itch.io

Hello! Some time has passed since we wrote here on Itch.

We will present ourselves again, we are Paola and Eleonora. We are working on a tech demo for The Rebirth of Franklin Albrecht, a graphic adventure that revisits the Frankenstein myth in an original way.

Here are some slides that present the project in-detail, in its most recent state:
https://www.canva.com/design/DAFr_tNdxy4/AzBXyARfiG845GD2erchsw/view?website#2:presentation-of-the-project

Right now we are a team of five people working on the tech demo: Pao, writing and management; Ele, character designer (+ general artistic and management support); Sarry, programmer; Freez, UI Art; Wagnard, sound designer.

As we said last time, we are not a full-on indie studio, but thanks to a small personal budget we had the occasion to experiment various types of paid collaborations (Fiverr, Upwork, etc), also with professionals of a higher level (for a better understanding of the game's art direction, we contacted a visual developer who worked for BBC and Good Smile Company). But after these various short-term experiences with professionals, we concluded that to follow the project in its embryonic phase, the best choice is to rely on volunteers, who can bring their passion to the project.

Currently, the members of the team are volunteers, who organize with us in terms of workload and time. Especially because of the premises of the work (being volunteers), our schedule can be flexible compared to a full-time job.

Right now, as the title says, we are searching for more creative minds for the team and are willing to amply our contact circle. As you can see, it’s a way less specific search compared to last time: what we expect from this search are people who can participate in this project from a creative point of view and share their ideas and opinion with us. They can do that as a proofreader, writer, narrative consultant, game design consultant, artist...

How do we plan to proceed?

If you are interested and willing to contact us, we will share some essential documents for the project’s understanding (Screenplay, Game Design Document and a Concept Art PDF). But before that, we would like to chat a bit with you to see how and if we can develop a collaboration together and agree on some essential matters.

We thank you for your attention. For any information, our preferential way of contact is Discord (paoele or Pao/Ele#9107). If not possible, you can send a mail to luditarantula@libero.it

Thanks for the interest! Actually... We are in a quite interesting situation. We never said anything publicly because for now there is no material that we deem good enough to show; but we're working with a small team to re-think the game from the start: to be in 3D instead of 2D, with more clear "grammar" and mechanics, even if all the concepts shown here will be in the final product that, for now, it's in a prototype state.

We did this (difficult) choice to make a game that can use its potential to the fullest. But we want to create an experience that can be engaging and, most of all, fun for all the players out there :)

So... Let's say that what it's shown here is only the start.

A demo will be there, some time will pass, but we assure you we'll come back in style ^^

-Pao&Ele, Ludi Tarantula Team

Thank you very much for the compliments!
We are planning even better and bigger things for the game: hope you all will like it when we'll announce everything! :)
-ELE, Ludi Tarantula Team

¡Muchas gracias por los cumplidos!
Estamos planeando cosas aún mejores y más grandes para el juego: ¡espero que os guste cuando lo anunciemos todo! :)
-ELE, Equipo de Ludi Tarantula

The initial basic designs for the characters are done by us!

If you're interested in collaborating, please contact us on Discord so that we can talk better on there about what to do! :)

Ludi Tarantula#9107

Thank you for proposed yourself! Your portfolio seems very interesting. 

One question: do you think that you could work comfortably with characters sprites animations (and, with this, know how to work with canvas sizes)? :)

Not exactly a composer, but it would be really helpful to have a sound designer! ^^

We will see your portfolio soon, we noticed your thread in Help Wanted or Offered.

In any case, if you want to know more about the project you'll work in, check out the Discord server: there are channels with in-game material etc. 
You can also talk to us in a more free way there, if you have any questions :)

Ludi Tarantula Team

Artist, pixel artist, programmer...
Any kind of help for The Rebirth Of Franklin Albrecht is well taken!

The re-styling phase of the game is over, but as we went on to make the video preview (that it's possible to see on the game's page here on Itch) we recognized that two people aren't enough to keep the quality constant and (we think) high in all fields and in the entire game.

We recognized that for this project we really need a stable team. The objective is, for now, to conclude the development of the Alpha and Demo of the game.

We have already invested some savings for the resources you saw until now, but our budget is limited until we find stable employment.
So for anyone who wants to work on this project, the work will be mainly free. We are searching for people that are simply interested in the project and in doing some teamwork :)

But we'll tell you: we aim high for this game. We really want to give a good experience to our teammates and a rewarding collaboration for everyone that will work with us.

If you're interested and also want to know the project more and better, please contact us on Discord!

