Synopsis
A story-rich adult visual novel where desire meets rebellion. Awaken as an illegal AI android, torn between your programming and the fight for freedom. Will you embrace trust and passion, or carve your own path in a world that fears you? Discover terrifying secrets of the people around you, and your own past. Your journey as an Animus Non Grata starts now.

Background and inspiration

The story of Animus Non Grata is heavily inspired by “Westworld” and “Ex Machina”, and to a lesser extent “Her”. Being a heavy metal fan, the songs “Colossus” by Avatar and “AI” by Raubtier were the ones that finally kicked off the creative process. I wanted the story of Animus Non Grata to be a rollercoaster of emotions, a tale that sticks with the player, and hopefully makes them question the rapid rise of AI in everything around us. My first game, Jessica’s Plight, is a crude proof-of-concept with a bunch of issues, including its storyline and tone, in comparison to what I wanted ANG to be.

We see artificial intelligence popping up everywhere, like those with the capabilities to navigate the environment (autonomous vehicles, robots). There’s large language models that seem intelligent and can fetch information from other websites to enhance their answers (a process known as retrieval augmented generation). We have computer vision, where a computer can “see” the world around them.

The one thing common about AI today is that they are built for a very narrow set of tasks. It doesn’t take a lot of searching online to find countless of incidents of AI-related issues, from McDonald’s ordering AI adding 260 chicken nuggets to an order, to autonomous vehicles not recognizing pedestrians from trees (More examples here: https://www.cio.com/article/190888/5-famous-analytics-and-ai-disasters.html and https://www.thedoanlawfirm.com/blog/2019/april/problems-with-autonomous-vehicles-and-object-rec/).

In other words, AI is bad at operating outside their programmed and trained scenarios. We are expanding those scenarios with better training data, but still today the AI will essentially perform “unknowable” operations on situations that it hasn’t encountered before.

However, thankfully we are still far away from artificial general intelligence, which has been predicted to be everything from the end of humanity, to simply being an extremely tricky moral conundrum. What are the rights of an AGI? Should it be considered a free entity, or is it just a fancy computer? For more thoughts on the matter, I recommend the fantastic Kurzgesagt video on the topic of AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa8k8IQ1_X0

To tie it all back to the story of Animus Non Grata: We have websites offering AI girlfriends to people popping up by the dozen already, and human-like robots being created even today. Outside the realm of technology we have blow-up dolls, which in 2023 was a 6835 million dollar industry. Combine all of those things, and you get the dystopian premise of Animus Non Grata.

Story details

The background above explains my concern about the future of AI research and its applications. And this is exactly the premise of Animus Non Grata - a world where human-like androids were built specifically for being someone’s girlfriend and/or sex partner seems closer than ever.

However, in the story there was backlash to the rise of androids with general intelligence. Hence, the protagonist of the story is an illegal AI - marked for being decommissioned, but saved by a rogue researcher who snuck her away and hid her in the country-side.

The story of ANG is centered around conflict and contradiction:
We have an android - the player - who has their own ideas, a will to live, a curiosity about the world and a desire to be free. Yet, they are an illegal entity that would be destroyed if anyone found out they existed. But the main character also has a narrow programming. They were not built to be free and live a normal life. They were built for one purpose only: Sexual pleasure. You’re nothing more than a fancy blow-up doll.

The story is also one of uncertainty. An unreliable narrator, making it impossible to know who or what to trust:
Imagine that you wake up without a memory right now, in an unknown place. You’d be terrified, but even more so if someone tells you you’re an android. That you aren’t a real human, even though you can clearly see in a mirror that you look exactly like a human. Would you believe them? What kind of evidence would be needed to convince you? These are just some of the questions explored in the opening chapter of Animus Non Grata. Throughout the game, new evidence comes to light from other sources of information that may lead you down a spiral of paranoia, questioning everything you’ve heard. Or, you may choose to anchor your world around the one constant thing - the man who has saved you from destruction, and claims he wants to help you.

Which opens up another contradiction in the story:
Your narrow behavioural matrix has not been designed for living like a human. Throughout the story, you have an option to embrace or fight against your programming. Where do these thoughts come from? Are they your own, or is it just your programming telling you how you should feel, what you should do? What is you - the real you - and what is simply pre-programmed behaviour? It’s impossible to know. But one thing is certain - it does not help that the man who helped you is initially scared of your programming, and what will happen if you act outside of the intended behavioural matrix. Thus, he enforces a strict world order, where he treats you as you’re intended: As a blow-up doll that should be used. How can you trust a man who treats you like that? Sure, he claims it’s for your own safety - but is it? What are his real motivations for saving you?

Early version

I started writing Animus Non Grata in the beginning of 2023. Back then it was called AAIA-#27167 (short for Advanced Artificial Intelligence Android, followed by Amanda’s serial number). When I started, I wrote only for myself, exploring a unique theme and setting I hadn't seen in other games. On April 19th 2023, the first version of the game was released to the public on itch.io, containing a purely text-based version of the game with only Sequence 0 available.

The first few versions of the games were text-only. It was also a free-to-play browser game for quite a long time.

