As you may have noticed, it’s been a little while since my last post. I haven’t been inactive though. In fact, I’m working on something that I feel will be extremely useful for helping me produce the stories that I want to tell. My previous motion comic turned out to be rather a drag to do, and I ended up producing it as movie file rather than the flash animation that I had originally planned. I think part of the problem was that I didn’t have a clear enough idea of the “structure” it would have. By “structure”, I don’t mean the structure of the story itself, but the mechanics of how the user makes it progress. However, a couple of weeks ago, I came across something which I thought—with a little adaption—would be perfect for my stories: the visual novel.
As many of you will already know, visual novels are basically games that consist of a lot of dialog, and also include pictures and a (usually limited) amount of animation. It’s basically the dialog that drives the story, i.e. the characters speak, and the user clicks to read the next piece of dialog. Many VNs are pretty long, and the emphasis is not particularly on the pictures—and still less on animation. My stories are much shorter, but they are usually centered around conversations, so I think that having them driven by dialog is a good idea. On the other hand, I want my stories to be more visual, and to have full blown animation at the most “interesting” points.
I’ve done quite a lot of looking around on the internet, and have found several virtual novel engines that make the process of producing a visual novel considerably easier. However, they tend to suffer from the same deficiency, i.e. poor support for animation. The upshot was that I decided to write my own VN software (not an ‘engine’, more like a VN generating program that I can easily amend and reuse for different stories). The work has been progressing pretty quickly, and it looks like I’ll be able to include the following features.
1. Web based—implemented in HTML5 and javascript
2. Efficient sprite based animation allowing animation of facial expressions etc as the characters talk
3. Seamless integration of short animations in the form of web video files
4. “Typing effect” style dialog in comic style speech bubbles
All of that has taken quite a lot of reading up (I knew virtually nothing about HTML or javascript), but it’s been fun. I’ve got to the point now where I’m almost ready to start work on producing an actual story, so please stay tuned!
P.S. Of course, that also means that “Visitors” is slightly on hold, but I hope to move that forward too in the next week or so.
P.P.S. I should point out that virtual novels usually have branch points at which the user makes choices. I’m not so interested in that just at the present, so what I’ll be producing is something closer to a “kinetic novel” (or in my case, a “kinetic short story”).
As many of you will already know, visual novels are basically games that consist of a lot of dialog, and also include pictures and a (usually limited) amount of animation. It’s basically the dialog that drives the story, i.e. the characters speak, and the user clicks to read the next piece of dialog. Many VNs are pretty long, and the emphasis is not particularly on the pictures—and still less on animation. My stories are much shorter, but they are usually centered around conversations, so I think that having them driven by dialog is a good idea. On the other hand, I want my stories to be more visual, and to have full blown animation at the most “interesting” points.
I’ve done quite a lot of looking around on the internet, and have found several virtual novel engines that make the process of producing a visual novel considerably easier. However, they tend to suffer from the same deficiency, i.e. poor support for animation. The upshot was that I decided to write my own VN software (not an ‘engine’, more like a VN generating program that I can easily amend and reuse for different stories). The work has been progressing pretty quickly, and it looks like I’ll be able to include the following features.
1. Web based—implemented in HTML5 and javascript
2. Efficient sprite based animation allowing animation of facial expressions etc as the characters talk
3. Seamless integration of short animations in the form of web video files
4. “Typing effect” style dialog in comic style speech bubbles
All of that has taken quite a lot of reading up (I knew virtually nothing about HTML or javascript), but it’s been fun. I’ve got to the point now where I’m almost ready to start work on producing an actual story, so please stay tuned!
P.S. Of course, that also means that “Visitors” is slightly on hold, but I hope to move that forward too in the next week or so.
P.P.S. I should point out that virtual novels usually have branch points at which the user makes choices. I’m not so interested in that just at the present, so what I’ll be producing is something closer to a “kinetic novel” (or in my case, a “kinetic short story”).
