My goal is to create a Visual Novel Game and sell it at an Anime Convention

[Vyse]

Link to original post: [drupal=2285]My goal is to create a Visual Novel Game and sell it at an Anime Convention[/drupal]

Specifically, I plan to design a Ren'ai (romantic) game that is presented in a visual novel format.

Think of Sim Date/Ganguro girl and remove, erm, pretty much everything. In fact, that's not even a very good comparison.

When I look up Ren'ai on Wiki, it takes me to the 'Dating Sim' page, which is kind of sad since Ren'ai can be a very powerful and emotional story telling medium combining images, text, music, spoken dialogue, sound effects etc.

Actually, I clicked on Visual Novel which gives a much better explanation of what I intend to do.

Firstly here is a paragraph distinguishing VN's.

A visual novel (ビジュアルノベル, bijuaru noberu?) is an interactive fiction game featuring mostly static graphics, usually with anime-style art. As the name might suggest, they resemble mixed-media novels or tableau vivant stage plays. Visual novels are commonly called dating sims in English[by whom?], a misnomer as visual novels are classified as a sub-genre of adventure games and not simulation games. This has led to confusion with the other genre known as dating sims, which often shares a similar visual format with visual novels, but has gameplay based on statistics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_novel

And here's a good description:

Visual novels are distinguished from other game types by their extremely minimal gameplay. Typically the majority of player interaction is limited to clicking to keep the text, graphics and sound moving (most recent games offer 'play' or 'fast-forward' toggles that make even this unnecessary).

Most visual novels have multiple storylines and many endings; the gameplay mechanic in these cases typically consists of intermittent multiple-choice decision points, where the player selects a direction in which to take the game. This style of gameplay has been compared to the Choose Your Own Adventure books. Most, however, strive for a higher level of plot and character depth than the aforementioned series of interactive children's books. These can be more closely compared to story-driven interactive fiction. While the plots and storytelling of mainstream video games is often criticized, many fans of visual novels hold them up as exceptions and identify this as a strong point of the genre.

Now, I've become acquainted with a marvellous little coding program called Ren'Py (Ren from Ren'ai, Py from the coding language Python), and am fairly confident in my ability to code a game from it (I'm pretty familliar with coding and spinning a good story).

Here's an example screen:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renpy

All I need now is somebody here on the Gold Coast to collaborate with me and draw what I need for the game, then with any luck, we'll get some floor space at SupaNova next year and sell them for like 5 or 10 dollars each.

Hopefully I get started with it sooner than later.

I felt like telling someone my plan, so I figured why not Smashboards!

 

[Steven Jackson Action Jackson]

That's pretty cool. I liked Ganguro Girl lol. Dating Sims always made me lol.

Make sure we got to play it

 

[finalark]

I'd look it to it if you were to make such a thing, but just so long as it doesn't have the following:

1: Stereotypical anime personalities: It takes no effort to just take a bunch of stereotypes and dump them into some story. A good way to prevent this, is by asking yourself "can I buy this." Or in other words, could I believe that (given the context of the story) this could be a real person?

2: An unpredictable plot: It takes no effort to just take a base storyline and plot twists that have all been used before and apply them to your story. If I'm going to spend hours on end in a visual novel, I at least want a plot that's had some honest to God effort put into it and isn't just a rehash of just about every anime plot twist ever.

3: ATTENTION ANIME FANS, JAPANESE IS NOT A MYSTICAL LANGUAGE THAT CANNOT POSSIBLY BE TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH: Seriously, please drop the "-san" or the "-kun" and such, we don't say these things in English. And if you must put in something like this in then at least put in the English equivalent. Things like "Miss" or "Master" as opposed to "-san" or "-sama." And you're going to have to accept that you're going to have to not have some of these all together. And please don't keep words in Japanese, it's not like all of these words have some kind of magical meaning that could not ever be possibly translated into English. For instance, "Nakama" could translate to friend, so put it down as friend. If I'm playing/reading a visual novel, it's because I want to read a good story, not brush up on my Japanese.

Sorry if I seemed like I was being kind of a jerk, that's just things I've noticed in visual novels that bug me to no end. So my advice, if you want your visual novel to really shine, please follow my suggestions.

 

[Vyse]

Good advice finalark and I agree whole heartedly.
I couldn't, and would refuse to write something that is too anime-esque. Fact is that I can't.
It's why it took me so long to win a Write With Your Power competition.

I'm going to write a story like I usually do, with Australian characters in an Australian setting. Some people aren't looking for that in a VN, and that's fine, because my favourite VN of all time 'Ever17' has all of those things you pointed out.

But, I don't think I could convincingly pull off something like that. Or at least it wouldn't convince me

Maybe I will develop one that sees Japanese influence one day though (Like most manga you read, etc.). Because despite what either of us might think, people like it, and it sells. But for this one, I'll just go with what I know.

 

[stingers]

only vn i've ever fully played is fate/stay night. i absolutely adored it, except one thing

the stupidass random sex scenes. please, none of those -.- unless you're positive you can make them meaningful and the writing doesn't degrade down to a 4th grade level (ie. they're actually important to the story, i guess).

i downloaded ever17 but my hard drive failed when i was about 6 hours in and i've just been too lazy to restart. :/

 

[bobson]

I've always wanted to date Wikipe-tan.

 

[Vyse]

only vn i've ever fully played is fate/stay night. i absolutely adored it, except one thing

the stupidass random sex scenes. please, none of those -.- unless you're positive you can make them meaningful and the writing doesn't degrade down to a 4th grade level (ie. they're actually important to the story, i guess).

i downloaded ever17 but my hard drive failed when i was about 6 hours in and i've just been too lazy to restart. :/

Mine will be strictly G13+
:D

Ever17 is G13+ as well (Like most, if not all of theirs were before their bankruptcy), but it still presents one of the most amazing stories I've ever experienced.

EDIT: Also, I get that too with Ever17. I've only finished it twice. Takeshi/You bad ending and Takeshi/Sora kinda bad ending. lol.

 

[Morrigan]

Good luck with this Vyse, visual novels are fun.

 

[stingers]

wait you never beat the whole game? @.@

i heard the game doesn't even turn legendary status until you beat coco's route!

 

[Vyse]

Yeah, I am slack

 

[Lore]

Mine will be strictly G13+
:D

Ever17 is G13+ as well (Like most, if not all of theirs were before their bankruptcy), but it still presents one of the most amazing stories I've ever experienced.

EDIT: Also, I get that too with Ever17. I've only finished it twice. Takeshi/You bad ending and Takeshi/Sora kinda bad ending. lol.

Yeah, Ever 17 was probably the best Vn I've ever played. Especially because of the fact that there weren't any REAL sex scenes.

And you didn't even beat it? The game doesn't even really reveal the plot until coco route...

I order you to play through it completely. NOW!

and good luck on your vn idea.

 

[~automatic]

You got this Vyse. If you need distribution in the States, México and Italy I'm the guy you should call. lol
Good luck!