#vnconf

[4noki-vns]

The Art of Asset Reduction: VNConf 2024 Write-Up

This is a write-up for my Visual;Conference 2024 talk on asset reduction: presentation of scenes with reduced art labor.

I will discuss how to reduce production requirements via various methods of asset presentation and staging, walking you through case studies of existing visual novels. This talk will guide you to answer the question: How do I fulfill my project scope without asset bloat?

This is an art talk that assumes you have already scoped down your story and have created a list of scenes that you need. This is not a talk about scoping down your game's story.

You have scenes you need to make. How are you going to make them (and with style)?

Abstraction

Cut-ins

Reduce

Reuse

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I. Abstraction

I start off with abstraction as a reminder that visual novels are a combination of visual and novel (amongst other aspects)

Abstraction

Abstraction is a strong tool for bringing focus to the writing, highlighting ambiguity and setting the mood with colors.

Examples I mentioned in my talk include:

Black screen

Solid colored screen

Sky BG

Of Components

The mood-setting power of abstraction also extends to scenes with characters, especially CGs.

As again, abstraction draws focus to what you choose to emphasize: the characters.

(FLOWERS -Le volume sur ete-)

They are gay. Thank you for coming to my VNConf talk.

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You can similarly abstract characters.

(Lachesis or Atropos)

Consider representing irrelevant characters (e.g., NPCs) as silhouettes. The reader can fill in the details within the shapes themselves.

Silhouettes are especially great for crowd scenes where you want to draw focus to the main characters.

This will be a recurring theme:

What do you really need to draw?

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II. Cut-ins

One common not-quite full screen piece of art you'll see in many visual novels is the cut-in.

The cut-in typically consists of the:

Item/focus

Frame

And is often for topics such as objects or small animals, which may exist in the scene but may not be within the same frame of reference as the background and sprites.

The separate framing informs the players that the item is "separately framed."

(Who is the Red Queen?)

For example, this small bird is not huge and would not be the size of a character's head even had a sprite been on screen.

The Foreground-Backdrop Heuristic

Cut-ins make strong use of what I refer to as the "foreground-backdrop heuristic."

(Shikkoku no Sharnoth)

A general backdrop informs the reader of a broad location or scene (especially if characters are present). Then a more specific foreground (the cut-in) informs the reader of the specifics.

As the foreground cut-in is in a different frame, the pairing of the two helps create a mental model of the space in the reader's mind.

Cut-ins can be used for:

Backgrounds (mix and match foregrounds with a backdrop)

Reduced CGs

Presenting existing assets in a different frame of reference

CG variants

Try tackling your visual presentation in a layered, comic book-esque fashion with cut-ins!

Just be careful about clutter.

Whether you want to go for the layered cut-in style, the 3d stage cinematic style, or a combination of the two, make sure you have a vision before you jump in.

SD CGs

I had to make an obligatory mention of SD "super deformed" CGs in this talk, so here it is in the write up as well.

(Grisaia: Phantom Trigger Vol. 1)

SD, chibi. However you call these, they're great for playful scenes that might require more art than your classic sprite-background combination.

What SD CGs do best is that they:

Fulfill the role of a CG

Are easier to draw than fully rendered non-chibi art

Can be distributed to different artists to reduce artist workloads due to style difference

Just keep in mind that a simplified CG is still a CG and thus may lack reusability.

Consider what scenes really need a CG.

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III. Reduce

Now, consider asking yourself: "Does what a player does not see need to exist?" (mostly applicable for games with opaque UI)

Yet, what you need to draw is what you need to draw. How can you reduce the work in what you need to draw?

One option is:

Palette Limitation

You've heard of gray scale games, but don't forget about other ways of limiting your palette to reduce workload.

Dramatic, mood setting color power

Less rendering work

(Sona-Nyl of the Violet Shadows)

A similar idea can be applied to NPCs for a more detailed take on silhouettes.

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IV. Reuse

Lastly, please remember to be economical and reuse assets as necessary. One of the great joys of cut-in BGs, for example, is reusability.

I had to give an obligatory mention to CG variants in my talk, such as:

(Fatal Twelve)

However, overall, you never know when you'll want to use various components of your art elsewhere such as intermixing CG and sprite art.