Ludi Tarantula#9107

If you have any questions, send us a DM or comment this thread.

Ludi Tarantula Team

The Rebirth of Franklin Albrecht

Thank you very much!💪

Game page on Itch - The Rebirth Of Franklin Albrecht

This will be as short and as simple as possible: we need help to make what will be our UI work on the RPG Maker engine.

The UI per se is almost finished but, in any case, incomplete. We show you those two screenshot to give you the idea of how it fills the screen.

Yes, there will be two variants of it.

Basically the parts of the UI you see, when the signed button is pressed, should have a little animation before actually... Doing the function they're meant.
Also, how we want to do the menus... Isn't really something you can do with vanilla RPG Maker, without getting crazy with "Move Image" commands and in general doing something messy with event pages or common events. During cutscenes or other game phases, using only events might result a bit problematic.

In short, we need a RPG Maker MV pluginner that can basically make this UI work in-game.

We already have the inventory animation. Not shaded yet and still with no definitive writing of the "E" and the inventory sections in the boxes...
But we hope you can get an idea from here.

As we said, we wanted to make this as short and coincise as possible, so we just say that if you are interested or you just want some details, please don't hesitate to comment this topic or send us a PM on any social network.
We're "Ludi Tarantula" everywhere: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. If you want to contact us on Discord: Ludi Tarantula#9107

-Ludi Tarantula Team

I love this game and I don't even know why.
-EleRantula

We appreciate your try on this! We like the work you made on frames and the red line on the wall, it makes it less empty!

But in any case (we will update the topic) we already found a map colorist, and for map design (details etc) we would like to keep this a work that we do, even though as we said we liked some details you added.

Thank you again for your interest! Good luck for future applications in other projects :) 

-Ludi Tarantula Team

Yes, we still need some help with artists!

Since we have to consider what kind of work would be good for you (since, with this message, you haven't applied for any position in particular), can we see some of your art? Do you have an Instagram or any kind of social where you show your art?

Thank you for your interest, in any case :)

-Ludi Tarantula Team

Thank you for offering yourself! What is your Twitter, so that we can see your art?

For the style... We already have a drawing style, for the CGs we just need someone that can replicate it.
But... Well, we noticed (from your offers in other topics) that, in general, your style is similiar to Disgaea's...
It can be a good base, you may be on the right track!
Please see the MEGA folder we put and open the "CG Artist" sub-folder, then submit your work here or send it on our Twitter @LudiTarantula!

-Ele, the chaotic spider

Thank you very much and have a nice day!

Thank you for offering yourself! You have an interesting portfolio, we will contact you soon!

-Ludi Tarantula Team

Thanks for your try! We are truly sorry, but this is not what we are searching for. It's a nice style though, in another type of game it would be really good to see.
(Ele, in particular, really likes it: good job!)

As we said above,  thank you for having spent part of your time to try to draw Frankie, we appreciate it!

(PS: Frankie's scars are not drawn orange, but black. Ele put them in orange to count them in the reference sheet, sorry for the misunderstanding!)

-Ludi Tarantula Team

UPDATE:
In the last few days we are also turning to professional artists who are doing some tries on our material. We advise that any prices can be negotiated by artists interested in collaborating with us.

(We noticed that you contact people with Discord, you can add TomorrowAvenger#5113)

Yes, it is a free work! If you are interested you can open the MEGA folder and start working on the material we gave.
If you have any questions please contact us on Twitter (@LudiTarantula) or PM us here.
Thank you for your interest!

-Ludi Tarantula Team

WE PUT BETTER MATERIAL FOR CG ARTISTS IN THE MEGA FOLDER! We hope that this will make people more confortable if they want to work with us!

FOR MAP/POTRAIT COLORISTS:

If you don't know what to do and/or you're unsure about your colouring style, we have some other games you can take inspiration from for shading!

(We don't want the exact same way of shading, don't worry. These are just reference you can re-interpret yourself)

They are two very different games, but we hope that you can understand better the mood we're going for.

Thank you for your eventual interest!

-Ludi Tarantula Team

We have another proposal for you! We didn't put this in the original post because it's way less urgent than the definition of a shading style/colouring style but in the future we may need of some help for sprite animations. This is because there may be a high amount of them for the scenes (since The Rebirth Of Franklin Albrecht is a story-driven game), also because we have a large cast.

For example, this panoramic may show you that there are some collective scenes.
(This scene is not in the demo and there is the old graphic style we had)

Evaluate what you want to do based on how comfortable you feel with an option or another, and feel free to PM us on Twitter for any questions or decisions!

