Devlog - Legend of the Abyss

[Xonas Pitfall]

@LordFall Hey, just one thing I’d highly recommend: sell the game first and build up an audience around the niche. You really need to validate the market. Unless this is more of an experimental passion project, in which case, keep it up! Good luck! 

[LordFall]

56 minutes ago, Xonas Pitfall said:

@LordFall Hey, just one thing I’d highly recommend: sell the game first and build up an audience around the niche. You really need to validate the market. Unless this is more of an experimental passion project, in which case, keep it up! Good luck! 

It's definitely an experimental passion project but the goal is to commercialize it. The marketing is going well so far, most people I show it too seem to like the idea and some of the videos are getting a decent amount of views on socials.

I've decided to write a Light Novel as the first version of the Visual Novel which I'll be starting to post that on WattPadd and Royal Road over the next few weeks.

I got the first Chapter about 70% nailed down, I'll post it here. If you guys wanna give me feedback on it, it'd be much appreciated!

I'm gonna write it George R.R. Martin style and switch POV each chapter so I can introduce the different cast members and have them develop their own plot lines in the game.

The first one is from Livia's perspective, she's gonna be one of the main framing characters of the Visual Novel so I think it's best to start readers off from her perspective.

The setting is Venice in 1671 at the Naval Academy, in the story Venice is controlled by Naples where a lord conquered all of Italy in the mid 17th century and renamed it to the Iveilan empire. 

Spoiler

 

Dawn came to Venice like a blade drawn slow from its sheath — quiet, cold, and utterly without mercy.

Outside the Palazzo Illiacourt, the white phoenix standard of the Iveilan Empire hung limp over the water, its silver thread catching the first light before the fog swallowed it whole. Fifteen years since the legions crossed the causeway. Fifteen years since Venice learned to smile for an emperor it had never seen, and bow to inquisitors who answered to no law but their own. Livia was nineteen. She had spent nearly the whole of her life in that shadow, and it had made her sharp the way a whetstone makes a knife sharp — by wearing everything soft away.

Pale light rippled across a ceiling of long-dead sea gods, sliding over silk the color of crushed lapis. Orange blossom drifted through the shutters. To anyone glancing in from the canal, it was the sanctuary of an idle patrician daughter, still asleep, still dreaming of dowries and dances.

Livia had been awake for an hour.

She sat on the edge of the mattress, bare feet against the icy terrazzo, and counted her breath the way her father had once counted coin. Four in. Four hold. Four out. Her heart kept the same flat rhythm it had kept since she was fourteen — because in this house, a girl who let her heart race was a girl who hadn't yet learned what her family did after dark.

Across the room, laid over a carved chest, waited her naval uniform. Midnight-blue broadcloth. Brass buttons stamped with the sea-hawk of the Maritima Academy. A silver aiguillette that marked her, on paper, as a prodigy of fleet hydrography and tactical boarding formations.

It was a beautifully constructed lie, and she wore it the way she wore everything — like armor that happened to be pretty.

She dressed without a single wasted motion. Linen tunic. Trousers tucked into boots buffed to a mirror shine. When she took up her hairbrush, it wasn't to admire the girl in the glass — high cheekbones, steady green eyes, the same fine Venetian nose she shared with her twin — but to check the reflection for weaknesses, the way she'd check a blade for rust. Where Elise's face still held the soft, unguarded belief that the world was fundamentally kind, Livia's had been folded and refolded until it held nothing but edge. She pulled her hair into a single tight braid at the nape of her neck. No stray strands. A loose lock was a handhold in a fight, and Livia had learned, a long time ago, never to hand anyone a place to grab hold of her.

Her fingers found the ivory-hilted stiletto at her waistband without needing to look.

She'd learned its weight on her fifteenth birthday, down where the tide seeped through the cellar brick and the air smelled of brine and something worse. There'd been no ribbon that year, no cake. Only her father, pressing cold iron into her palm and nodding toward a kneeling customs official who'd asked one question too many, telling her in a voice gone flat as a ledger that someone in this family had to keep the roof up — and that Elise's dance cards would never cover the debt.

If you flinch, Livia, your sister pays for it.

She hadn't flinched. She'd thrown up into the canal afterward and scrubbed her hands with bitter orange oil until they bled, and she had never once let her father see either. Every gilded façade in this city hid rot underneath. Livia had simply stopped pretending she didn't know where the rot was, and started keeping the ledger herself.

Elise still believed their father was an unlucky merchant, worn thin by Levantine tariffs. Elise still thought the men who came at midnight were wine factors from Candia, smelling of salt and cheap cigars.

Livia intended to keep it that way for as long as she had breath to spend on it.

She checked the hang of her coat and slipped into the corridor. Outside her sister's door, she stopped — three heartbeats, no more — and listened to Elise breathing, slow and even, the breath of someone who had never once had to scrub blood out of her own cuff-lace. Something in Livia's chest loosened, just slightly. It was the only indulgence she allowed herself before sunrise.

Sleep, El, she thought, resting two fingers against the cold stone lintel. I have the watch.

She took the service stair down past the storerooms, following the smell of lamp oil and low tide, to the iron door of the water-gate office. A thin line of candlelight bled from beneath it.

She pushed it open.

Her father sat hunched behind his salt-warped desk, feeding shredded vellum into a copper brazier with hands that wouldn't stop shaking. Upstairs, Cassian Illiacourt was a pillar of the old republic, an art patron who toasted imperial officers with spiced wine and a gracious smile. Down here, he looked like something the tide had dragged up and forgotten to finish drowning.

