While we won’t be releasing new character designs every week, we do have another one today!
Erdi is the the Chosen One’s little sister, except she doesn’t know he’s the Chosen One.
While she may appear like a regular student about to finish high school while juggling a social life, volleyball, and studying, she is driven by more meaningful concerns. As a child, she witnessed Julian’s father abduct her older brother and was forsaken by the justice system – something she means to rectify.
Oh, please, I am a master of the social. Can’t have people see us on the way and think we’re faking it. Trust me, I know what I’m doing.
This week was a big one for us: We launched this website alongside our Twitter account, finalized the design for our logo, and finished an internal demo for new team members.
Art
Our artist was especially diligent this week – not only did he take our concept art and placeholder design for the logo and turned it into art, but he also finished the first pose for our first route’s heroine, Katrin.
You can find a short introduction of her artwork here. Since he already got started on our second heroine, Erdi, there’s a good chance he’ll finish her this Thursday during his art stream.
Editing
While our editor may not have worked on much of Poomp’s text this week, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t busy. With the new website and several tweets, he had his hands full correcting the garbled mess that I write when I’m left to my own devices. Maybe, one day, I can get him to write an article about the daily struggle that is my questionable spelling, especially when it comes to homophones, as well as the hardship of fighting off what he calls my ‘German commas’.
If it wasn’t for him, we’d be all be turning on our heals, our demos would be life, and cats always would have tales to tell instead of tails to wag.
Music
Oh snap, our editor is also our composer! As previously said, he was quite busy this week. We promise there will be snippets from our OST at some point.
Until then, feel free to check out this awesome OST that he wrote within 72 hours!
Meanwhile, a friend of our group offered to write us an anime opening. He already provided an amazing first idea, which sparked conversations within our team, entailing options for the structure and figuring out what mood we’re looking for. We are thrilled to see where he’ll take this.
Scripting
This week, I created and added some animated backgrounds. We’re quite happy with how they turned out and will post one of them on our twitter later this week. Besides that, I reworked scene transitions and added several placeholder sounds. Let’s hope our composer figures out how to produce better designed sounds than the ones I’m using!
Writing
This week was fairly boring, as far as writing goes. I spent several hours editing our demo. While it’s not yet ready to be released into the public, it’s now polished enough to at least be distributed to those that want to help us, but don’t know the story yet.
Besides that, I still managed to squeeze in 6.000 words, which is below my usual word goal for a week. This takes us to a total of 382.000 words.
I’m currently working on the third route, where I had one of our big antagonists bite the bucket earlier this week. However, that doesn’t mean dear Julian’s troubles are over. In fact, he just found himself in a fairly sticky situation.
Today, we are proud to reveal the first sprite for our first route’s heroine, Katrin Gansen!
Katrin was raised to investigate the occult and put a stop to it and is unafraid to pull her guns to do so. When she sets out to disrupt the ritual that Julian’s cult is working towards, however, she decides to appeal to his humanity instead.
Turns out, Katrin tends to get sucked into people’s personal backstories.
If you’re about to say that you’re better than human because you can do magic, don’t, because I will punch you, even if it means sleeping in wine-soaked sheets.
Hello and welcome to our newly launched website. NotHack Europa is an indie dev group that primarily focuses on visual novels, but produces other content like short stories or soundtracks on occasion.
Recently, we released our first original visual novel, so we decided it’s time for us to create a web presence
About Us
NotHack Europa is a hobby group. We don’t write visual novels for a living but are passionate about our stories and characters and want to create an enjoyable read for whoever cares about it.
Up to now
“Meteors are bad.”
Our first original visual novel, “No Meteors”, is a short story, written specifically for a 72 hour game jam.
Despite the short time frame, we managed to pump out over 9000 words, three hand-illustrated characters with several expressions each, three original music tracks, and a little tune sung by some of the devs.
The jam’s theme was a cropped bit of Michelangelo’s “The creation of Adam” and the word “Cringe” which is definitely a bit out there. In the end, we were surprised to see how much fun we ended up getting out of the prompt. When combined, the two parts of the theme definitely gave us those typical “chuuni” vibes, so that’s what we focused on.
As far as genres go, we went for a mix of comedy, horror, and romance. As per the jam’s requirements, the novel is family friendly, although it may get dark at times depending on the reader’s choices.
What’s next?
Be a warlock, sacrifice goats, save the day?
Now, upcoming projects is what this web-presence will mostly focus on. Since before the jam, we’ve been working on our “big project” – a visual novel set in a dark urban fantasy setting with lovecraftian horror elements and the chance to romance up to five heroines in their own distinct routes.
We called this novel WYSAPOOMP at inception – the acronym standing for a silly phrase we used to summarize the concept. Over a year later, when we started seriously brainstorming for a proper name, we kept returning to it. It turns out that with some minor adjustments to its meaning, the acronym can stay.
Thus, we’re proud to announce WYSAPOOMP: Why You Should Always Pull Out Of Magical Pacts, or “the Poomp” as we like to abbreviate it, as it’s quite the mouthful.
In “the Poomp” you take on the role of a warlock. In modern-day Germany your cult is getting ready to summon an Eldritch Being to the physical plane, by sacrificing your childhood friend, whom you have been grooming for this purpose for years. A bit over a week before ritual day, shady people pop up within the city, to put a stop to your cult’s activities. Will you take a stand for what you think is right, stay loyal to the cult, or find a way to surpass your problems altogether?
Depending on your choices, you get to work alongside one of several heroines and watch as your decisions send you into wildly differing adventures.
NotHack Europa 