-Ludi Tarantula Team

If you're unsure, try to make some experiments with the resources we put in the MEGA folder and put them as a reply in this topic, or send them as a PM to @LudiTarantula (Twitter) or Itch, or... Any other social! We'll keep you in mind :D
-Ele, the chaotic spider

Good evening from the Ludi Tarantula team! Like we said in the title, we need multiple artists. After two years in which we tried to do both eventing and the art for the game, we recognized how much does it take to do both of them: we are always unsatisfied with our results. That's why we thought we may need someone who has more knowledge than we do.

What kind of artists we are searching for?

A - Colorists (Maps + Potraits)

B - CG Artists

C - Artists for promotional art

Colorists (Maps + Potraits)

(Palettes, shading tecniques, RPG Maker illumination)

This is one of the reasons why we chose to ask for artists.

To make an example, the shading of the objects doesn't seem really proper for a game that should be released to a public, also because they look a bit out of place if compared to the wall and the floor. So we think that a colorist can help us reach that homogeneity that we couldn't completely do alone. For the same reasons, the same person has to do the same with potraits. In this screen we can see a more "flat" style of colouring. The reasoning we did is the same: all of this isn't really homogeneous.

(In the case one person decides to be the map colorist and another person decides to be the potrait colorist, we ask that they should always confront eachother on their work.)

"Should I try to replicate this shading tecnique?"
No. This was our shading we experimented in the last few months. We will offer the material to do the experiments you want. We will explain how shortly.

 "Why there is written "RPG Maker illumination", too?

Because until now we worked with pre-made tilesets (people who use RPG Maker may recognize Celianna's and PandaMaru's). In the preparation of parallaxes, we limited ourselves to uniform everything, and the RPG Maker illumination (made with the Terrax plugin) merely accompanied the illumination of the parallax.
Now that the maps will be drawn by hand, and we don't know how to shade correctly, we have problems on how to shade the parallax and it's more difficult to choose the right lights on RPG Maker.
The reason we will offer apposite RPG Maker MV project is because we want to give maximum liberty on that behalf, so that you can experiment however you want with the lights. It is not mandatory, if you don't do that we will take care of it. With a better parallax it will be easier for us.

PaoGun, the annoying snake

CG Artists

Well, we need a CG artist almost only for a matter of time. I, Ele, am not a professional: I take lots of time to draw things, and making concept arts for a reeally large cast that will have potraits that will constantly change positions and also CGs would be the death of me, I'll be honest (also because I can't draw backgrounds).

The concepts of the CGs will be given by me, EleRantula (or Ele), I will try to make them as understandable as possible.

I'd like to specify that our only important condition is to follow the drawing style that the potraits will have, for coherence.

IMPORTANT DETAIL: The CG assignment we give in the MEGA folder will NOT be used for the game (the cutscene won't have a CG). It will help us evaluate how your work adapts to our game.

Ele, the chaotic spider

Artists for promotional art

This is the category of artist that will be more free than the others (but please, don't recruit yourself in this category just because of this!).

This one explains itself: we need an artist for art that we will use for the promotion of the game.
This artist will have the project of the (not releasable) demo with all the scenes and dialogues, that are complete.
This person can let themselves be guided by their inspiration to draw certain scenes from the game and, eventually, even some more simple character art, just to show them to the public.
For this category, you are more "loose" on style, but Ele always advises to try to follow the game's artstyle as much as possible (if you need it we can help you on that by, for example, adding the faces to your sketches).
For the coloring style, this person is completely free. The only keywords are: "catchyness", powerfulness and SPECTACLE.

How all of this is organized?

Every material we mentioned is here!

MEGA FOLDER

Just download the material destined on the category you want to propose yourself for, and when you finish working on it, post the results under this topic.

Even in the future we will work with .rar (or .zip) archives where we will give you linearts and first palettes (especially for the maps: in short, for the first artist category we wrote about).

At the moment, the artist we need more is the colorist for maps and potraits, but also CG artist are well accepted. For now, the "promotional artists" are the ones we need less, because we will think about promotion in a later stage, so we will think about promotional art way later than art that will be useful for the game per se... But if someone wants to try, go on and ask: we don't bite!

We hope that this initiative will catch your interest, even if we have no monetary compensation! Thank you for reading this announcement 'til the end!

 -Ludi Tarantula Team

Click on the image for the January Devlog! I'm late. As usual. Haha.

