FratUniversity
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android
Welcome to FratUniversity, a branching narrative visual novel where your choices shape your college experience. As a new student thrown into the chaotic world of fraternity culture, you’ll navigate friendships, rivalries, and the social pressures of campus life.
Will you pledge to a fraternity and rise through the ranks, or reject the system altogether? Will you party, compete, or carve your own path? Your relationships, reputation, and future are in your hands.
Make your choices. Define your legacy. Welcome to FratUniversity.
This project is a companion demo to my other project Arena of Thebes introducing new gameplay options to the Thebes universe.The demo showcases several exciting new features, including:
- Player Choices: Your choices throughout the game including your main desire at the start will influence your roommate’s clothing, behaviors, and responses throughout the game.
- Clothing System: Ability to take off clothing and see how they impact gameplay.
- Parallax Sprites: Movement of Sprites through mouse or touch movement creating perspective
- Speech Bubbles: Dynamic dialogue presentation for easier reading
- Playable Models: Six player character models to choose from
- Roommates: Three unique roommates, each with their own storylines to explore.
This test project has already revealed some areas for improvement. As a result, future updates and games will benefit from the shift to 3D for Arena of Thebes, addressing performance issues and expanding creative possibilities. That said, I’m considering keeping versions similar to this demo available alongside the 3D games to support players with less powerful mobile devices, so please let me know any issues you encounter.
As always, your feedback is invaluable. Let me know your thoughts about the demo. The main focus will return to Arena of Thebes with the upcoming 3D prototype for now but there are lots more things that are planned and partially scrapped in the demo of FratUniversity. As they both play in the same universe there might be more references and updates tying them together in the future.
If you wish to support the project you can check out the Patreon page allowing me to spend more time on it, while giving you early access to new and exclusive content.
Link: https://www.patreon.com/ArenaOfThebes
Download
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Development log
- FratUniversity Public Demo4 days ago
Comments
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Really good introduction! Definitely excited for the next part of the story :)
I tried to play this but after just a few seconds I absolutely couldn't stand it.
max volume racking clacking for every single character of text. Music slider doesn't control it, Sounds slider doesn't control it, and voice doesn't control it either. Only way to get rid of it is to mute everything..
Thanks for bringing that to my attention. Seems like the renpy documentation has wrongly labeled sound channels. Uploaded a hotfix just now. You should be able to adjust volume via the "voice" slider now. Though you are not missing anything muted for now either. There aren't any other sound effects in this demo, yet.
An option to entirely remove that irritable racking sound for every text character that appears would be extremely helpful if you plan on adding voices later. I doubt I am the only person that would find it highly distracting.
I love how you get to choose how dressed you are and how you look. And the visuals are really nice. I hope the customisablilty isn't to hard to work with, cause i love it.
Thank you! I’m really glad you’re enjoying the customization and visuals. I’ve been developing tools to make it more manageable, so I’m hopeful it’ll stay feasible while keeping the flexibility.
This is looking really cool so far. However, as someone else commented, I'm also a little bit worried the large amount of variability could become too much to develop.
But hey, I'm rooting for you! If you can pull this off, that would be amazing!
Also, I liked seeing choices in this project, unlike AoT (don't get me wrong, I still love that game too). I'm not saying you need to go crazy with the choices down the line and end up making like three different games. But even some choices that just change some flavor text can already give the player a feeling of agency.
Anyway, I'm exited to see where you go with this. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it. :)
Thanks so much for the feedback! I totally get the concern about complexity. It’s something I’m always mindful of, both in terms of development time and making sure everything stays manageable. That said, I’m still hopeful about pulling this off!
One thing that’s actually helping is my switch to a 3D version of the game. It might sound counterintuitive, but developing tools to speed up my workflow has made customization a lot more feasible directly translating from Blender to the game engine. In the Ren'Py version, pre-rendered 2D sprites actually slowed things down since some steps had to basically be done twice. With the 3D version, that’s no longer an issue, and it opens up even more possibilities for customization.
Android performance is one potential hurdle, but since AoT’s tech demo runs okay-ish on a seven-year-old device, with some focused optimization efforts I’m optimistic it’ll be doable. I don’t want to drop Android support because of the large player base, but if I ever had to stick with the Ren'Py version as a worst-case scenario, customization might just be slightly reduced. (Probably more fixed outfit options instead of fully modular clothing)
As for the branching, later storylines will indeed converge more than the demo intros, with some key character-specific moments alongside common events, instead of fully separate paths. So while there’s a lot to do, I’m super excited to keep testing things out and refining it all. (Hopefully not too far in the future) Thanks again for the encouragement. It really means a lot! Hope to see you around for the journey. 😊
Interesting so far, and great looking characters. Am slightly concerned with them all being twinks (not exactly the bodytime frats conjures to mind, lol), but will keep an eye on the project.
Thanks for the feedback! I see your point about them feeling like the same type. Just a couple of things that might help ease your concerns:
The concept behind the frats is to represent different stereotypes of male groups. Once you get the chance to join a frat in the game, you'll see a variety, from nerdy guys to beefy jocks, based on your preferences. While the game includes traditional frats, it also explores a broader range of male stereotypes in a fraternity setting both visually and in their storylines.
The six characters revealed so far were consciously designed as first-years, visually distinct from older frat brothers and legacy members. I can see how that might not be to everyone’s liking, though. To address that, another aspect I’ve been working on is a 3D game version. This version will include a character creator, allowing you to design your own player model to your liking. I’ve been previewing it in this public Patreon post for my first project Arena of Thebes https://www.patreon.com/posts/tech-demo-arena-124938345
Given the great reception to FratUniversity I’m now tempted to try out a 3D version for it sooner than previously planned.
I hope this will cater to as many preferred visuals as possible and give players the freedom to shape their own playthroughs to their liking.
Looks great nice work on the game, can we choose to top or bottom ? or isn’t does depend on what love interest we choose ?
Thanks! It's going to be mostly dependent on your chosen interest with some being more fixed into one position and others more flexible where you can choose both.
ok thx u for replying and ur hard work on the game
I'm loving this new project you work on, it's more to my taste than the other one (which is good, I won't lie). I hope to see more of this game soon since it has so much potential!
Thanks a lot. Doing my best to get a new update out as soon as possible.
I personally like this new project (FratUniversity) better than your other projects. I hope you will continue to work on this project more.
Thanks, it has been a result of comments on Arena of Thebes which has been my first ever project giving me lots of stuff to learn and improve on. So I'm glad its getting your positive feedback. Both projects should be able to benefit from the new mechanics and dev pipeline with crossover events tying them together. You can definitely expect more content directly and indirectly connected to FratUniversity.
Nicely made and rendered. But how are you going to keep it with so many variations? The amount of images will grow exponentially when you allow so much variativity.
Thanks for the feedback. This has been primarily been to test the limits on how much variety is possible. To that end I've developed several solutions to make it possible. Through scripts in blender to automatically switch out clothes and characters and stacking individual images in renpy with tight naming conventions the amount of images actually scales closer to linearly rather than exponential. That being said there were still edge cases where manual editing was needed, which is why I'd probably prefer the additional switch to a 3D engine for full variations on desktop and slightly less variation on renpy builds for mobile in future versions.