Bel-Océan - Point&Click adventure game

Gameplay alpha video :

Bel-Ocean is a point and click adventure game. You play Jean-Chien, a disenchanted dog who has been cursed by a giant fly-fairy that makes him living the same day over and over again.

Jean Chien lives in a seaside city over polluted. The sea became became a giant pool of poop and the sun is not helping the stink by striking big time. People are trying really hard to keep their dignity though, but that's not going to last very long.

On top of that, there's also his best friend, Jean-Dauphin, killing himself every night at 3AM.

The fly-fairy has been clear on one point. To break the curse, Jean Chien has to clean the ocean during this one very day. This is up to you to take advantage of that curse to change the course of other things, like saving your best friend.

GAMEPLAY

Bel-Ocean is a "classic" point&click game. The gameplay twist lies in the looping day and the need to organize your actions in order to achieve all your goals in one day. For this, the player has special tools such as : a magic map able to track the NPCs, a magic watch to travel through the hours of the day, and a magic notepad to organize your roadmap.

So you get everything you need to do the fastest run you can !

TEAM & TECHNOLOGY

Developped by Fromage Interactif, basically composed of two brothers : Charles Torris, writer, developper and music composer, and Paul Torris, designer, illustrator and animator, both passionate with videogames. Construct 2 has been chosen for efficiency and convenience, combined with the powerful Spine software for the animation. Our own dialog management system in PHP / MySQL has been made from scratch, allowing us to deal with more than 4500 lines of dialog.

ADVANCEMENT

We started this project 3 years ago, and now the gameplay part is finally almost done, as a complete playable alpha version already runs and rocks. We need an extra 4 month to complete the graphic assets. A devlog is available here.

However, one main question remains : shall we do some voice over for the characters?

We would need 3000€ to make it the good way, and we don't have the money. So we're thinking about crowdfunding. Why not trying ? If it fails, we'll release the game anyway, because it already works like that. And maybe that's for the best ?

And there's already the need to get translated in english (the game is in full french for now), which is already a challenge itself when you have no money.

Construct 2 matters

I'm not even sure C2 HTML5 technology can support so much sound clips without crazy loading times (the game is 350mo so far, and it already takes some time to load) but maybe with the streaming feature it would be ok (it didnt work for the music as it stuttered)

Full devlog : http://c13.5tfu.org/tag/bel-ocean/

Artwork : http://beloceanpictures.tumblr.com/

Soundtrack sneak peek : https://soundcloud.com/cestlematin/bel- ... -economics

Ambitious goal there and an interesting premise. Would hurt if the friend can't be saved...but perhaps a good hurt

The game surely looks good and I'm glad to hear you're planning on translating it, opening it for a larger audience. The premise of the game seems also guite interesting in it's own quirky right

Thanks guys ! Of course, the translation is really important, and everything is already set up for it. When we'll be sure we don't extra lines, we'll translate it. It may hopefully be done for a beta playable version for early 2017.

Sounds good! Looking forward to that then by the way did you get a more or less professional translator or..?

We didn't find or asked for a professionnal translator, and I only asked a quotation for the voice over from now, but you're right, that's an important point.

We don't know yet if we can gather enough english-speaking friends to make it by ourselves or not (we're french but my brother lives in London, there may be some hope here ) or if we will need money for this also.

I've set up a dialog management system (php/mysql) to make this task as easy as possible,

you can export the dialogs and translate it in a excel .csv file or even a .txt file, then re-import it in my manager, it creates a .xml in the files folder of my C2 project, which is automatically updated into dictionnaries objects when I launch/compile the game. It also manages options / conditions and a system that allows you to make variations of some sentences, to avoid repetition. This is really convenient

By the way, my brother says I should make some kind of Construct 2 plugin of it ... maybe I will when the game will be done.

The UI still a bit rough, as you can see ...

Love the concept and gameplay

Really stylish, love the graphics. Good luck!