Berry Street (DEMO)
A downloadable visual novel for Windows and macOS
WARNING: Berry Street contains content not suitable for younger audiences, including strong language and sexual humor, and is intended for players aged 15 and up.
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16-year-old Alex Sprouse has moved to the tiny Smalltown with several different neighbors of different personalities, but there might be more to these people than first impressions reveal. Will he be able to be a good friend, or perhaps more, to one of these new neighbors? In a world where actions can't be reversed, he better hope you get things right!
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This demo currently includes:
- Fully custom sprites with mouth movement, blinking, and voice blips
- Custom backgrounds with a mix of placeholders
- A 95% custom soundtrack (one placeholder is left)
- Around 2 hours of gameplay
- 3 main 'route' characters, as well as small chances of interactivity with the 4th.
Hidden secrets
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Berry Street is currently in development. Everything is subject to change. There are still placeholder assets in place, including backgrounds and music tracks. If you wish to help the project's development, please consider supporting it on Patreon!
Download
Development log
- v0.2 Release!May 01, 2019
- 1-16-19 PatchJan 16, 2019
Comments
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I am going trought the demo, I have done 1 our of playing so far and I can see a lot of problems, I like a lot all of the idea done so far, the story and the basic graphics, but I would love for those basic graphics (not talking about the obvius placeholders taken from google) to be more detailed or just worked on a little bit more, that includes backgrounds and menus but the thing that REALLY is annoying me at this point is that I did not get to choose a lot of options so far, and since its a game and not a cartoon you should really add more options, even useless ones that do not influence the story but maybe just some lines of text or even nothing, I would really like to be free to talk to characters freely or to have a day or two in the middle of the story to do my own thing and explore to get that feeling that I am not just watching a story that cannot bend with my options or that it is not really complete.
I started this game just to get a game like The Sims but from another prospective and where I could only control myself, and have all the options to talk, flirt, and make bad jokes, but the limitations of following the story only lead to talking to few characters that for now I do not personally like and that I can't really talk much with becouse I can't say much in the conversations.
I'm relatively new to Visual Novels too. And coming from open world games like Skyrim, I know what you mean. BUT, remember that a VN is a weird combination of Book, meets Movie - in that you set the pace (book) and there are visual and sounds to enhance the story (movie).
I think this is why some people prefer to say *read* a VN, instead of *play* a VN.
I'd say that wishing you could spend a day just wandering around and talking to the characters is an indicator that the story and characters are solid enough to draw you in - which is great! Right?
:)
If you are enjoying this medium, I can recommend more free VNs that you might like. Some with choices and others without. A great one (that is a 10 min read) is "Ripples by Saki Visual" (google that, it comes right up.
i just finished demo.Well, it was good but...
Some of backgrounds could be replaced with something better. Especially the ones made of photos and pictures from found on the interenet. The rest of artstyle is cool! The cartoon-style CGs, sprites and backgrounds are very nice :)
And a good music :)
I like the story. Maybe the idea of young person moving to place they nows nothing (or very little) about isn't new. But it doesn't have to be.
Moving on to totally new place must be hard, especially for teenagers. But very small american towns (especially the ones in the middle of nowhere), where literally everybody knows each other, have their own charm :D
Especially when you have some supporting friends.
I like when game has a lot meaningful (or not) choises, plot-twists and endings :)
Characters are very interesting, too. I like them all. I don't have favourites yet.
The idea of auto-saving instead of normal saving system is good. It requires from player totally other way of thinking - more thoughtful decisions. Is it how it gonna work in full game?
It is a lot of gameplay as for demo :)
I wish you good luck with this project
First, thank you for playing the demo! Really means a lot to me! Now, to address a few things:
Some of backgrounds could be replaced with something better. Especially the ones made of photos and pictures from found on the interenet.
Yes, the backgrounds that are obviously real photos are just placeholders; the ones with the art style that matches the characters are more like what the final BG style will be.
I like when game has a lot meaningful (or not) choises, plot-twists and endings :)
Then this truly is the VN for you! :)
The idea of auto-saving instead of normal saving system is good. It requires from player totally other way of thinking - more thoughtful decisions. Is it how it gonna work in full game?
That's the idea! I want the player to actually think about their choices and how they may or may not affect both the short-term and long-term events to come. Nothing to the level of the butterfly effect, though; the outcome will (hopefully) be logical based on player choices rather than the unpredictable "Oh, because you chose to spend time with this person, this person's dog got ran over!"
I'm currently taking a short hiatus from Berry Street while I work on my project for NaNoRenO, but once that's done, I'll be sure to get back to work! In the meantime, feel free to follow one of the social media platforms via the Extras menu in the game, as that's where you'll get more current updates, if you're interested.