Interactive novels?

I’ve thought about trying my hand at a visual novel, but honestly the art assets are beyond me and I don’t have the budget to commission what would be required.

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Why not use clip arts? In any case, you can use what’s called developer’s art. Usually, this means colored rectangles. People can be represented by ellipses with names attached. Then, when you finished the game, maybe some artist will do it for you for cheap for exposure and some piece of the action.

Not all VNs have good art. The commercial ones do because that’s half the reason they sell. But the indie games tend to have pretty poor art. I’ve even played some that didn’t have a single character portrait. A common thing to do is to take photos of real world places and run them through a filter.

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (aka Higurashi: When They Cry) is a famous indie VN that became a famous anime. It’s now had an original 48 episode series, a manga series, a remake series that is currently airing, and a bunch of spinoff anime series, not to mention being released on PS2, PS3, PS4, Vita, and Switch.

I mention all that, because this is what it looked like when it released.

It used background photos of a real village in Japan and the characters had balloon hands bigger than their heads. But the writing was so good that nobody cared. It’s since then gone through a few upgrades to being commercial quality (mostly the versions on consoles), but the version you buy on Steam still has the original assets.

Switch version for comparison.

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My artistic abilities are limited to low res pixel art, and even that takes me a long time. Would a VN with poor art be better than a textual game with no art? Would it be worth dragging out development time a few more months?

I’ve seen some good looking 3D renders, but I think that working with Daz3D or Poser would take me even longer tbh

Right, because if there’s one thing everyone knows about artists, it’s that they just looove working for ‘exposure’. :stuck_out_tongue:

There’s a pretty good selection of sci fi and fantasy background and character art you can get for signing up a month at one of those stock photo places (which all seen to have extensive collections of original art now). As well as real photos as Tayruh mentioned.

This still would make it difficult to do a commercial visual novel, but you could get a following for other reasons, and art can always be upgraded and replaced. And for my purposes writing something more prose heavy, atmospheric background art was more along the lines of what I’ve needed.

Visual novels always seem very dialog focused to me too, like there doesn’t seem to be much that’s done in them that doesn’t involve talking to other characters. So as far as writing goes it doesn’t really fit my style.

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It’s hard to say, really. It all depends on how you use it. It’s kind of like the argument of books vs movies. Both have their strengths and weaknesses.

I’ll at least say in Higurashi, certain scenes like Rena flipping the F out on you out of nowhere would have had less impact without accompanying art.

Have you read many VNs? There’s generally more time spent in your character’s head with monologue than spent talking with characters (they’re usually told in first person). At least with the ones with a strong story. Promotional art usually only shows shots with characters because it helps advertise the art, and games where the goal is mostly just to hook up with a girl has mostly dialogue, but those VNs usually suck and have really poor stories.

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We as artists don’t work for free unless the story is very compelling and it just “clicks.” Although rare, it’s not unheard of.

That being said, good artists are flexible. If you pay $100 per picture, then you get $100 art. If you pay $5 per picture, then you get $5 sketch that you need to color yourself, as well as adding any missing details yourself. With art, quality of work expands to the available resources.

Some artists will take hours to finish 1 painting. Others can do it in half an hour or faster. If you just don’t bother asking, then you’ll never get it. When I suggest that you do developer’s art, that’s one way to get interested artists to get on board. It helps with visualization, and that makes our job easier and more pleasant. Even little scratches can help a lot sometimes.

Why are you so cynical? Did you have bad experience with artists? It really depends on how you approach the subject. I certainly wouldn’t do it for you if I think that you’re that one rude person out of many. But that’s on you.

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Regarding dialog vs exposition: this is the difference between movie scripts/plays vs novels/literature. The two are not the same and a person may excel in one but not the other. Actually, it’s rare that a person can do both with equal faculty. So, just choose whichever you’re comfortable with. Either way is fine.

Either is fine, but if I cannot afford or produce quality art assets I’ll stick to formats where visuals aren’t so important. Limitations can be useful.

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Depending on the setting and on the visual style which you have in mind, you might find really quite decent art which could serve as a placeholder or could even stay in the finished version (though, of course, if it’s free it might be very widely used and therefore considered boring).

Here are some links to resources (many of them free or cheap):

Maybe you could use those assets to make a polished demo version, and if people really seem to like the demo, you could consider if it’s worth it for you to commission original art.

