The Story of Errant Heart
Errant Heart takes place in a fictional 1940's Europe (sans Hitler) and follows the exploits of a young painter, Lira Moretti. As she leaves home in order to establish herself as an artist in the cosmopolitan mainland city of San Moritz, she has a bizarre encounter with a street urchin which leaves her with a gap in her memory.
Unsure of how she arrived at her final destination of Mrs. Hinze's boarding house, she runs afoul of her granddaughter, Elena. Accused of being a disruptive drunkard, Lira does her best to salvage the scenario and surprisingly, ends up on the good side of Mrs. Hinze.
As she settles in to life in San Moritz, Lira struggles to choose between starting her painting career or following up on the bizarre circumstances that she encountered upon her arrival. Eventually, after having apparently been followed by the street urchin, Salima draws Lira deeper into an extraordinary world where the passage of time takes on new meaning—a world which runs parallel but utterly unseen to the eyes of the banal.
What is a Visual Novel?
Traditionally, the term Visual Novel (VN) is associated with Japanese gaming. They are essentially computerized "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories. VNs typically don't include standard game play elements, as one would see from a game on a console system. Instead, VNs really are "novels", with some accompanying graphics and music to help set the mood, as well as a series of choices that the reader makes, which steers the outcome of the story. The graphics themselves tend to consist of background images used to denote locations in the story, and "sprites" of characters overlaid on the backgrounds. A variety of sprites are swapped out at key moments as the emotions of the character change. During especially important moments, specially-crafted "Event CGs" are typically displayed. These are usually fully-colored and complex scenes, meant to punch of the impact of special event.
In Japan, the best selling VNs have historically been associated with sexually explicit content. Ironically, this does not mean said titles are ever intended as pure pornographic material. In fact, many titles that succeed will end up getting "sanitized" versions created for release on the major console systems, like Playstation and Xbox. Some titles, like Fate/Stay Night even spawn new games in new genres (e.g. fighting), as well as generate television series', movies, manga and various other material which have no connection to sexually explicit content.
In the west, VNs are a nascent, virtually unknown medium. There is, however, a dedicated fanbase of the genre. In fact, there are a number of programs designed to help game-makers create VNs—Programs like KiriKiri, NScripter and Ren'Py. In our case, we found Ren'Py to be the most robust and versatile engine, and that's what we're using to build our project. Through Ren'Py, we would very much like to foster the popularization of non-sexually explicit VNs in the west, written by western authors.