A Monele & DaFool game

Manage your magic shop aspects with an interface that smells like good ol' grimoires.	Follow your employees in their everyday life through visual novel phases.	See how well they fare with the tasks you give them.

Welcome to the Magical Boutique! My name is Framboise and I will be your guide. We have just opened, eheh... don't mind the mess please! Aah! The manager left a bunch of parchments laying around... again.

Downloads

I am pretty sure you don't want to read a ton of grimoires... You just want to start mixing ingredients together, don't you?
Well all right then! Pick the potion you like the most : the See-Through Vision, the Penguin Metamorphosis or the Fruit Detection one?

... And this goes there! Phew, everything is back to where it should be! Oh, yes, sorry... let me show you around the shop. You should get a feel for the place quite quickly, eheh!

The game

Having just inherited a shop from your late grandfather, it is now up to you to manage its day to day operations. Send your employees to gather ingredients or brew potions. Pay them a salary or give them a day off. Keep track of how each potion sells so you can keep up with demand. You might be able to discover a new potion or two while you deal with unexpected events!

Features

• A staff of lively characters
• Over an hour and a half of immersive entertainment
• Unique fairy-tale atmosphere brought about by stylish graphics and custom music
• Hybrid gameplay combining stat-building (using a sim interface) with story-telling (using a visual novel interface)

The Staff

• Original Concept, Original Game and Interface Design, Scenario and Story, Programming and Resources, Character Design - Olivier Mercier (aka Monele) (angelushappyfm at evc dot net)
• Original Music, Drawn Backgrounds, Coloring, Beta-testing - G. Q. Del Rosario (aka DaFool) (giorel80 at yahoo dot com)
• Ren'Py Engine - PyTom
• Photographic background sources - Stock.xchng (http://www.sxc.hu)
• Additional "sickness" quest - Jake (from the LemmaSoft forums)

Monele (aka Olivier Mercier) is a web application developer who has been in love with computers since he was four. He has gained a reputation for lighthearted storytelling and pushing the Ren’Py engine above and beyond its intended capabilities.

DaFool (aka Giorel Del Rosario) is an animation studio employee who hopes to one day set up a business of his own---preferably a visual novel house. He also swears that listening to jazz music helps one become a better composer, even if one doesn’t know how to read notes.

Jake is a programmer and webcomic artist, and generously contributed a quest format and hosting. He has a blog at http://www.eviscerate.net/

PyTom is the creator of the Ren'Py visual novel engine and the Moonlight Walks visual novel. When not helping make visual novels, he works as a Computer Scientist. He lives on Long Island, NY. He may be reached by emailing pytom at bishoujo.us.

Blue Lemma is an anime game developer and the founder of the Lemma Soft forums, where visual novel creators congregate. His games can be downloaded from lemmasoft.net.

Um, yes? Oh, you say you want to open your own shop now? I can tell you how to do that!... Wait... would that mean we would become rivals?

The Engine

While the task of scripting the game is important, it's only akin to hammering nails in a plank. What would one do without the hammer and the nails? All these important parts were created by PyTom and the name of the resulting tool is Ren'Py!

Ren'Py is an engine that lets you script games without having to worry about how the computer will actually make all this work. Just focus on writing your story, directing pictures, sounds and music and let Ren'Py deal with displaying stuff and making the sound come out of your speakers.

For those who like to customize everything to match their vision, know that Ren'Py was made with Python which means it will work on platforms supporting the language and that you can add to the engine through Python code (this was done for Magical Boutique to add the sim-game aspect).

Whether you just want to make a simple visual novel or a full blown game, check it out here : http://renpy.org
You might want to take a look at the Screencast to get an idea of how to start making your own game.

Additional Screenshots