"You're late." He didn't look up. "Three minutes past the fifth bell."

"Imperial skiffs were trawling San Polo." She bolted the door behind her. "Why are you burning the manifests?"

He crumpled a wax seal in his fist, and when he finally lifted his eyes to hers, they were bloodshot in a way she hadn't seen since the worst days of the occupation.

"The Santa Lucifera was boarded before she cleared the Lido." His voice frayed at the edges. "Not port authority. Black Cloaks. Vane's inquisitors."

Something in Livia went very still. "She was carrying my Maritima clearance. Logged as naval ballast, out of the Arsenale."

"They didn't care about ironwork." He swallowed. "They cut through the false ribs under the bilge. They found the crates."

The room seemed to shrink around the candle flame.

Livia had never asked what waited inside those sealed lead boxes, hauled up from sunken ruins off the Cretan shelf, reeking of pitch and old copper and something that made even her father's men go quiet. In Venice, survival meant knowing precisely which truths would get you hanged for merely holding them. "The captain?"

"Drowned, before they could put irons on him." Cassian's breath hitched. "The crew's in the Doge's lower cells. Two days, maybe less, before the Black Cloaks finish breaking thumbs and the seizure order reaches our gate. Our ships. This palazzo. You and your sister on a scaffold in the Piazzetta before the masquerade waltz has even started."

He struck the desk with an open palm, hard enough to rattle the inkpot.

"Vane has us pinned to the wall, Livia. His father can't parade the contraband before the High Council yet — not without exposing his own hand in the smuggling routes — but he controls Slip Fourteen. The crates sit in the Arsenale basin under imperial seal, waiting on transfer to Rome. And he expects me on my knees by sundown."

Matteo. The smirk in the academy loggia yesterday. The way his eyes had crawled over Elise while he dropped careless little remarks about shifts in the merchant registry. It hadn't been courtship. It had been a hyena, circling something already caught in the snare.

"He wants the fleet," Livia said, very evenly. "And he wants Elise."

"He will get neither." Cassian drew a heavy scroll from his coat, bound in slate-grey silk, the wax stamped black with a sun ringed in iron ravens.

House Grey.

Her throat closed. "Rome? You went to the warlord?"

"I sent a courier south the moment the first whisper reached me." Cassian's voice dropped to something almost pleading. "Harlan Grey answered."

"He doesn't broker mercy, Father. He brokers debt. What did you give him?"

Cassian couldn't meet her eyes. "Forty percent of our deep-water keels. The grain monopoly for the whole northern Adriatic — five years."

"Forty percent?" The fury came up through her ribs like cold water flooding a hull. "You handed him half this house! We spent fifteen years building those routes under occupation, and you signed them away in an hour—"

"And Vane would have burned this family to the waterline by Sunday!" Cassian's voice cracked across the cellar. "We had no leverage. Grey sits on the Emperor's privy council. His seal carries sovereign jurisdiction — if his household claims oversight of Slip Fourteen, the inquisitors have no choice but to yield the contraband into his custody. The terms are struck. His vanguard is already at the Arsenale."

"Who did he send?" Livia asked, though something cold in her stomach had already answered the question.

Her father looked up, and in his sunken eyes there was something almost like fear.

"His daughter."

The silence that followed had weight to it.

Illythiah.

Memory pulled her back five years, to sun-bleached flagstones at the Grey compound on the Tiber — fourteen years old, drowning in silk and self-importance, until she'd collided head-on with a girl carved out of something harder than marble. She remembered the crack of wooden practice blades, the dust ground into her teeth, and a pair of pale, unimpressed eyes looking down at her like she was an ornament that had wandered somewhere it didn't belong.

"Go home to your gondolas, little girl. You smell like sugared almonds. You won't last a season out here."

Livia had spent five years burying that girl. She'd drilled until her wrists locked and her knuckles split, mapped every shoal in the lagoon by memory, learned exactly how much pressure it took to slide a blade between two ribs without her hand shaking — all so that no one, least of all Illythiah Grey, would ever look at her like that again.

And now Harlan Grey had sent her north to collect on the debt.

"When does she dock?" Livia's voice had gone flat, stripped of anything her father could use against her.

"Her galley cleared the Malamocco passage an hour ago." Cassian's throat worked. "She takes the Arsenale gates by noon."

Livia stared at the iron sun pressed into black wax until the shape of it burned behind her eyes, her hands curling into fists behind her back where her father couldn't see them shake.

"Burn what's left of the manifests," she said, turning for the door. "Keep Elise in her silks and her sheet music. Let her go on believing this city is still made of nothing but waltzes."

"Livia." Her father's voice caught her at the threshold, thin with something that might almost have been fear for her. "She didn't sail north out of kindness. She's here to bleed us dry, and enjoy doing it."

Livia lifted the iron latch. It came free with a small, definitive click, the only sound of certainty in the whole cold room.

"I know exactly what she is, Father."

She stepped into the passage and let the door fall shut behind her.

"What she doesn't know," she murmured, to no one, to the dark, to the five years of dust and blistered hands and drills run alone in the moonlight, "is what I let her make me."

Above the canals, the sixth bell began to toll over a city still wrapped in fifteen years of chains.

Seven days until the masquerade.

Livia dropped into her skiff, fitted the oars into their locks, and rowed straight into the cold morning mist — toward the Arsenale, and toward the one person in the world she had built herself, blade by blade, to finally stand level with.

 

This is her character overview: 

Edited 2 hours ago by LordFall