Visitors: Frame 6

Visitors: Frame 5

What I've been doing...

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”).

Visitors: Frame 4

Google has backed down

Google has reversed its "no explicit content" decision. It seems that a lot of people actually like looking at porn on the internet—Stap me, what a surprise!

Moving to Tumblr

Thank you to everyone who posted messages encouraging me to continue. Actually, there's no chance of me quitting, I enjoy doing this stuff too much!

Anyway, I've moved to Tumblr. Apart from the flash animations, I've transferred all relevant images and movies that were posted here. There seems to be some technical issue with the flash animations (probably related to domain access) which I'll look into when I have some spare time.

Here is the tumblr link:

http://lamivex.tumblr.com

Time to get the hell outta Dodge...

Evidently the time has come to look for a new home. I just received the following from "The Blogger team":

Dear Blogger User,
We're writing to tell you about an upcoming change to the Blogger Content Policy that may affect your account.
In the coming weeks, we'll no longer allow blogs that contain sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video. We'll still allow nudity presented in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts, or where there are other substantial benefits to the public from not taking action on the content.
The new policy will go into effect on the 23rd of March 2015. After this policy goes into effect, Google will restrict access to any blog identified as being in violation of our revised policy. No content will be deleted, but only blog authors and those with whom they have expressly shared the blog will be able to see the content we've made private.

Any suggestions regarding a new location would be welcome. Hopefully a site where censorship isn't an issue.


Regards.