Please keep your working layers if possible.

Other reuse examples:

UI (especially in episodic games)

Gameplay (e.g., Kogado's rhythm game)

Consider asking your programmer to work on a framework to reuse, reducing repeated code work.

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Conclusions

All in all, you can make your game.

And it doesn't need to be hellish on your budget or timeline.

If you take anything away from this talk, let it be to:

Prioritize reusable assets

Maintain aesthetic; avoid clutter

Display important scenes

Do not scope up; aim for a set goal

A scene can be presented in many stylish ways, some of which will suit your workflow better than others.

So, go on. Make your game!

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Interested in my works? Find me on itch:

And check out my newsletter:

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VNConf 2023 Talk Write-up:

[sakevisual]

Questions Needed!

Heyo fellow game devs! Have you ever wanted to know more about the business side of working with voice actors? Hiring, payment, contracts, finding, etc? I'm doing a talk about that at VNConf in January!

If you have any specific questions, feel free to drop them here. Would love to make sure I cover the stuff you're most interested in.

[majorprojectalex]

Forefront Post: Visual Novel Con

I have been following the youtube channel Visual Novel Design, as he gives really helpful advice on how to create visual novels, and through him I hound out that there is a conference that happens every year centred around visual novels, VNConf. I follow their channel and they had a bunch of talks given by professional visual novel developers.

Since I have been really enjoying creating a game I have been thinking about it, and I would really like to keep making my own games like that on the side after Uni is over too, so I really wanted to see what they had to say about being a visual novel developer.

In this talk shibalist/ Toast talks about being a solo dev:

VNConf 2023 - 14 - Toast - So You Want to be a Solo Dev - YouTube

While I would like to collaborate with people on some games I also like the idea of developing some myself so this was very useful. During the talk, Toast explained that being a solo dev comes with a lot of advantages and disadvantages. The advantages include:

Having more creative freedom. in my small experience developing the Detective Amphibian Demo, this has been true, and something that I really appreciated it.

There is less social pressure, which can also be a con. In my case while I did have less social pressure than I would working in a group, I still had a lot of external pressures since tis was a university assignment. So I'm not really certain if I will be able to keep myself accountable while developing a game if I am not in an educational environment where those pressures exist, so this is something I should watch out for.

You learn a lot of new things that you wouldn't otherwise. This has certainly been true for me. If I was working with in a group someone else would have taken charge of the programming, and potentially the UI design, both of which I ended up really enjoying. So I am very grateful that I had the chance to learn those skills.

You can work however you like. This was only partially true for me. I definitely had a lot more freedom to work in a way that felt more natural to me than whenever I've had to work in a group, but I also had some restrictions/ obligations set by my planning folder and the major project brief. While some of those restrictions and obligations did feel like they hindered me, others like having to follow the planning folder ultimately really helped me stay on task, even if the felt annoying at the time. So I think I should keep that in mind in the future when working on my own projects

The disadvantages included:

Having less time, as you can’t do tasks in parallel with each other, since you are working on everything. This is something that I encountered and kind of blocked me creatively.

there will be a trade-off in quality. Which is something that knowing myself might be a bit hard to accept, so I will have to keep it in mind

You have to do everything.

The work will stall a lot more and a lot more easily. This is also something I had trouble with. There were a lot of things that got me stuck creatively, and since there were no other people working with me everything would kind of come to a halt, wich felt really demotivating and made it hard to push through.

They also included some questions to ask yourself when making a game, like what you need to build it, how you will get it, how much time it will take, ect. which felt really reminiscent of the planning folder.

They also mentioned that being a solo Dev doesn't necessarily mean you have to do everything yourself, you can download pre-made assets, or existing music to make your life easier. I know that in my case I deffinetly want to leave the music to someone else.

They also mentioned that areas to watch out for are, overscoping, underestimating the difficulty of something and isolation, all of wich I experienced to various degreed throughout the project and should take steps to avoid in the future.

All of these issues caused me to burn out quite often, so I found this talk by Maxi Molin very useful.

(Visual;Conference 2021) 04 - Maxi Molina - Avoiding burnout as a solo dev! - YouTube

The talk was about avoiding burnout as a solo dev. One of the first things the advised was to question if solo dev is right for you.

