• Add Review
  • Subscribe
  • Nominate
  • Submit Media
  • RSS
The World is Made of Paper is a modern fantasy, psychological whosawhatsit that also happens to be a visual novel.

Hurrah!

I don't really want to bore you too much with introductory ramblings, so I'm just going to get straight to the stuff people actually care about.

Story

Being a bored college dropout with nothing better to do, Dion Nagi had read a lot of books in the past few years. Far, far too many of them.

Contrary to popular belief, this is not a healthy practice. At least not for a young man already prone to over analyzing things.

After a certain point, the lines between reality and fiction started to blur, and it became increasingly easy to interpret even the events of his own life as if they were written in a book. Everything from the people he knew, to the problems he suffered from, started to seem like nothing more than plot devices intent on bringing him to a meaningful conclusion.

Dion didn't really mind this, however. To him, that part was really nothing more than a new way of looking at the world. No, what really made him snap was, in fact, the most simple of book related thoughts.

"What is the genre of my life?"

It didn't take long for him to realize the answer: he was living in an underdog story. He was the kid left at the bottom rung with nowhere to go but up. It would be sappy, heartwarming, and incredibly cheesy.

He hated that kind of story.

So he did the only thing he could think to do. He left his home, his town, his job, his belongings, and just about everything even closely related to his life as it was. He did everything it took to throw away the novel he had already started.

--------------------------

Stuck in an unknown town without gas, a place to stay, or any immediate goal to speak of, Dion found himself starting a new story. A story that he realized began with him being a complete and total idiot.

Hit with a car on the way to find a gas station, his story continued. A story that seemed to want nothing more than to kill him at every given moment.

A story that, upon him waking up in the hospital with a head injury, started to get a bit weird.

Over time, Dion's reality started to fall apart around him, and the more he attempted to take control his life, the stranger it seemed to get.

In his attempt to simply start a new life, he found himself looking at much, much more.

----------------------------

When given the opportunity to change the world at it's very core, would he be willing to take it?

How would he do it?

What would he turn it into?

And what will he do when he realizes he's not the only one who can?

----------------------------

The demo is just over 37,000 words in length, with three full demo endings, and one bad end. It should take somewhere around one and a half to two hours to complete one playthrough. Quite a bit of the game changes depending on your choices, so I encourage you to play through it again if you like it.

New additions to the revamped demo:

- One of the three demo endings is now extended.
- The game now has a custom menu. It's fully functioning, however, there are currently no hover or select displayables, meaning you can't really tell when you've selected certain options. The main place where this probably stands out is in the loading screen. Loading does work. Just click on the load button, and even though nothing will appear to change, selecting your saves will now load them. I'm really sorry about this complication. It will be fixed, no questions asked, in the full version. For now, blame the Ren'py documentation for being utterly worthless.
- Some new expressions for characters.
- Two new backgrounds.
- Some of the art is now cleaned up. The CGs are still rough, however.
- General bugfixes and edits applied.

Latest Blog

Demo Revamp Going Up

The revamped demo is going up just as I'm writing this. Hopefully it will be available for download soon.

The revamped demo does not add any chapters that weren't in the original demo. This is mostly because ending on Chapter 4 would be really boring. However, there are a few changes from the original demo version:

- One of the three demo endings is now extended.
- The game now has a custom menu. It's fully functioning, however, there are currently no hover or select displayables, meaning you can't really tell when you've selected certain options. The main place where this probably stands out is in the loading screen. Loading does work. Just click on the load button, and even though nothing will appear to change, selecting your saves will now load them. I'm really sorry about this complication. It will be fixed, no questions asked, in the full version. For now, blame the Ren'py documentation for being utterly worthless.
- Some new expressions for characters.
- Two new backgrounds.
- Some of the art is now cleaned up. The CGs are still rough, however.
- General bugfixes and edits applied.

If you run into any problems, please comment about it. Otherwise, have fun!

