Visual Novel creation

  • #1, by ArtNovaThursday, 26. January 2017, 12:53 7 years ago
    Hello, guys.
    Can you please share your opinion, if creating Visual Novel style games in Visionaire Studio - is a good or bad idea?

    1. How is it competitive with lets say Ren'Py or Tyranobuilder?
    2. How good VS can handle multiple scenario branching?
    3. Is it comfortable to create appearing character images like in VN games? Can such a big images still use animations?

    Thanks!

    P.S.: Btw, I wanted to thank AFRLme for mentioning somewhere deep in the forums about "articygrinraft" tool. Tried it awhile ago and got really great writing motivation boost.

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  • #2, by afrlmeThursday, 26. January 2017, 13:40 7 years ago
    Visual Novels are entirely possible with Visionaire Studio. They are essentially myst-like first person point & click games albeit without the exploration aspect.

    You can create branches in any game engine as they rely on the same thing most events do, which is Conditions. You will need to use a combination of conditions, values & if queries to determine which branch of a story-line the player is on or which event should be played & so on. You could even use Lua tables if you feel up to the challenge.

    I've heard of Ren'Py which as far as I'm aware is specifically designed for the creation of Visual Novel games. Never heard of Tyranobuilder.

    Yes, you can have animated characters appear over the top of scenes or via an interface. I have been doing some freelance development work on & off for someone who is making an hybrid visual novel / myst-like point & click Sci-Fi game with Visionaire Studio. Check out their website here - I think there's even a demo for windows & mac available on that site. The freelance I did for them was to create an automated system that would automatically iterate through a conversation on left click & show the correct character sprite / emotion for the currently displayed text rather than them having to manually to create new display text for each one & actions for showing correct animations & hiding the previous ones, etc.

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  • #3, by ArtNovaThursday, 26. January 2017, 14:12 7 years ago
    Thanks again, AFRLme.
    Checked the demo. Looks pretty impressive, interesting hybrid.
    I think, I need to take a closer look at Zeppelin First Person example now smile

    Newbie

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  • #4, by bonesMonday, 24. April 2017, 09:27 7 years ago
     The freelance I did for them was to create an automated system that would automatically iterate through a conversation on left click & show the correct character sprite / emotion for the currently displayed text rather than them having to manually to create new display text for each one & actions for showing correct animations & hiding the previous ones, etc.
    If you wouldn't mind, could you explain the basic approach you used to accomplish that scripting? I have a similar issue with my game, and suggestions are welcome. More specifically, I have an string of dialog texts two or three characters conversing), and sprites for the expressions (like a visiual novel).

    Ideally I'd like to switch out parts of Spine-based characters in Visionaire, but I am unclear whether this is now possible in v5 or not through Lua scripting. Otherwise I will have to settle for a simpler approach by switching sprites.

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  • #5, by afrlmeMonday, 24. April 2017, 12:50 7 years ago
     The freelance I did for them was to create an automated system that would automatically iterate through a conversation on left click & show the correct character sprite / emotion for the currently displayed text rather than them having to manually to create new display text for each one & actions for showing correct animations & hiding the previous ones, etc.
    If you wouldn't mind, could you explain the basic approach you used to accomplish that scripting? I have a similar issue with my game, and suggestions are welcome. More specifically, I have an string of dialog texts two or three characters conversing), and sprites for the expressions (like a visiual novel).

    Ideally I'd like to switch out parts of Spine-based characters in Visionaire, but I am unclear whether this is now possible in v5 or not through Lua scripting. Otherwise I will have to settle for a simpler approach by switching sprites.
    I used a looping called by other action block which contained a narration text if I remember correctly which I linked to the string part of a value I created inside of the editor. Then I created some example Lua tables for the devs to use as reference, which contained various information such as the dialog text, the main character sprite, the emotion animation if there was one, etc. We used all that information to update the string part of the value & to kill previous animations & play the next. We also returned the total of entries in the table at the beginning of a conversation so we could iterate through it by incrementing of decrementing another value - I don't remember exactly what I did off the top of my head - not without digging out the ved - but it worked.

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