For me I think it is, at least as something I do on the side. While I did get burnt out a lot, I also felt a great sense of satisfaction in varios stages of the project, so it is something that I want to keep doing. I think it was worth it even with the burnout, but that doesn't mean I don't want to avoid it happening in the future.

They also talked about some of the pros and cons, and a lot of them where the same as Toast's, but there were some different ones that I hadn't considered. One of the pros was that you can have full ownership of what you do, which is something that I hadn't really stopped to appreciate. The new cons were that, you don't really have emotional support from a team, and that it becomes really difficult to estimate time. For the first point I think getting emotional support is not always the case, as it depends on who you are working with, but I also hadn't considered that being a solo dev means you are definitely not getting any of it. So, I think I should start talking to people around me more about what I am doing in order to avoid feeling isolated. For the second point, that was deffinetly true for me I think, and I need to keep that in mind and start overestimating how much time things will take me more.

Some of the advice that they gave for avoiding burnout was:

Finding a message that you want to convey, and keep that in mind to stay motivated ad remember why you need your game to be made. Honestly I really struggle with that one, because while I can see why it would be helpful and needed, whenever I try to do that it ends up feeling shoehorned and like im taking myself too seriously, so I end up feeling more demotivated. I think that's something that I have to sort out about myself.

Keeping the project's scope in mind. I generaly struggle with that type of thing as I end up being too ambissious sometimes, (which is something that happened during the major project too) so I really have to make sure I stick with my initial goals and stay realistic.

I need to keep a good pace instad of rellying on passion. This is something that I really need to keep in mind because throughout the project I would get these spikes in excitement and productivity and then burn out creating a bit of a vicious cycle.

Finaly i should try spotting what patterns demotivate me.

Overall these talks were really insightful about the challenges of being a solo game at the moment, and I should really keep what I learned in mind in the future if I want to pursue making games (or any other type of solo project)

Bibliography

(Visual;Conference 2021) 04 - Maxi Molina - Avoiding burnout as a solo dev! (2021). YouTube. 24 January. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RadK66-eWDM&ab_channel=Visual%3BConference (Accessed: 23 August 2023).

VNConf 2023 - 14 - Toast - So You Want to be a Solo Dev (2023). YouTube. 30 January. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l-Yht1UjWg&ab_channel=Visual%3BConference (Accessed: 23 August 2023).

[transcendersmedia]

Fictional relationships feel real

I’ve been writing a few posts now about the relationships in Knife Sisters and what we learned from making that game, as well as from the comments we received (here and here). This post is about one of the most important findings we’ve done when it comes to relation games.

Players invest themselves when playing

Knife Sisters was the first game I made about relationships. I've written novels, but as you might know, there are big differences between games and novels… one of the most prominent being that people who play games and retell what happened, talk about themselves in first person. That’s something I’ve never experienced when it comes to novels. It seems like the player identifies more closely with the player character than what readers do with the main character in a novel. That isn’t to say that readers don’t engage deeply with the characters in novels, they definitely do - I just think they do it in another way.

Players who played Knife Sisters tend to say things like “I dated Vicki”, or “I went to the forest to find a skull”… and by that, in a way, they’re stating that they are in fact the main character Leo – because they’re the ones making that character’s decisions. The one that brought this phenomenon to my attention was Christine Love in her fantastic talk Narrative Techniques in Ladykiller in a Bind at VNConf in 2017. And after hearing about it, I’ve paid attention to this habit in myself, and yes, I do it too!

From that viewpoint it also gets pretty easy to see something that I’m not sure I was fully aware of when I started working on Knife Sisters, and that I will elaborate on below.

Fictional relationships feel real and should be treated as such

Players invest themselves when playing, and the decisions they make, as well as what happens in the in-game relationships, needs to align somewhat with the player’s wishes for that outcome – otherwise it might feel very out of tune for them. The relationships in a game need to be handled with care, just like ‘real’ relationships.

The break-ups

From my own experiences of playing games, I have two examples, both from the same game, an otome game called Amnesia (the English release is called Amnesia:Memories) by Idea Factory & Otomate. (Note that there will be spoilers ahead so if you’re not up for that, you can stop reading here.)

