Children of Helioz

The Children of Helioz is a short atmospheric visual novel of science fiction and cosmic psychological horror.

The events take place in the year 2310, fifty years after the collapse of Helioz, an interstellar mega corporation of the spaceflight renaissance.
Laser propelled spacecraft and advances in terraforming have allowed various countries, corporations and individuals to settle colonies in a dozen systems near Sol.
While travel between these systems takes from half a decade to three, bio-stasis pods have enabled reliable travel between the systems.
These pods slow down aging tenfold, while allowing the individual to remain plugged within advanced virtual realities, connected through a combination of laser and quantum networks.

You awake from such a stasis pod due to a malfunction, the side effects of which have led to a classical partial amnesia.
Your ship; CIRCE 12 has gone astray from its laserlane and lost its way under suspicious and abnormal circumstance.
Navigate through the derelict vessel of your voyage and communicate with the sleeping crew members through a virtual connection.
Gather your broken memories, survive the unseen, and uncover the scattered secrets left behind by fallen titans.

Audio: Ari Keränen

Code: Pasi Kleimola

Narrative & Visuals: Jani Hietikko

Special thanks to Henry Hietikko for narrative input and crucial game testing.

This visual novel was produced as a final month's project for the Game Dev Academy course by Buutti, it was made with Unity and Yarnspinner, with roughly 17 days to work on it (and a few extra days and nights off hours).

While the game is playable(enough), through part of the story, it has many broken segments, and is still in need of bugfixes, rewrites, and great amounts of polish in the future.