The long:

Hello!

My name's Youko and I've been recommended to give the newgrounds colab forums a try by Step, in the hope of finding a programmer for my visual novel project: Advocate's Lai.

Lai is the sum of my mental ramblings over many years. After a year of emotional break downs and soul-searching, I've finally decided to not only make it a reality, but the start of my game development career. Sadly, however, the programmer I previously had recruited was forced to resign due to personal reasons and I'm left without a programmer.

Considering the success I've had on newgrounds finding both a friend and a reliable composer in Step, I decided I might as well try again to see if I can hit gold twice in a row and make this dream of mine come true with a little more help.

The visual novel itself will be a commercial product, meaning that I can actually afford to pay any programmer for their work. The current pay is around $700 USD if we can make a playable demo and have a successful kickstarter campaign. Should that fail or never happen, the payment will be a percentage of the profits for a set amount of years after all processing fees and taxes are factored out. Of course, all of this is negotiable.

As for the content of the visual novel, the plan is to have a series of self standing stories that are interlocked with each other and tell the story of a world and its inhabitants as a whole. The work I'm currently looking to commission is for the first installment of the series: Advocate's Lai; a story about a daemon politician looking to save her country by allying with a neighboring kingdom in the hopes of gaining healthy land for her citizens to thrive on. However, when the meeting actually takes place, instead of going into negotiations about the proposed war with humans, he instead offers her a deal. If she or her partner were to go north and fetch an item from deep within human lands, he would do whatever they requested, no questions asked.

It's up to the player to decide what the fate of both the politician and her country meet.

The overall theme of the visual novel mostly revolve around the hardships and internal struggles faced when trying to do the thing that's best for an individual and everyone around them. Each path will have common elements of friendship, adventure and drama. The player is able to make many small decisions that varies what they see on each play-through and the main character's standing with each character she meets.

While Advocate's Lai is a standalone story, the underlying larger story starts to surface as the player gets through paths and interacts with the Artificial Intelligence, Afal, that observes the story together with the player as they experience it.

It's this factor that increases the technical complexity of the visual novel. Outside of the actual visual novel, there's a meta story of sorts where the player is a researcher who's been tasked to retrieve information off a colony ship lost over 40 years ago. While searching the files, the player is met with a game program, manned by an AI called "Afal" who urges the player to sit down and play a game or two while they're trying to decipher the ship's files.

One of these games the player is able to play is the visual novel series Advocate's Lai is from.

As for people on the team, we have Step, who's the composer and proof-reader, an editor, who's a family friend of mine and myself who does pretty much everything else related to the game (Art assets, editing, writing, directing, sfx, UI design, PR, etc etc). As much as I would love to program the game, sadly I don't possess the skills nor time to make it happen. Hopefully, through this post, I'll be working with one of you talented programmers and we can work together to make this happen.

I'd prefer to have someone who's more interested in seeing the game come into existence rather than purely for profit. I'm a pretty relaxed person as far as deadlines go and is flexible about when things need to be completed as long as the time frame is reasonable (3-7 months with no progress when promising there will be progress is not ok!).

Contact me via: Skype, Twitter. Both are listed on my profile page. I'll try to respond if you contact me via newgrounds, but I'm pretty new to all this, so prefer the previously listed modes of communication.

Thanks!

-Youko
 

tl;dr: I need a programmer for a visual novel. I will pay you. It'll be pretty long. Thanks.