In Amnesia you play a girl with memory loss. There are four parallel worlds which you as a player can enter and explore, to try to find out what has really happened. In each world, one out of four guys is the protagonist’s boyfriend… or are they really? She can’t be entirely sure that the guy presenting as her boyfriend was actually that in her previous life, before she lost her memories.

One of the boyfriends is Ikki, a very popular person who even has his own fan club. As the game progresses, the heroine feels quite unsure of her feelings and what she is to him. But me and Ikki (now I’m doing it) went on nice dates – and when I got to the first ending in that route, it was one where Ikki broke up with me. Even though I shared the heroine’s feelings of doubt about the sincerity of this person, I actually felt heartbroken. I still wanted the relationship to succeed – and I especially didn’t want him to break up with me!

Another relationship I had in Amnesia was with Toma. ​​Toma is a very jealous and “protective” person, and his route takes quite a strange turn, when he locks the heroine up in a cage to keep track of her. I detested Toma, and when I reached the so-called good ending – where the heroine chooses to stay with him and forgive his actions, I couldn’t feel accomplished at all. I really wanted a way to tell him that what he had done wasn’t okay in any way – and for sure I wanted the chance to break up with him (and more too).

I think those two examples from the same game are very different, even though both are about things that happened in the game that made me feel bad. I could accept that I had gotten a (mildly) bad ending with Ikki, and that I could replay his route and try to get the romance ending, where he wouldn’t break up with me. But I found it hard to stomach that I had to accept Toma’s actions toward myself, which I thought were repulsive, without getting the chance to object to it. In the first case, I think the game is fine in leaving me with my feelings of regret for being dumped, but in the second case, I absolutely think the devs should have added the possibility to say “thanks, but no thanks”. I think it would have been better to give the player the opportunity to set boundaries in this situation.

(I’ve written another lengthy post full of spoilers about this game and its anime adaptation, if anyone’s interested!)

If fictional relationships feel real, how does that affect game design?

Accepting that fictional relationships feel real, and that players might object to going against their own will, can definitely affect the way we design games. We need to be mindful of how we utilize characters and relationships in games and what options we give to players. But as game developers, and especially indie devs, we also have constraints. Every new character and every route with different options adds to the game’s size – and therefore to the budget and development time. So there needs to be a balance between the options given and the scope of the game. This can lead to tricky design challenges when deciding which characters are in the game and how the player can affect the relationships with them. I’ll continue the discussion about relationships and gameplay in my next post. 

Have you played any games in which you objected to relationship outcomes?

[bunnyadvocate]

Changes in VN Screen Resolutions

Tracking the default screen resolutions of new VNs releases shows how long it’s taken for HD resolutions to reach the VN mainstream. It wasn’t until 2014 that the majority of VNs being released were widescreen, which is also the year Japan released the first 4k televisions.

This is just a teaser for my VNConf18 presentation on trends in the VN market this weekend, which will have an accompanying post I’ll put up here.

[ertalgames]

The Visual Novel con starts in 5 hours! *excited as a puppy*

Last year was lots of fun, so I’m really looking forward to this one!

[gaybirdwrites]

VNconf was fun, but my ADHD brain was not ready for the sitting-and-listening-all-day an online conference requires. Learned a lot, but also zoned out a ton and took way fewer notes than intended.

[englishvisualnovels]

The Drastik Measure News Room – Visual;Conference Interview with Agilis and VNConf Presenters

It’s been about two weeks since the first western visual novel conference, Visual;Conference, has happened. During the con, many amazing talks and great connections were made between fellow devs and attendees. Afterwards, I wanted to talk with attendees, presenters, and the organizer about thoughts after the con. This is the interview done, finally written and compiled, for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

Read the full interview here

For those who missed Visual;Conference, a playlist containing full recordings of all of the event’s presentations can be found on Youtube.

[storydevs]

Forbidden Gay Birds & 300+ Reserved Handles!

