News

Update and Clarification: All Backer levels at Anchor and above (Ace, Wing Commander, Authority Figure) will receive the upcoming 2nd edition of the Bliss Stage tabletop game in digital format , as well as our expanded tactical rules based on the visual novel.

All Backer levels at Anchor and above (Ace, Wing Commander, Authority Figure) will receive the upcoming , as well as our expanded tactical rules based on the visual novel. Gamelex anunció oficialmente su papel en la traducción etapa de la felicidad un par de días y se puede encontrar la página aquí.

Gamelex officially announced their role in the Bliss Stage translation a couple days ago and you can find the page here. An English translation via Google can be found here.

At MiniEnt there is now a story preview of the game. Check it out here.

Intro

Bliss Stage will be a visual novel using the Ren'Py engine and based on the tabletop game of the same name. The game will be available for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Android.

Setting

Bliss Stage is a role-playing game about teenage pilots fighting back against alien invaders with giant robots made of weaponized love, or perhaps hate. It’s about love and war and the future of humanity.

Nearly every adult in the world succumbs to an alien weapon known simply as the Bliss, permanently placing them in a state of suspended animation. Naturally, civilization breaks down quickly. All the conveniences of modern life rapidly fail - no more electricity, clean water, fresh food, you name it. Bereft of adult guidance, many children perish or devolve into savage gangs. Here and there, though, a particularly skilled or resourceful group of children manage to preserve something like civilization - although it is very hard, and under constant threat.



The Blissed do not die, or indeed suffer any kind of ill effects from their sleep. Somehow, they are being preserved by their state. Many children have strange dreams in which they claim to have interacted with sleepers, explored strange dream environments, and been terrorized by "nightmare monsters".



Two years after Bliss Day, the next phase of the invasion begins. Alien remotes - probes, tools, weapons in the form of giant machines - begin to appear and busy themselves with destroying the remnants of human civilization. Particularly groups of surviving children and anywhere that they gather together. The alien remotes are invulnerable to what weapons the children possess, and they must live on the run.

Seven years after Bliss Day, a small resistance cell of teenagers lead by a still waking adult has pieced together psychic weapons from the aliens' own drones. You will guide the new pilot, Joshua, as he enters this conflict. Using the ANIMa constructs, pilots are able to explore the aliens' world and fight them on their own terms: when an alien operator is defeated in the dream world, the remote it controls in our world is likewise destroyed! However, the alien dream is dangerous, causing distortion and harm to the pilot's psyche, and inflicting "damage" suffered by the construct as emotional stress echoing through the relationships that power it.

Gameplay

The game play alternates between character interaction scenes and combat against the invaders. Character interactions play like a standard visual novel sequences with a lot of dialog choices and possible results. These interactions build relationships between the characters and provide relief from the stresses of battle. In combat against the aliens the strength and nature of these relationships determine how your ANIMa mech's form manifests. We've worked hard to faithfully port the basic rules of tabletop to a computer game format while also expanding on the combat rules. In fact the expanded combat rules are compatible with the tabletop version and will be made available, including as part of our backer rewards.

Development

Our small team has been working on the artwork, story and coding for well over a year now. We're ready to move out of pre-production and start full scale work on this game but our staff needs pay to do that. We'd like to make this a high quality commercial game but to do that we need money to support full-time work and upgrade and maintain our equipment.

Your support will give us the resources we need to make this a priority and complete production in a timely fashion. We will be to pay our staff for their work, commission voice actors, and replace damaged drawing tablets and audio equipment. We already have an early version of the game working but need your help to see this through. We're asking for $2,000, the minimum we need to make this happen. The more we raise, the more time we can dedicate to this project and get a better product out faster.

Q&A: http://www.formspring.me/BlissStageVN

Bliss Stage tabletop RPG: http://swingpad.com/dustyboots/wordpress/index.php?page_id=244