The Lemma Soft Forums also have a big recruitment & commissions subforum: Recruitment & Services Offered - Lemma Soft Forums

Theoretically, if it’s a commercial endeavour, you could then even try a Kickstarter or some other means of crowdfunding. I have no idea how realistic that is (and whether you’d want to deal with all the extra overhead and hassle), but there are VNs which have raised a couple of thousand dollars on Kickstarter, and I just wanted to mention it as a possible option.

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Are we still tallking about text games?

Yes. Illustrated text games are a somewhat different world, for all the reasons mentioned here: budget, coordination with artists, whether you expect to make money on the game, …

But the game design and game play questions raised by a visual novel aren’t much different from those of a pure-text choice-based game.

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My question came from a lack of background I think. When the topic of graphics and visuals came up, I immediately thought “pretty pictures to make the game more likeable”. That’s a wrong mental jump.

I do this in static fiction too. I’m still learning to read the language of comics and graphic novels.

A good friend introduced me to Thorgal - Wikipedia years ago, and I’m still trying to wrap my head and eyes around the fact that images tell stories too.

Did you know that text adventures are actually the ancestor of visual novels? Both English and Japanese adventure games became visual and used a menu based system instead of typing (like Monkey Island), but while English graphic adventures dropped the menu for a mouse interface with less text, Japanese graphic adventures leaned harder into more text and only occasional menu choices. There are still a few that are played in the early adventure style, and Japan tends to refer to them as ADV.

Here are some example pics of the games that were in the ADV format. The second one is Snatcher by the guy that made the infamous Metal Gear Solid series.

1620676430235 1620676354442

There’s a nice long article on the topic for anyone curious.

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Thank you!

I love this about this forum and the people on it. People with different but overlapping interest areas who point me to topics I had never heard or read about.

Sometimes this leads me deep into the history of western games ( The Digital Antiquarian (filfre.net)), (50 Years of Text Games - 50 Years of Text Games (substack.com)) , sometimes a niche historical period I find immensely interesting (Border Reivers - Details (ifdb.org)) ,and now you have pointed me to a whole new field of cultural and historical interest.

Nice!

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While the art is definitely a major draw for many types of Visual Novels, they are usually very dialogue-focused - to the point that the engines have a “skip seen text” option built in to skip to the next new part on replay.

In many respects, the sliding paper doll format with character sprites is obviating the need for constant “he said/she said” prose dialogue tags. You actually see the character who is speaking onscreen and they either slide on and off in rhythm with the conversation, or the sprite might hop or pulse or change expression to indicate they are the one speaking when multiple characters are onscreen. It’s a bit akin to comic books and graphic novels with dialogue balloons, but with dynamic art and its own set of tropes.

The art requirements are a steep entry point to creating one, but some authors have come up with unique workarounds - Hatoful Boyfriend I believe uses stock images of birds as the characters (based on the parodic conceit that the player is the one human in a school of talking birds) and others have used stylized public domain images. I’ve seen a game jam VN that also used photographs taken by the author for backgrounds and pictures of fruit as the characters.

It almost seems that that with as much control as VN engines give with the sprites, it might work to go for a sort of Monty-Python animation “purposely awkward” aesthetic with clip-art collage.

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I’ve done a longer story, a surreal dreamscape, almost 30,000 words. It’s interactive only in choosing where you go, and there is a place where you can return to major branchings.
I see that there isn’t really any category for discussing the story-writing part of authoring in particular; the closest would probably be “General Design Discussions” in the Authoring category, which lumps it in with everything else which isn’t specific to an individual engine like Twine.

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“General Design Discussions” is appropriate for that, yes. That’s where questions like “which point of view” and “writing good dialog” have been posted.

If you’re willing to use a resource external to this forum, then the official Twine Discord server has a writing-discussion channel.

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I’m genuinely at a loss at why people in this community always seem so intent on jumping in and taking things I say in the most bizarrely negative light possible. I honestly don’t even know how to respond to getting lectured for this and having assumptions made about me over it. 'Working for eXpOsUrE" is an expression that’s taken on meme status for how often it gets scoffed at, because it’s a genuinely insulting thing that artists are constantly asked to do. Their time is worth as much as any other person with a valuable and sought after skill.

Any decent artist looking for commissions will quickly have their hands full. Self declared writers meanwhile are a dime a dozen, and the “exposure” from some random author’s vanity project can not realistically be offered as a currency. Artists recognize those kind of requests for what they are. Particularly when they come from people they know.

Having to explain all this and defend myself over a one line reference feels a little insane seeing as you literally could have googled “artists working for exposure” before jumping on my post.

But if you’re claiming to be an artist and you interact with other artists, you knew all this already, so I wonder what your motivation was.

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