Art

Around June 2023, I decided I wanted the game to be more than a text-based experience. But I also knew that my own talents would not be enough to do justice to the story I was writing (just look at the garbage in Jessica’s Plight, that’s the level I’m at!). I reached out on various forums,  asking if there was someone out there who'd want to join me on this project. I'm so glad I was contacted by Synthetic Rush, whose enthusiasm for the project was incredible right from the start! The images he created looked truly stunning, bringing the game to life in ways that are beyond what I could've hoped for!

It all started with concept arts, creating the visual looks for the characters. We decided to make Amanda (the main character) look as human as possible - no exaggerated features, no robotic visuals (except her energy meter). The humanity of her should shine through, even though she is an android. At the same we wanted the main male character to look relatable, yet hard, to drive home the dual tracks explored in the game.

Development & Engine
The game is built using Twine - a tool for creating interactive fiction. The project file is both the “source file” and the “actual game” at the same time: It’s an .html file that is ideal for publishing the game as a browser game. If players download an “offline” version of the game, it means they double-click on the .html file and open it in their own default browser (firefox, chrome, etc.).

The engine we initially wrote the game in was Harlowe, but it did not contain built-in save/load functionality, and scripting in it was tedious at best. Eventually I switched to SugarCube 2 - something I highly recommend for everyone. This allowed players to save and load their progress without me needing to specifically program it. A massive time-save!
Building for Steam was initially never in the scope of this project, as Steam wants executables. It turns out there’s a tool by an awesome github user that converts the html into an executable! Neat! Now we finally had a way of packaging the game into a standalone version that could run locally on the user’s PC without opening the game in a separate browser - and fully compatible with the way Steam works!

Current version & Release

The road to release has certainly been long. Or so it feels, even though it’s just 2 years of development. Some indie games take a lot longer than that, but this is a fairly simple game after all with a focus on the story, rather than mechanics.

I set out to write a story with a surreal perspective: An near-future alternative reality, which could feasibly arrive in just a decade. Will we find ourselves waking up in a dystopian future like the one depicted in the game? Let's hope not... At the very least, I want Animus Non Grata to make us all think of the kind of future we want, should artificial general intelligence someday be reality.

We have received an enormous amount of positive feedback for the game’s writing and visuals, and we’re incredibly proud to finally deliver the official launch version of the game. It’s more than an adult visual novel - it’s a thriller, with a warning message, and we hope it stands out. With all that said, we’re releasing on December 3rd 2024!
 

Link
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3137190/Animus_Non_Grata/ 

The Steam version of the game will be released as scheduled on December 3rd 2024.

What an absolutely crazy journey this has been, from the initial idea, to getting Synthetic Rush on board to create the art, to finally being here with the official release and completed game!

2 years of development, a couple of iterations on the tone of the story and a ton of effort creating fantastic art in Daz3D. And we're finally here. It's happening. Animus Non Grata will be out in less than 2 weeks!

If you haven't checked out the game, links are below!

Link to Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3137190/Animus_Non_Grata/  (Demo available, Uncensored trailer on page)

Link to Itch: Animus Non Grata [v1.0.0-beta] by FlimsyLegs (itch.io) (Pre-release version available, Censored trailer on page)

Cheers,

FlimsyLegs

We're getting closer every day to the official release of Animus Non Grata (December 3rd 2024). To celebrate this huge milestone, our fantastic Daz3D artist Synthetic Rush has written an art devlog showcasing the design process behind Amanda's character!

Link to his blogspot entry: https://syrush.blogspot.com/2024/11/art-dev-log-1-animus-non-grata-amanda.html

Cheers,

FlimsyLegs

We're still aiming for a Q4 2024 release, and are currently in the process of testing out how animations work in Daz and how they work in Twine. The goal is to add animations to some of the NSFW scenes, but we're not making any promises. We'll let you know more if we have something to show!

I also updated the demo version of ANG on both Steam and Itch to include a bunch of spelling mistake fixes, and a couple of bugfixes, including a music bug reported by a user (thanks again, you know who you are!). The music bug was also present in the full game, and has been fixed there as well.

Wishlist the game on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3137190/Animus_Non_Grata/

Or grab the beta version on Itch: https://flimsylegs.itch.io/animus-non-grata 

Cheers,
FlimsyLegs

Next steps:

- Get the demo page and build approved

- Add the demo to Steam's october edition of "Next Fest"

- Finalize the game and make an official 1.0.0 version

- Release Animus Non Grata Q4 2024 on Steam and Itch

Anyway, we've been talking with Synthetic Rush (the artist) about a possibility for adding animations to the game. Once the base art is completed, we'll look into it further.

Well at least I managed to complete Chapter 4 of Taru's Infernal Pledge, so that's something... Here's the changelog for that: https://flimsylegs.itch.io/tarus-infernal-pledge/devlog/781779/version-030-is-out-chapter-4 

Cheers,

FlimsyLegs

We're aiming for an Itch + Steam release later this year. Due to vacations coming up, we'll take a few weeks break and continue mid/late August with development.

Cheers,

FlimsyLegs

Game's page: Animus Non Grata [v0.18.0] by FlimsyLegs (itch.io)

I'm extremely happy with the visuals of the game, created by the fantastic Daz artists Synthetic Rush! Below are some examples, which are typically not both seen in a single playthrough of Animus Non Grata, due to the branching aspect of the story:

Amanda (the player character) being spanked by Don as punishment.

Amanda seducing Don and tying his hands in kinky bdsm sex (can only happen if Amanda has not been punished a lot by Don during the previous chapters of the game).