It’s update time! Since it’s been a long time I guess I’ll make this a correspondingly long update. Here’s an overview of the things I’ll cover:

Visual;Conference (VNConf) recap

About page design & content update

It’s not a bird

Modal/dialogue windows restored + improved

Asset Store / Talent Database restrictions

Current goals

300+ Reserved Handles

Excuses

Visual;Conference!

Along with a bunch of others, I recently spoke at Visual;Conference. My talk was an adaption of this post I wrote about logo design, with a few changes here and there. And I think it went okay! You’ll be able to see all the talks on YouTube by February, along with links to slides. I’ll let you know once they’re up.

The conference began at 3am in my timezone, so I ended up having to leave for sleep before it ended. As a result most of my memory is skewed toward the first half of the event.

I enjoyed Kuiper’s talk about Route 59′s methods in securing grant money. One key point I remember from it included the need to tailor your pitch according to your audience (e.g., an arts body will be convinced by different pitches than financial investors). Another point was to avoid describing yourself (e.g., ”I’m motivated”) and instead make your audience come to that conclusion but telling them all the things you’ve done — a compliment you pay yourself isn’t worth anything.

I also enjoyed Christine’s talk about the narrative design of Ladykiller. She discussed the idea of design narrative with choices as a base unit; i.e., designing the visual novel around its choices and their regularity. Another interesting point was her insistence on having a user interface designed early on so that you know what the audience is will be experiencing as you write.

So overall it was fun and interesting. It’d be nice if there were another conference that was shorter, maybe 3 - 4 hours long but with talks that are around 40 minutes to an hour in length rather than 20 minutes max. I probably would’ve given a different talk if I’d had more time. Regardless Randy/Agilis did a great job organising VNconf.

About Page Design & Content Update

There’s been a few design changes to the about page. First is the text-alignment alternating from left to right. Next, is the text being broken up by rows of graphics. The first contains social media icons that are animated (more on that in a bit!), and the second ... contains nothing. It’ll contain an image of people “storying”, whatever that looks like — I may commission an artist for that at some point.

(Larger version of above image here.)

The text itself has undergone changes. The first paragraph is largely the same, but I’ve replaced subsequent paragraphs that were previously about the talent database and its advantages. I felt those original points were unnecessarily self-congratulatory. If someone is already on the site you shouldn’t need to tell them how great the search is — they should be using it and coming to that conclusion themselves. So the about page now links to it and the home page will too.

The first paragraph is followed by the row of animated social media icons. Previously the social media stuff was just a bullet point list. Now they look like this in action:

The next two paragraphs are kinda stubs right now — starting points to flesh out later. The second paragraph, “StoryDevs Is Partisan”, is concerning the fact that StoryDevs isn’t a “neutral” place, and that people harmful to the community, whether their harm was intended or not, will be removed. This paragraph still needs reworking, I think. I’d like to focus more on what we do stand for rather than what we don’t.

The last paragraph, “Code Of Conduct”, isn’t... exactly a code of conduct per se, but it is about communicating with others on the site. I feel a culture where criticism is present and highly visible is essential, and something that needs to be fought for — when I hear people questioning whether criticism should even be on a development site or whether critics have a “real job” (things I’ve actually seen debated on VN dev/enthusiast sites) that’s depressing. My mind throws that in the same category as “we don’t need science”. Art forms stagnate without critical thought and discussion. We need proper guidelines and examples for criticism on the site to help cultivate an honest, knowledgeable, and friendly community.

I also made a loading animation that shows when switching pages / modes / modals:

The Titular Bird

I used both Twitter’s and Tumblr’s media kits to make my own social media buttons above. Most companies have media kits available with high res versions of their logos and sometimes they offer guidelines on how to use said logos — e.g., minimum amount of white-space to use around their graphics so that they look nice, etc. Twitter’s guidelines are especially funny though; here’s an excerpt (larger pic here):

Here Twitter goes into a bizarre amount of detail of what not to do, with such jewels as:

Do not use metaphorically to suggest a bird. It’s not a bird, it’s a symbol of Twitter

The document is absurd in its suggestion that basically any modification is a misuse. I took it as a challenge to disobey as many of these suggestions as I could. The below illustration of a gay bir- uh, I mean, symbol of Twitter is actually what gave me the idea for the animation I shared above:

Anyway, none of that is really related to StoryDevs. Onward!

