Like what dude, genuinely asking, don’t leave me hanging. Also yeah I didn’t mean just having lots of pictures makes it a VN right away, but by ‘heavily featuring’ I mean the look n feel of VNs, like renpy stuff. Obviously just having pictures doesn’t make jack VN, otherwise everything’s a VN. Btw I don’t get those examples you gave, are those considered novels/graphic novels? I’d call them children’s picture books
To be fair, I suppose a heavily illustrated choice-based game migth be practically indistinguishable from VNs (although don’t VNs usually have markedly less choices, usually? Not less meaningful, but simply less. Don’t VNs have long-ish narrative moments broken by the odd choice, where choice-based IF is lots of choices broken up by narrative? Maybe I’m not getting that right). When considering IF I still default to parser-based, so that colours my judgement.
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I think there’s a distinction to be made between “illustrations” (directly depicting events of the narrative) and broader “visuals” that give you something to look at and help to provide ambience while remaining abstract enough to complement, rather than potentially conflicting with, the imagery in the text. There’s a lot of interesting stuff to explore with non-illustrative visuals, I think.
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You just reminded me of Alabaster.
I could barely ever understand what the illustrations were supposed to be, but they were pretty cool.
Right! This isn’t an Inform thread, but so far as it goes, I think Inform 10’s lack of flexible windows has been an obstacle to exploring this kind of thing. Maybe someday down the road…
I wasn’t, but I don’t see how the location of the picture makes a difference. Showing pictures in fewer circumstances and thereby having fewer opportunities for confusion, sure.
But my point here is that illustrations in IF are not remotely new or untried. Authors are in a position to make informed decisions here, and many have probably developed some ambivalence about graphics, based on the games they have played. I’m not saying a particular game should or shouldn’t have any particular type of illustration.
You mean what are the conventions of graphic novels? They consist of a narrative sequence of illustrated panels. They don’t go in for long sections of prose without intervening illustrations, just a couple of sentences at a time. Speech bubbles.
They’re the type of prose you’d find in a novel, but with far more illustrations than usual. They’re not normally considered graphic novels.
I was just reading about a tussle in late-1970s comics fandom over this. A guy named Byron Preiss was trying to popularize “graphic novels” which were effectively comics without speech bubbles. He ran into a lot of what you could call either artistic principle or gatekeeping, depending on who you agree with.
https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/The_Strange_Case_of_Byron_Preiss_Visual_Publications/29748458
The reason I looked Preiss up (and why I bother to mention it): A decade later, he pitched Infocom on the concept of finding some established fantasy authors to write licensed novels based on Zork, Enchanter, Wishbringer, and so on. And that’s where those came from.
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Any relation to Byron Preiss Multimedia of Philip Marlowe: Private Eye?
The CD-ROM game? I wasn’t aware of that one, but yeah, Preiss was involved in a lot of industry deals.
Cool, he kept his hand in the novel-slash-adventure-game business.
I personally don’t much enjoy playing Private Eye, but I like that it exists.
I haven’t reread your post, but it was the way you said that if something is shown on the picture, then we have to think about making it interactable and vice-versa, or that you need to think how the player then ought to be able to interact with the things on the picture, and then you mentioned point-and-clicks.
I understood that as having an illustration of the whole current scene on the side. Because if you display e.g. a picture of a thing when examining, then those issues are (basically) non-existent. Anyway, not a big deal.
I’m not sure if it has been mentioned, but accessibility is a big reason I’m lukewarm on graphics.
Text-based Interactive Fiction is one of the few videogame genres that are naturally accessible to the blind and the visually impaired. In fact, it’s one of the few interactive mediums that allows someone to explore and interact with a fictional environment without the need to see that environment. I believe that’s something worth preserving going forward. I don’t like the idea of making my games more attractive at the cost of leaving an entire demographic out in the figurative cold. I know for a fact that plenty of others in this space feel the same way.
So, even if I incorporated images into a project, I would be careful that the plot and gameplay weren’t reliant on those images. I would be sure that everything depicted in those images was meticulously redundant in the text. Basically, the game should create an identical experience whether you can see those images or not. Once you hold yourself to those standards, the images don’t hold as much appeal, frankly.
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I couldn’t agree more. Personally, I like graphics in parser-based games, but the graphics should only supplement the game and not be an integral part of it.
Look at it this way, you should be able to turn the graphics off and you can still solve the game, whether sighted or not.
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My two most successful games on Itch both have graphics that are 100% superfluous to the text (both were playtested in just the standard Inky web export, before I brought them into Godot and added graphics). The appeal is that, if done properly, they can cross a minimum threshold into looking like what the mainstream gaming audience expects “a game” to look like, without really changing anything fundamental.
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When I have a map to play with and write notes on as I am playing the game, and the map is well illustrated as in a game like Wishbringer, I find that I am a lot more engaged.
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Aaaaaaah, feelies.
(imagine the above in Homer Simpon’s voice as though he were talking about donuts)
Feelies are a whole other level. It’s magical.
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On the note of feelies, it sucks that the pinnacle of tactile computer graphics is lower resolution than a TI-83, has fps in the single digits, costs in the ballpark of a cheap new car, and the tech is advancing at a rate to make a sloth impatient.
But yeah, blind man here who came back to this genre mainly because its one of the few genres of computer games where the answer to “can a blind person play this?” is usually “Yes and mostly with frustrations sighted players have as well” instead of “Probably not, but maybe if you have infinite patience, memorize every minute detail of the sound design and in-game menus, and constantly OCR the screen”… Admittedly, some mainstream games are more accessible than that, but from talking with other blind gamers, that’s not an uncommon experience and many of us don’t have the patience to work around the limitations of games that weren’t built from the ground up with accessibility in mind.
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What you need there is for a hugely influential tech billionaire to go blind. That’ll speed up the tech like crazy.
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That might be overly optimistic. Sure, they could afford to build themselves a million dollar prototype that puts anything on the market to shame, but unless they thought they could sell it to the sighted masses, I don’t see the price falling to match an iPad as there aren’t enough blind people to drive the kinds of economies of scale the consumer electronics industry thrives on.
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