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"You won't live to see your thirteenth sun."

"Let's talk about it, hm?"

Your minions are defeated, your plans thwarted. The hero has come, and all you have left is words.

The thing is, you are good with words. Words are pretty much what you do best.

Can you talk your way out, or break that pesky hero and send her crying to her teammates?

Be careful, for this could be your final monologue.


Exeunt Omnes is a rhetorical strategy game, where dialogue is the battleground and you fight for your life armed with Logos, Ethos and Pathos.

Trigger warnings:
- evil teenage girls with a taste for dialectics;
- wacky takes on ethics and narrative theory;
- dissing Kant and Nietzsche for street cred;
- needlessly difficult to reach fifth ending and slightly esoteric UI because of the folly of youth.



Notice: Exeunt Omnes was developed in a month for the 2014 Indie Game Making Contest. It somehow got the Humble Bundle choice.

It is complete but short and was meant as a proof of concept for my homemade engine (based on Pygame, a Python SDL environment) which has been in development for a year or so. More games extending this gameplay concept, and hopefully making it more human-readable, are currently in the works.


CREDITS

Adam Hasvers (adam.hasvers@free.fr) - Programming, Graphics, Design

Doedelzak (benjamin.bouvrot@gmail.com) - Music, Playtesting

Latest Blog

Looking back, moving on

Over the past two months, I have demo'ed Exeunt Omnes at three events around New York, received a ton of feedback and learned quite a lot about what was wrong in the UI (from repeating roughly the same six sentences over and over again everytime someone got stuck :P). To celebrate this, I have just uploaded EO v1.03 with slightly streamlined controls, some rewritten text and most importantly, help popups if you select the "with tutorial" version.

Very few changes apart from that, so this is probably not reason enough to replay the game if you've finished it already, but I invite you to grab the new version you had only downloaded the previous one, or quit a few minutes in, cursing my lack of UI flair.

Tonight I will demo EO once more in Hoboken NJ, at a nice event organized by The Sheep's Meow. This should be the last public outing of this little game, and perhaps the last blog post on this page (?), since I am moving on to better and greater things.

Indeed, my next game is in progress, building upon the same engine. I have said very little about it on the interwebs so far, but from now on you will find regular updates here:

http://lilavati.org


Thanks to everyone who has ever shown interest in this game!
You really helped me find the motivation to pursue those things a bit more seriously.

If I ever become the next Peter Molyneux or Phil Fish, you should know deep inside that it is your entire responsibility. That should feel warm and fuzzy.

Posts

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Walkthrough updated!

The Kant reference is
all the way to the bottom left, it's tricky to get there because you have to stay as much to the left as possible when going down, while Hero's comment drags you to the right.


Immanuel Kant is a very influential German thinker whose most important writings are impossible to read without becoming either mad or a philosopher :P A large part of subsequent philosophy, like Nietzsche, has been in reaction to Kant. So it's a prime target for apprentice philosophers to criticize so as to feel superior, exactly like our teen protagonist!
CashmereCat
Self-proclaimed Puzzle Snob
11638
author=Hasvers
Immanuel Kant is a very influential German thinker whose most important writings are impossible to read without becoming either mad or a philosopher :P

Or both, am I right?

Edit: Oh, by the way, I played the game for a bit. It seemed really deep and complex, requiring intricate strategy. It was a really innovative and it had really good art. But I found myself rather confused by the gameplay mechanics. Even though I read the rules, I still couldn't get my head around how they worked. I liked the idea of conversations being like literal trees in a 2D space (I've actually imagined something similar myself), but I found it hard to get my head around things like where the line of sight ended, and what arguments mean, and what the connections between the nodes meant. One possible reason for this is that I didn't play it for very long, and I probably would have got my head around it if I did. In fact, I might play it right now and try and figure it out again.

Edit #2: Play it real soon I mean. Because, you know, I only have access to a Mac right now. Ya. Sux.
Just got the logician ending. I do think it was too difficult; you need to not only know the hero's belief in every single subject (which is impossible), you have to claim the nodes in the exact right order or you'll run out of time and/or the topical zone will screw you over. And, to be honest, I wasn't entirely sure what I was convincing her of. The ethics/philosophy branch kind of makes my head spin.

And all I know about Kant is from Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher, but he sounds like a nutcase. Intent is the only way to define morality, but also we have to consider the consequences of an action in every possible situation in order to define its morality, and all because humans are special and dignity is sacrosanct? I don't even.

And I guess I'll give a bit of advice to anyone looking for the Kant reference:

It's in the lower left. To uncover it, you need to follow the "I am a free thinker" branch, which is tricky because Hero will keep shifting you to the right.


How is the score at the end calculated, anyway? Things like belief changes and emotion points seem like pocket change in comparison to the Kant reference bonus. My Adhavista ending score was like triple my score in every other path because of it.
author=argh
Just got the logician ending. I do think it was too difficult

Congrats, and yeah it is really unbalanced. I didn't want people to stumble on it through pure luck on their first playthrough, but I went too far in the other direction. Thanks for going that far though!

author=argh
How is the score at the end calculated, anyway? Things like belief changes and emotion points seem like pocket change in comparison to the Kant reference bonus. My Adhavista ending score was like triple my score in every other path because of it.

