Videotome Heartbreak is a small narrative engine for making web based visual novels, based on its predecessors Super Videotome, Videotome:ADV and Videotome. It overhauls the linear structure into a stat raising dating sim game cycle, with a functional editable calendar and a storylets system for choosing which story chapters to play when.

Due to the increased complexity compared to the previous engines, it is suggested to have at least the minimum familiarity with javascript or else be willing to learn.

Demo game sprites by Toffee (twitter.com/funpuppyvideos, toffee.itch.io)

DETAILS

Feature set:

menu based "choose what to do each day" gameplay with narrative scenes
storylets based conditional chapter system
fully functional & modifiable calendar
character stats tracked & displayed in UI
easy character and background commands for quick editing
characters can blink now
layered canvas for background images, 2-frame animated foreground images, and text
music + sfx
non-blocking choices! pick one or let the story continue!
keyboard control (spacebar + numbers), dialogue autoplay
variables & branching checks
message history

Not implemented:

Conditional dialogue; branching is on the chapter level, not line
More complex animations or non-manually-defined animation frames
Literally anything fancier than the above

FAQ

I am a total beginner, is this engine for me?
Maybe. The syntax is moderately simple, but you will need to know at least minimal javascript for writing card conditions. There is minimal error handling, and single character errors may cause it to break. In general I recommend at least passing knowledge of how html/js works, if only to be able to debug your own games.

Why (make/use) this?
This engine was a hobby project. I like dating sims and so wanted to make a simple-ish engine for them. It is also designed to have a syntax that is fast to write and does not require things like wrapping dialogue in speech marks or special characters for every line. It offers a (relatively) constrained feature set and visual display, unless you have the ability and desire to expand upon it.

It doesn't work for me, can you help?
Maybe. I have a day job so I am not offering guaranteed support for this free hobby project. Before commenting with any issues, please check:

You are running the game after uploading to itchio / another site, or else via a server you run yourself. Just opening the index.html will not work.
You have included ALL files in the zip of your project and have not changed the location of any of them within the file structure.
You have followed the syntax and layout of the demo project.
You have checked the developer console (press f12 in browser) and had a quick attempt to decode any error messages in the console.
You have checked the readme.txt

Further Reading: Long post on the Videotome family of engines.

More information

Status	Released
Category	Tool
Platforms	HTML5
Rating	Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars (9 total ratings)
Author	communistsister
Genre	Interactive Fiction, Visual Novel
Tags	Dating Sim, engine, html, Narrative, Simple, tools, videotome, web