Modal/Dialog Windows Restored + Improved

These are finally back in working order with no small amount of pain. They’re very similar to before: some links will bring up these dialog windows (I call them modals — tomayto tomahto) so that you don’t lose your place on the site when you do stuff like login or sign up to the mailing list.

There’s few cosmetic changes: the button to close the window is now square to be consistent with the upper-right buttons in the search groups. The status message in the bottom-left is now coloured yellow-ish and italicised to draw more attention to itself. StoryDevs has a pretty decent email confirmation rate but a small percentage of people forget to confirm their address so this is my attempt to really catch their eye — the yellow stands out against the greyscale and as a colour it’s often associated with caution or warnings.

Additionally, as you can see above things now neatly tuck under each other when previously they’d just clip over the edge of the page. There’s also now a scrollbar for when the modal gets too tall. Surprisingly time-consuming to implement due to... CSS being CSS. There’s also some special-case code just from Microsoft’s two precious ickle little widdle browsies who cwan’t figwure out when to hwide the scwollbar :( So I just manually force them to!

As you can see bottom just sort of... clips the content. It’d be nice if it faded out more gently. I did implement such a fade out with an arrow pointing down but it involved a lot of extra code due to how the scrollbars work and it didn’t feel good. So after working on it for the better part of a day I ended up scraping it. Pretty frustrating. I guess it’s relatively rare for the scrollbar to be present so I’m leaving it as-is for now.

Asset Store / Talent Database Restrictions

Put briefly, I’ve greyed out some options on the talent database and asset store to make it clear they’re not accessible. I want people to be able to see all the planned options having options that don’t work is bad. It confuses people and if they’re not aware that the site is under development they may judge the site based on this.

The initial version of the site will only have certain types of profiles available, thus you’ll only be able to search for certain types of roles at first.

Current Goal

My main goal at the moment is have a demo of StoryDevs I feel confident about, that stands-alone, and doesn’t need a whole bunch of caveats attached. I haven’t updated the www site for a long time because it works, despite looking far less impressive. It’s not good to direct people to a site that may be flashy but has options that don’t actually work.

So I’m preparing to update the www site and at least replicate its functionality, and also show off some of the new additions. Once I have an updated demo I’ll feel much better about marketing the site as I work. I’m fine with it not being perfect, but there needs to be a nice-looking demo that actually works. Mobile support is also big part of this. The site absolutely cannot be broken on mobile. I’m sick of it being an embarrassment on handheld devices.

Anyway, I suppose that may be an underwhelming goal to some. It’s basically “make the current version of the site... but better”.

300+ Reserved Handles

Uh, yeah! What it says on the tin! There was a decent boost in handle reservations after my VNconf talk that pushed us right over 300. I’m surprised there’s even this many people interested so far but glad nonetheless. So thank you to everyone for the support so far. It’s good to know that there’s other people who want this as much as I do :)

(Oh, and the beta site is...!!! Not updated... sorry. I wanted to let people play around with the new designs even if they don’t fully work but the code is only partially written in places so it’s probably possible to crash the site with certain actions! I just didn’t want to leave the update any longer. So next time I’ll have to have that ready! For now pictures will have to do :( This is another sentence that exists purely to prevent my sad face from being next to the closing parenthesis.)

StoryDevs is a place for developers of visual novels, interactive fiction, and story-oriented games to find each other and collaborate. The site is under development, but handle reservations are open: www.storydevs.com/reserve

Website: www.storydevs.com Twitter: storydevs Email: support@storydevs.com

[froggyplays]

So excited for Visual conference 2018!

[4noki-vns]

Polishing your Release: the Little Features that Could

This is a write-up for my Visual;Conference 2023 talk on polish: UX and accessibility.

I will discuss quality-of-life features and accessible design with engine-agnostic tips for implementation, walking you through case studies of existing visual novels.

This talk will guide you to answer the question: How do I give my players an improved user experience?

To create a polished visual novel is to deliver your game with both style and usability.

This talk focused on the aspect of usability and accessibility in your visual novel. How can you give your players a better user experience in terms of the following?

