Category: Visual Novel

Visual Novel update.

First of all, why have none of you poked me about keeping up with this, huh? How am I suppose to gage interest when no one asks.
Well here is a content update to keep that hype. HYPE.

Firstly I have a working title now, Project life time.
What do you think?

I have also been working on a few character designs recently too.

  • Unnamed #1
  • Unnamed #2
  • Unnamed #3 & #4

Firstly we have unnamed character 1, Blond hair and blue eyes. I’ve adopted an easy going anime style as mentioned in my last Visual novel blog. He is going to be a major character for the first part of the book and will influence how you, the player, will set the path you take. Hopefully being friendly, reliable and responsible with respects to the player.
Unnamed character 2 will be the first female that you will encounter. She will have brown hair and green eyes. I’m hoping to make her a more motherly or sisterly connection to the player, brining a sense that the player is not the be all and end all of the story (as I think that gets boring).
Thirdly, the last 2 unnamed characters are a mother and daughter duo that I was doodling a few weeks ago, I don’t think I’ll add them to the story, I just wanted to add more content to my blog as I had a few days of not contributing to my VN, I’ve been randomly slacking off.

As for adding story. So far i have about a page and a half of content and a long flow chart of possible out comes for chapter one. Screenshots may be added later.
To summarise the chapter, the player will ‘wake up’ and go through a ‘normal’ day, this is sort of the introductory level, meeting the characters and getting used to the story and backstory. Then it’ll move on to a small introductory decision about a coffee in a café, ultimately the decision won’t affect the story at all, but will get the player used to the system or clicking to interact with the story, and see how it changes.

As for backgrounds, which is one of the biggest and most important part of a VN as it describes the environment without words. I am really struggling heavily with this, it’s really hard as my drawing style really lacks detail and I hate working on detail in general, so drawing backgrounds forces me tackle this.

As you can see, this is simple and basic but still needs a lot of work. But i think it’s my best work yet.

Wish me luck guys, I’m hoping by next week to have a lot more done.
Tell me what you think, and if you have name ideas give me a shout, I might even design a character for you if it’s not too outrageous (meaning you get a shout out in the credits)

Creating a Visual Novel – VN

What is a VN?
A VN is a visual Novel or know in Japanese as bijuaru noberu is an interactive game genre, which originated in Japan. In my case its a visual way to tell a story, how the characters look and where they are. This probably stems from my love of role-play games such as Dungeons and Dragons etc.

It is mainly a text based narrative with a few interactive choices, such as using your own name or branching story lines, these usually have large arcs and can shape each players experience, giving both a unique play experience and re-playability. Most VN’s fall into the romance and school life genera, but there are exceptions, some follow horror and some follow slice of life. But a great deal of them share in the art style, very animated and set backgrounds. The characters are usually drawn in an Anime or Chibi style.

So now that you have a basic idea of what a VN is, why do I want to make one. Well if you know me, I am too ambitious and usually a big ideas kinda guy. Often way too many ideas and a big dreamer. In university I attempted to make a VN for a final project, but I didn’t get very far, the teacher was unsupportive of my idea and drawing style and it threw me off the whole idea. I then created a sub par animation that I am embarrassed to claim as my own, as an 8 year old with Microsoft Paint could probably do better.
However recently I have been having many vivid dreams, something not uncommon to me, taking me back to the good ol’ days and giving me a lot of inspiration to draw and write, I have been having a lot of bad dreams too, but that is due to personal reasons and being unwell.

This was my first attempt at a scene back in University in 2017

This project may not come to anything, it may end up being a dead project like all of my other ideas, but I can at least give it a go and start up. I have a baseline knowledge of programming and I can draw relatively well, and I have always adored the anime style of drawing people, big cute eyes that you can push emotion into, the wide range of facial expressions, and last but no least the characters you can portray changing the hair, eyes and skin tone. Also direction and narrative can be shown based on how they are standing and posing for each frame of the novel that they are on screen.

The program that I will using is called Renpy, it allows for basic animation and scrolling text and it has a lot of good tutorials. With any hope in a few years I’ll have something worth while of the name Visual Novel.

My idea is to have some modern post university non gender specific main character trudge through their life battling the real life problems of finances, social life, relationships and finding a job. Very ambitious I know. Bonus points if you can guess who it is based on.
The main character, why non gender specific you ask? this is to give any player, male or female or any other gender, the ease of read, give them the feeling that this is their story, I will of course try to program in the ability to chose your own name, failing this I will choose a gender neutral name and refer to the character as that and they or them.

The setting. I plan to set it in no fixed geographical location, this again gives the reader freedom to help, but I am going to have set locations within the town, for example, a work place, a bar, a university and so on, these will be demonstrated by drawings and real life photos edited to look drawn. (oh god help me on this part)

As for the rest, well you are going to have to keep up to date with my blog. I want to make this a real thing and I want this to work, it’s a dream I’ve had for a while now. I have been missing something to shoot for recently.
If I go anon for a while and don’t post anything up but this sounds like a good idea, poke me, message me or find my social media accounts and bug me for more, that will kick me up the bum and keep me going.

I hope to post up some sketches and beta art some time this month. Watch this space.