-----------------


Progress on full version:

The game contains 4,890 screens of dialogue.
These screens contain a total of 71,102 words,
for an average of 14.5 words per screen.
The game contains 75 menus.
  • Production
  • ganonfrog
  • Renpy
  • Visual Novel
  • 03/12/2011 09:05 PM
  • 06/10/2016 03:41 AM
  • N/A
  • 119004
  • 64
  • 951

Posts

Pages: first 12 next last
This looks pretty cool! I really like the title, haha. I'll give it a shot!

EDIT - 300MB?! What is in this?!
author=Strangeluv
This looks pretty cool! I really like the title, haha. I'll give it a shot!

EDIT - 300MB?! What is in this?!


Way too much music. I'm going to try to compress it and clean it up a little more. If you want to wait, I can probably get a smaller one up later today. Sorry about that.

I'm glad you're interested, though! Thank you.
I just cut out about 30 MB from the download. It's still, unfortunately, pretty large, but at least it's an improvement. I'm just going to blame Ren'py for now.

Anyways, the slightly smaller download is up, now. You can get it from the main download button.
It's still pretty big but I'm downloading nonetheless. It looks good and I really like visual novels, so we'll see. How long would you say the demo is?
Probably somewhere between one and a half hours, to two hours. I'm not really sure, since I've played through this thing so many times for testing, and it varies a lot depending on what choices you make, so I could be a bit off.

Anyways, I hope it manages to be entertaining! I wouldn't want you to have to download such a ridiculous file for nothing.
... So, I just found the cause of the huge file size. Apparently some other complete game got packaged with it for no easily explainable reason. What the hell.

Anyways, about to upload the new one that should be almost half the size.

I... I seriously can't believe that happened.
Looks great, but I'll wait for a full version. :D
Yeah I just realized I downloaded two games, haha. I am playing it right now. I am digging it so far. It reminds me a little of the feelings I had when I was writing a novel of my own. Making life more interesting, starting over life, life's resemblance to a novel. I'm a big sucker for stories that give off this "jaded/desperate for rejuvenation" vibe.
Hurray! I'm glad it doesn't suck.

The other game in there is actually an outdated demo of Aleema's Rock Robin. I really have no idea why. You probably shouldn't play the copy that's in there. XD
For some reason absolutely nothing happens when I click on "The World is Made of Paper.exe"

Which kinda sucks, this look really good.

Edit: No, it just took ten minutes to launch from clicking open.

Edit edit: The music on this is awesome!
Creation
An avid lover of Heartache 101
1446
I tried this. I actually started doing a video review but I stopped.

Actually, it's more of a book than a visual novel. I guess I was lured by the pretty pictures and I thought there would loads of them with some text to them.

I guess I was expecting some sort of comic book judging from the screenshots but it's mostly reading. Kudos on the art however, it was pretty good.
@NewBlack: That's weird. Not too many people have tried it yet, but I've never heard of that happening before. I'll have to keep an eye out for it. I'm glad you like the music, though. XD Thank you! I'll tell you if I hear anything about the loading issue.

@Creation: Aw, I'm sorry I disappointed you with the lack of variety in visuals. I was actually thinking of doing comic style CGs for the final version, though. It mostly depends on if I can get a tablet.

Thanks for the compliments on the art, even if it was simplistic. I'm kind of curious about how much of the video review you got done.
Hmmm, somewhat interesting writing and concepts: I like the idea of a protagonist who can shape a world by himself.

The protagonist is somewhat similar to the ones in other similarly styled visual novels: cynical, questioning, discontent with life, experiencing a life crisis and so on. Still, that's way better than the writing being a giant mess. Though I wish his personality is more balanced out in the final version and though he might be a cynic and questioning, he'll have traits that'll give him a stronger personality like favourite books/music/movies and other types of thoughts. His world might have collapsed but surely he still retains part of himself, no? The narration is fairly strong and I hope we'll grow to know more about the protagonist: why he's so cycnical, so disenchanted or even disconnected from life. Is he cycnical because that's his personality? Or because he's tired of life that he develops a disdain for anything?