-Ele 🕷️ 

thanks 

-Ele 🕷️

(I love the energy that your comment has lmao)

(Seriously, thank you for your support :)) 

What to say. The other comments and the awards talk for me :,)

Honestly, so cute, and sad, and... Everything.

-Ele, Ludi Tarantula team

Nothing really special, since it was for a IGMC (for this reason there aren't many CGs, in favor of wall-of-text with sounds), but it was a good experience, with basically almost the plot of a really weird hentai... Kinda. I think. Not... Not the part that talks about (spoiler) clones maybe.

-Ele, Ludi Tarantula team

I played this some time ago with my sister PaoGun

It was really cute, I (Ele) really like the art and the game had, for me, a simple "internal" plot that I liked, since I love more "internal" plots personally, I don't know if I explain myself lmao

But... Great work :D

-Ele, Ludi Tarantula team

I love how delicate this game is. It makes me feel so "at peace" and maybe even attached to reality (I really liked the scene where you talk with May in her room, beautiful :) ), but at the same time it deals well with its themes, it treats them with not too much heaviness and "drama", for me, and maybe that's what makes me think that this game is... "Delicate".

A comment said that saving May made them roll their eyes. For me, the fact that "the game convinces you that it actually the blood is on your hands", it has to do with the fact that us, the protagonist, really cares about May, and even though a person, normally, tries with all their might to not blame themselves, when someone that you care about dies you always think about your shortcomings towards that person in every case (if I have to say something a bit more "personal": when one of my grandmas died, even though she died for a sickness, I thought about how I should have visited her more, I felt really bad that I wasn't closer to her when she was alive, I even thought that I was a bit selfish for not doing that... And, like I said, I wasn't even that close with that grandma and she didn't die for depression or anything, she was just sick). Maybe that's why the game presses a lot on "it's our fault that May died". She died of suicide, the protagonist thinks that they were "selfish", and with that comes guilt for their shortcomings.

That's what I think. I don't know if I missed some details on the comment that may explain or even debunk my words.

But for me... You made a great job, Angela :D

-Ele, Ludi Tarantula team

This game was one of the creepiest things I've ever played in the last period. Am I using an hyperbole? Maybe. But I dunno, it just... Really scared me, but I also really really enjoyed it: this type of creepiness is the one I love to death: claustrophobia, sense of being controlled and being helpless. It's right up my alley, so... I loved it. Great work guys, can't wait for the full product.

-Ele, Ludi Tarantula team.

Hello! We're the team behind Ludi Tarantula (or Ludi Tarantula Productions): Ele (on the left, without a proper illustration for now) and PaoGun (on the right)

If you want to know more about us on the specific, there's an apposite section on our site, but what you need to know is that we mainly use RPG Maker MV: Ele thinks about the artworks, the eventing and cutscene direction; Pao thinks about the writing of the story, about the maps and  the sprites of the characters!

He's Frankie, the protagonist of the project we have in development: The Rebirth Of Franklin Albrecht.

Hope we can interact and share content as much as possible in this community!

The first Ludi Tarantula project
"The Rebirth Of Franklin Albrecht"

It gets close, for some elements, to the Horror RPG genre, even though we are trying something bigger. We still have to release a demo that is, as you saw, at 50% of development. 

It's a story-rich game, so prepare yourself to a compelling plot, full of a Creature's internal struggles through its hallucinations, what reviving a body by using other corpses may bring, how a man is brought to become a monster and how another man-made Creature, very different from the one in Mary Shelley's classic, relates to the external world.

PLOT

Frankie wakes up chained to a bed. He just wanted to denounce his father's crimes. Perhaps he should have expected to be abandoned there, in the house where he was raised before he could venture into the city, where happened the last tragedy that caused the trauma because of which he now suffers from severe hallucinations.

But the boy is not alone. In the same house, Oliver, one of his old classmates from the Georg Friedrich Hildebrandt Institute, is waiting between life and death for his injuries to be mended.

FEATURES

° Reveal Frankie's hallucinogenic dimension by simply placing the candlestick 

° Overcome various stealth phases that you will have to face in different ways

 ° Face moral choices and test your diplomatic skills

° Constantly interact between the two realities to solve various puzzles

SCREENSHOTS (YOU CAN SEE MORE BY TAKING A LOOK AT THE ITCH.IO PAGE AND OUR SOCIAL MEDIAS)

SOCIAL MEDIAS

Ludi Tarantula Official Site

Facebook

Instagram

Twitter

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The Rebirth Of Franklin Albrecht