Ultramarine Turtle's Dream

1. About

Ultramarine Turtle's Dream is a Bishoujo/Ren-Ai/Visual Novel type game. Meaning, we have pictures, music, text, and we traverse it by clicking and reading. In our case, there are no branches or choices - the game has one static path, and so it belongs to a subgenre sometimes called "Kinetic novel". The story is simple, and I hope it grabs your interest.

The game was made for the Best Ren-ai game competition, that was held at the Animefest 2009 convention, where it received the 3rd place prize. Originally written in the Slovak language, translated to English by mikey.

2. Installation

Nothing fancy. Download the game, extract it, and run STK.exe.

3. Controls

Click the left mouse button or press Enter to move the story forward.

Main menu is accessible by right clicking. There are some functions available there, like save / load and exit :)

To hide the text field, press space.

Fullscreen experience is enabled by the fabled Alt+Enter combo.

History is opened by mouse wheel up, and you can use the mouse wheel to scroll through it. Click to exit the history mode.

Close the game by Alt+F4 or the big bad X in the corner.

4. Problems

The game is done on an old .NET framework, so hopefully if you have version 2.0 or newer, it should work. It even runs through Wine on Linux!

5. FAQ

Q: WTF Turtle?
A: So what? You weebs would be fine if the name was Kame Aoi.

Q: Why?
A: It looked like a fun idea. When we learned about the Animefest competition, harph got slapped around with a muse, and the rest is history.

Q: A sequel maybe?
A: You wish. So much work, who would have time for that. But who knows?

Q: That was meh, couldn't you give it more effort?
A: Of course we could. Everything can be done better. But we were amateurs in dire time constraints! We think it went pretty well, considering.

Q: Why is the intro movie so late in the game?
A: If you played this type of game before, you know it sometimes is like that. And harph wanted it like that, the tyrant.

Q: Will there be an English translation?
A: Oh look, this is it! It's 2021 and thanks to mikey (http://atpprojects.mygamesonline.org/) the game is fully translated to English.

5. Contact

To contact the creators, either for feedback, bug reporting, praise or critique, you can do so at harphield@gmail.com

6. Credits

Story, programming, music, direction: harph

Character design, art: Spider

Backgrounds: Dunpee, Spider

Script: Magic, Toshi, harph

Betatesting: JackK3000, Kuboooooooooo, Mew 2, Symbiote, Tsutso

English translation: Mikey

7. Final thoughts from the future (harph, 2021)

Getting back to this fun little project brings back some really nice memories.

How we were looking for an artist and found one amazing talented recluse who we never met.

How we transformed my old school short story into a longer text fitting for a VN.

How I coded all of the game engine and had a blast doing it.

How I made music in this weird software called EJay Dance by just slamming loops together.

All in all, nice trip down memory lane for me, and a great experience for (I hope) everyone involved.

Thanks for playing!