There're a lot of grammar errors and quite a few really weird sentence structures but I'm sure the writing will be polished before the game's finally released. Otherwise, that causes the characters to go from eloquent to sudden broken speech.

And I can't wait to see how the story would be like, in the end. I didn't play through all the choices yet. Speaking of them, it's good that the choices seem quite logical so far. Some VNs I played, had really random choices where the process of selecting them and following the path isn't very logical.

Btw, the music is excellent and brilliantly conveys the atmosphere. The pieces have good tempo, great at implying the emotions of the moment or of the character. I'm actually waiting for Vacant Sky(complete edition) too.

A note about the style of art: I really like how you painted all those characters and even the background art, too. Anatomy seems quite all right, though some of the poses look a bit stiff. I like the styling for all of the characters so far, though the protagonist, Marianne and Jacob look a tad too pale. And the panda eyes don't help them any. ^^;;

Btw, interesting choice that right-clicking = brings up the Save menu right away. Though I hope you all will label that section to avoid confusion.

The world-building seems quite interesting and well thought-out so far. You really managed to paint the picture of a really empty town. However, it seems that Julia paints a fairly contradictory image so perhaps the "view" is one of the protagonist's perception: inability to notice others? Though if the town is supposed to be habited by quite a few other humans, I do hope the writing will actually reflect that.

And finally, he's running away but personally, I was a bit sceptical as to what could make a person so bored with life, he'd not just run away but over-react to the point of committing a theft. 'Cos you see, most people run away by disappearing to another city/state, moving abroad, legally changing their identity and altering their appearance, etc. So hopefully, the final version of the game outlines the parts of his character that influence his decisions. I'm actually wondering if the protagonist has some psychiatrical issues, btw.
Oblic
Once a member of RMN, always a member of RMN!
1937
...what a complete mind fuck... I've only played through once and plan on going back to make a few different choices. The only thing that kind of set me off is cliched the "ghost town" thing is (kind of ironic, considering that is part of what Dion is running from). Plus it seems to fall out of the sky on his head like a ton of bricks without warning. Maybe that's how it was meant to feel? Either way, I did enjoy the demo (I was going to check it out for 5 minutes and do some laundry... dirty clothes still all over my room).

Can't wait for a fuller version!
The story sounds super interesting but I'm not good at critiquing stuff like that.

Let me comment on the music, instead.

Many of the pieces compose of just 2 to 3 layers, if you ignore or include the synthesizers. That's both their strengths and weaknesses. In the better pieces, the simplicity allows the creativity and melody to shine through. In the weaker pieces, the melodies start to sound a bit identical and lack polish as they mainly consist of a few bars on loop.

Even in most of the stronger pieces, the energy of the melody dissipates after a while as there's almost no variant in the rhythym, tempo, flats, harmonies, octaves, background effects, etc. If only the pieces were a little more complex, they'd be even more distinctive, creative and memorable. That's important if the music is used heavily for setting the atmosphere.
The music as it is right now is just free to use music from a website I found. Unfortunately, I don't really have the composing ability or time to make my own. However, I am thinking of getting a musician on board, so I'll be sure to take your critique in mind when discussing any custom music that might be made!
I just played the demo, and I thought the game was spectacular! The story and writing were really amazing, I was intruiged (and entranced) from the very beginning to the very end. Each set of dialogue reflected the characters nearly perfectly, and their personalities were non-cliche, yet relatable at the same time. The music was great and really set the theme for each seen (There were several moments where I was actually creeped out, something that I find is usually not done well in other games, but done well here), and the graphics were beautiful in there own way, and really did reflect the absence of reality that was the theme. I can't wait for the full version, subbed! :)
Thank you so much! I'm really glad you enjoyed the game. I'm actually surprised about how many compliments I've gotten on the creepy atmosphere. I'm not even quite sure what I did right. XD

Anyways, I'll be sure to do everything I can to make the full version as good as possible!

Out of curiosity, what did you wind up doing on the night with the gunshot?
Pages: first 12 next last