Core Visual Novel Experience

Accessibility

Extra QoL Features

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I. Core Visual Novel Experience

You want your player to be able to read your narrative as conveniently for them as possible. Interactive components in your game application should mostly be there to enhance the player experience whether it is part of your narrative or there to give players more control.

I briefly touched on some common components/screens found in just about every visual novel.

Quick Menu

Be easy to click and inobtrusive

Be easy to understand

Convince your players that it actually works by providing feedback to button clicks

Text based quick menus are easy to understand, but take up lots of space. Icon based quick menus can be very abstract (what do the icons mean even if seemingly "obvious?")

You may want to consider a combination of both, but if using icon based quick menus, be sure to clarify the icons such as via tooltips.

Provide feedback when the quick menu items are clicked. Most actions just bring up a screen (obvious feedback). Skip will cause rapid movement of text on screen (easy). Auto is more subtle.

What can you do?

Change the auto button to an active state vs. idle state on press

Hide the CTC and/or quick menu on auto

Change the CTC to an "auto-mode activated" CTC

Etc.

History

Provide long enough history to backread

Provide utilities (e.g., if voice acting in game, allow voice replay)

Remember that rollback and history are two different things

Save/Load

Provide context of when and where

Provide sufficient slots for all choices without requiring player overwrite (visual novel players SAVE EVERY CHOICE)

Consider feature to indicate newest save, file deletion button, save file locking

To provide context, have a visual and timestamp, but also try providing chapter names or scene descriptions.

Configs

Provide reasonable default settings (e.g., audio at 70%)

Avoid overwhelming users by categorizing options and providing reasonable support (e.g., slider vs radio)

Provide previews

Single pagers and multi-pagers are both good. Make it easy for the player to get in, change the settings to their preferred values, and get back to the game.

Additional recommendations:

CTC icons

System sound

Splash screens (especially first time setting initializations)

-

II. Accessibility

Stating the obvious: start with good design :)

Make accessibility features easily accessed and support them:

Put it into your configs screen even if it's built in if you want to support it

Test and check that it works correctly (e.g., self voicing pronunciation, text size overflow)

Provide a reasonable number of options per feature. Whatever options you explicitly provide, you should actually be supporting them.

No one’s coming after you if the built in Ren’Py accessibility toggles overflow your textbox, but it sure will be a problem if the font sizes you’re explicitly providing are broken because that’s just a bug.

Recommended accessibility features: (italics talked about in presentation explicitly)

Self voicing

Image descriptions

Text options

Photosensitivity

Screenshake

Audio captions

Graphic images filter

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III. Extra QoL Features

Not all features are great for all games, but some quality of life features can be very useful depending on your game. Therefore, you should know your game to know how to make the player experience better.

What's the genre?

How long is it?

What's the branching structure (if any) like?

Gameplay?

In this section, I briefly tackled exploring Aoishiro (highly recommend this game, by the way) and how some of its quality of life features are useful due to the type of game it is.

Genre?

occult fantasy, Japanese mythology

Having a glossary (with "new" indicator and alphabetization to make it usable) is very useful in game genres with lots of terms!

Length?

30+ hours (according to vndb. I took way longer, so pretty long)

Fourth item down in the first box is a togglable alarm for when skip ends! (Vibration mode, sound mode, both, or silent) Longer visual novels with large trunk portions of shared text that might get new unlocked text often need lots of skipping.

Branching?

56 endings, route unlocking mechanics

Aoishiro provides a spoiler option that lets you "mark unread content as read," unlocking content that you may not have actually been able to play through, whether it's due to difficulty or just laziness.

(This is also useful for remasters or sequels that contain previous game content but are not backward compatible save file wise.)

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Conclusions

Make life more convenient for your players by keeping in mind UX heuristics such as:

Providing feedback & status

Error prevention & control

Recognition over recall

Consistency & standards

To polish your release, you want to make its features usable, accessible, and useful for your players!

Make baseline features with usability and accessibility.

Add additional QoL features depending on your game.

I hope this talk helps you make your visual novel a better experience for your players!

[sakevisual]

In case you missed my talk at VNConf this year, here’s the entire thing summed up on one slide.