Haha well I'll let you in on a small secret: the score and rank were tacked on at the end of the development as something of an inside joke. The score is straightforward: 10 points for each point of emotional change, truth change in the hero's belief, and villain claim. But the rank doesn't actually depend on the score, it depends on the ending - which was a very obscure and injokey way of saying that in a villain's value scale, only results matter, not the means. The Kant reference bonus is 500 points, because that's almost a Godwin point in philosophy; it clearly favors the philosophical path which is the only one where the means are actually taken into consideration.
This is all frivolous, and weak in terms of real game design, but I thought I could get away with it for this once ;)


CashmereCat> All my thanks! There's definitely a lot to improve on in terms of interface and clarity; even now I have trouble seeing Exeunt Omnes as a "full game" since it was a test run for my engine (and I spent most of the allotted month expanding and debugging it instead of making the game, stupidly enough)

Feel free to give me remarks on everything that seemed weird or was a weakness in your opinion. It will only make my future games stronger!
(and not only mine hopefully, since i want to release the engine for modding. So if you ever want to make a game with the same basic representation but a different mechanism, let me know and I'll see if I can adapt the code. The representation is really meant to be quite generic - it can go from simply giving a visual on the usual "conversation trees" that exist in most pro RPGs these days, to being a full on concept map)
author=Hasvers

Immanuel Kant is a very influential German thinker whose most important writings are impossible to read without becoming either mad or a philosopher :P


.. Is it really that hard to read or am I the only one not having too much trouble? Oh well.

Still need to go back to get the logician ending then.
Intriguing concept! Haven't find a visual novel this attractive for a long time.
Thanks a lot! Much appreciated :) (Also, scary avatar you have :D )


(Kyla> honestly I haven't read him in an eternity. I should try again. But I believe it's easier if you're German; concept agglomeration comes more naturally ;) )
Is there a video of the "true" ending somewhere? Even with your guide, I'm finding it ridiculously punishing to get and just don't have the time or energy to keep trying, but do want to see it. Or do you know of any LPs out there?
Thanks for playing, sorry that getting this ending proved so painful!
No LPs as far as I know, and making a video is a bit of a hassle with my configuration.
But if you don't mind waiting 48h, I'll upload saves made right before each ending.
Hey there Hasvers! Congratulations on winning the Humble Bundle Choice! You should be proud of yourself and your game! Great job!
Dude, how cool is it that you got the Humble Bundle recognition!? When I saw the name over Tam's head I got pretty excited. Great work!

EDIT: It was apparently Oxfeld.
What. the. Chelm.
Well my head just exploded from the awesome.

Thank you so much guys!
Congraats! That's really awesome.
nhubi
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
11099
Congratulations! Well deserved, too.
Thanks you two! Honestly I didn't expect anything after seeing the games I was up against - but I am certainly not going to complain :P

Instead, I will track down Andy Oxfeld and shower him in tokens of gentlemanly appreciation.
sinn
the original sinn
1092
So...it's a conversation game!
sinn
the original sinn
1092
author=Hasvers
Walkthrough updated!

The Kant reference is
all the way to the bottom left, it's tricky to get there because you have to stay as much to the left as possible when going down, while Hero's comment drags you to the right.


Immanuel Kant is a very influential German thinker whose most important writings are impossible to read without becoming either mad or a philosopher :P A large part of subsequent philosophy, like Nietzsche, has been in reaction to Kant. So it's a prime target for apprentice philosophers to criticize so as to feel superior, exactly like our teen protagonist!



I....Kant.
That was kinda, practical isn't it?
Leftist vs Rightist idea?
author=sinnelius
So...it's a conversation game!

It is! Well it's mostly a monologue game, to be fair :P

Haha I hadn't thought of left and right in those terms, but I did try to put some meaning into the spatial organization of the conversation, limited by how little time I had to think this through!

In fact this path is on the periphery of the conversation because it requires doing something that the Vilain doesn't want to do, and that even the Hero usually doesn't let her do: admit that the Hero is right. (so for us it is to the left)
The path that goes far to the right is the one where we claim that the Hero is only wrong.

That is slightly silly but welp, a dev must have their fun.
Hey Hasvers, Just letting you know I LOVE the game, And am looking forward to any future projects of yours! I also suck at the game, But that's not important. Anyway, I don't suppose you'd be willing to share if you're working on something now and/or what it is?

Edit:didn't see the blog entry. I'm an idiot.
Thank you so so much :)

To be fair, given the UI and everything, you cannot really suck or be good at the game right now, since a lot is out of your hands (especially on the first playthrough). Next game will be much better on that front, hopefully!

Sadly, it has been months since I've been able to work on it, I am at a pretty decisive juncture in my RL career and all other plans have been overriden for the moment. (Can you believe I hoped to get a first draft of the new game done by August? Ha ha silly me.) But your comment really helps restore my motivation.

As a thank you, here's a very modest teaser: one of my early researches on the art style for the next game. The end result will be quite different but it is still very much in flux so I dare not show more ;)
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