'll work towards that. 

Demo, Recap and What's Next
almost 3 years ago – Sat, Jun 19, 2021 at 03:11:32 PM

This will be a short update.

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If you missed it, the demo is out. You can get it through Itch or Steam:

 https://hiromu656.itch.io/thiefs-roulette 

 https://store.steampowered.com/app/1287170/Thiefs_Roulette/ 

Regarding the demo, its much shorter than the backer only demo since I cut out nearly all of the story parts. I just couldn't find a way to put it in without stopping the flow of the demo. Walking up to characters one by one and chatting was something I took from the Danganronpa V3 demo. That worked much better there because that's pretty much the bulk of the game anyway. In Roulette you do puzzles and stuff, so it ended up just causing confusion and ruining the flow in my opinion. So this new demo is pretty much all one string of gameplay. 

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Now for a quick recap: 

The demo is out, I finished most of the character art, and the challenge rooms are in their final stages. 

What happens next:

  • Finalize each Challenge Room
  • Polish some of the already finished environments
  • Get the remaining music tracks made
  • Refine the game's writing (could use 1 more draft at least)
  • Create a final trailer that will announce the game's release date
  • Finish the big promo art piece

I am very close to the end of development. After that, the game will be run by the Publisher, and we'll have to work on the porting and potentially some localizations. We may just release it in English, then work on more languages after release, but it would be much better to have some more languages in at launch. 

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That's gonna be all for now. Really not sure what to do with these remaining updates... I'm very much running out of things to show, but I do want to keep the updates coming on time. I hope that's okay with everyone. It's been a long time coming, but this is finally the home stretch.

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LINKS:

 Twitter 

 Youtube 

 Soundcloud 

 Backerkit Preorders 

 Steam Page 

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Character Art & Screenshots
almost 3 years ago – Sun, Jun 06, 2021 at 11:41:11 PM

This will be mostly a picture dump. I'll start with some screenshots, then end with all of the Character Art.

I feel like I may have reached the limit of what I want to show in the game... 

Especially when it comes to Challenge Rooms, I'll have to get really funky with my angles. Every Room that I've shown so far have much more to them, but those discovery moments will be better spoiler free! Not to mention there's a little bit more than I'm keeping to myself to use for the final trailer that I'm putting together now. 

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Finally, the character art:

I made some more presentable arrangements of the characters. 5 pics, 3 different characters in each. I recently updated Roland, so you'll see his new art in his pic. Each image will be clickable if you want to see the full size. I'm still self conscious about their legs, so you'll only get to see them in game. 

Alise | MC | Ruby
M | Adhira | Roland
Viktoria | Morgan | Isaac
Ice | Inamori | Roger
Lillian | Li | Joy

And that's the cast.

I'm still very tempted to update all of the art again, but I will just have to restrain myself. Everytime I post  art, I instantly see everything that can be improved. I can't touch the art anymore if I want to finish the game in a reasonable amount of time. Is what it is...

But on the topic of updating art, here's the old versions of the characters' art (minus the MC) from back in 2019:

I kinda like this old angry MC more, but that didn't fit with his character. I see right away that everyone's eyes got bigger. Maybe I'll allow myself to make them all a bit smaller, but I promise not to touch anything else.

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That's all I got. The next update lands on the 19th, but I'll make a small one a couple days early on the 16th, as that is the day of the final demo's release. It will be fully public, on Steam and Itch.io. 

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LINKS:

 Twitter 

 Youtube 

 Soundcloud 

 Backerkit Preorders 

 Steam Page 

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New MC Art & Some Screenshots
almost 3 years ago – Thu, May 27, 2021 at 06:54:02 AM

This turned out to be yet another small update, but unlike last time I do have some visuals to show at least. It's just as the title says, so I'll get right to it:

New art for the main character. He didn't change much at all, but I felt the way that he was drawn was no longer in line with the rest of the cast. So now, I can say that he very much is. In the next update I should be officially done with all of the character art, so I can then put together a big collection of all of the characters' final art. Maybe even show the art progression for the characters that changed a lot.

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Lastly, I took a couple more screenshots of some locations:

I swear the whole game isn't in the dark,  but I do like my moody environments.

And that's it. The next update will be June 5th, so I'll have a little more to share then.

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LINKS:

 Twitter 

 Youtube 

 Soundcloud 

 Backerkit Preorders 

 Steam Page 

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