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”).
Fascinating, I've always thought the words are the more powerful and I think that your decision to re invent the format will work as a medium perfectly. I check the blog daily, so staying tuned!
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment. I'm quite happy with the way my "KISS engine" is progressing (although it's nothing really so grand, I've decided to call it that, meaning "KInetic Short Story engine"). I'm now working on an actual short story, and it should be ready soon. I can also see that the format will give me a lot of flexibility in terms how detailed the artwork is, and how much or little animation I include in each story. Going forward, I would like to experiment with that too, in order to find a good balance.
DeleteThis sounds excellent, as i mainly enjoy your work for the story and for the art style, not the animation.
ReplyDeleteI've seen the combinations you describe used in RPGmaker but i wouldn't know how to take the RPG aspect out of it.
Branching choices would be excellent, but that would make it more like a game, and i would suggest not biting off more than you can chew.
As you say, allowing branches within the narrative is an attractive idea, but it really makes things more complex in terms of the things the programmer has to consider, and the possibility of "bugs" etc. In the future, it might be fun to put a limited random branch point into one or two of the stories near the end, such as "the turn of a card deciding the character's fate" etc., but I think I'll limit it to that.
DeleteLamivex,
ReplyDeleteI think searching for a faster way to get your ideas 'out there' is a good thing. However, you do seem to find these things mid-way through a project. I really would like to see the rest of 'Visitors' and Episode 3. How much work had you done on Episode 3? Have you decided to change production now to the new media method?
Any steps that get us more of your art will be most welcome. Personally, I would love to see another animation of the quality of Episode 2 and the Nipple Enhancement Infomercial. It makes me think I'm there, in the virtual world. Lovely!
Staying tuned
ptathuk
Obviously, without new ideas, people would never produce anything, but my problem is that I often get new ideas before I've had time to bring the current ones to "fruition", and then there's a tension between wanting to finish what I've already started and wanting to work on something new. With 'Visitors', I thought I'd steeled myself to producing all of it before I started doing anything else, but then the 'kinetic novel' idea came along, and that was just too good to resist! I'm really convinced that it will make a good format for my stories, so I decided to develop it straight away. I'm working on my first story in that format now, and I've already got about two thirds of it finished.
DeleteWhen it's published, I'll go back to working on "Visitor's". I'm still enthusiastic about that too, because I find my ending for it to be quite a turn-on, and I'd really like to produce the artwork for it.
I have to admit that I've developed a bit of an allergy to Episode 3, but I'm starting to feel the itch to get on with it and get it done. The main bugbear about producing those CG animations is—hair! I swear that if human beings had been a completely bald species (or at least, if all my characters were bald), then Episode 3 would be finished already. I won't bore you with the technical details, but after each animation, I'm left feeling that I need to change my approach to doing hair. Anyway, at version 2.74 Blender is getting proper hair collision and dynamics for the first time, so I'm going to give my characters proper strand based hair ('particle' based hair in Blender terminology). That should look good but will take ages to render. Nevertheless, given my recent lack of output, I'm beginning to realize that that isn't really such a big problem. If it takes 2 or 3 months to render, then that's what it takes!
Regards.
Personally I didn't think that hair was at all an issue, I liked things the way they were. I think the format is fine the way it is. Episode 1 was perfect, 2 was an improvement, the enhancement was almost too detailed for me. If there's too much detail I think it loses some character and room for the mind to fill in the blanks fantasy wise.
ReplyDelete