[visual-novel-interfaces]

Hi everyone. As always with exciting things happening, I thought I’d let you know about Visual;Conference 2017. It’s a day-long online conference run over the course of January 14th (US time), organised and hosted by Randy “Agilis” Au, Project Manager and translator for Sekai Project.

The conference hosts 30 speakers who will share their experiences with visual novel creation, translation, publishing and everything in between. While not all speakers have been revealed at the moment, I will make an educated guess and say that there might be a talk on UI design, past Jake Bowkett’s logo design talk.

The event is paid (with ticket discounts until Dec 31st), so if you’re interested, keep an eye on the VNconf schedule and Twitter for news as it happens.

[4noki-vns]

Happy New Year 2024

It’s hard to imagine that 2024 is already upon us. Thank you for all the support! I’ve had the chance to work with lots of amazing people again this year.

Let’s take a look back on 2023.

2023 Recap

In January, I gave a talk at Visual;Conference: Polishing your Release: the Little Features that Could.

In June, I released a short demo of a story I’ve been wanting to write for a while. While Consummation isn’t quite next up on my list of games to make, I hope you enjoyed a sneak peek at its characters and world!

In July, we released an updated version of our horror-mystery visual novel Lachesis or Atropos on Steam with the help of folks at Quill Yuri. Thank you for the hard work, everyone!

Check it out at

At the end of September, we released our survival-horror visual novel, The Final Prize is Soup, for Spooktober VN Jam. Amazingly, it won second place!

Jajajan!

A fulfilling year! (*¯︶¯*)

Upcoming

As for what’s upcoming in January…

I’ll be speaking again at Visual;Conference this year! The topic will be: The Art of Asset Reduction: Make More With Less

I will discuss how to reduce production requirements via the use of asset staging, recycled frameworks, and online resources, walking you through case studies of existing visual novels. This talk will guide you to answer the question: How do I fulfill my project scope without asset bloat?

Find out more at https://vnconf.com/

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Happy New Year!

shino

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[4noki-vns]

Releasing 8+ games (ft. game jams) and when to take a break

This is a write-up for my Visual;Conference 2022 talk on game jams.

I will discuss how game jams made me a better developer, walking you through my experiences as director, co-director, and direct creative roles in jam games across two years before I put a moratorium on jams. This talk will guide you to answer the question: Should you participate in game jams? (Spoiler: yes, conditionally)

In the talk, I discussed 3 main topics:

How to Game Jam

Lessons Learned

Should you participate in game jams?

How to Game Jam

The game jam timeline typically consists of four components:

Planning

Recruitment

Development

Release

There may be some overlap between the first three, but let's go in order.

Planning

Identify your premise

Identify your scope

Create references (outline, visual references)

Before you can bring a game to life with your team (or solo), you have to put the idea on the table.

Visual references are especially important if you're working with other artists. They reduce:

Communication difficulties (does the character look like this or that?)

Schedule delays (how can they draw if they don't know what to?)

Future issues (how do you draw this again...?)

Recruitment

Have your idea set before you recruit. When making your recruitment pitch, you'll want to address most if not all of the following:

Who are you? What are you doing?

Premise of the game

Scope of the game

Requested roles

Proof of concept

Here's an example I gave in my presentation:

You might not always have everything, but people won't get recruited if they don't know you're recruiting their role.

Once you've assembled the team, be sure you verify how they want to be attributed in the credits.

If you can't find a role, remember that CC assets exist!

Organizing Your Team

I recommend having a home base such as a Discord server (communication), shared Google Drive folder (assets), and GitHub repo (code version control).

Make sure folks know project information that isn't in your recruitment pitch such as:

File types (.ogg for music?)

Engine (Ren'Py?)

Asset specs (1080p?)

Compensation (if any)

Deadlines

Communication is key in avoiding delays. Start communication before the jam.

Development

Ideally, your planning has prepared you for the development process, and you don't need to do anything but make the game during the jam.

Ideal is rare, issues popping up here and there. Some common ones include:

Q. What if a teammate falls through?

Don't panic! If you're the teammate, remember that your team lead will appreciate upfront communication.

If you're the team lead, there's a number of options to take. Cut scope in that teammate's component, take on the task yourself, try to recruit a new teammate, and or grab some asset packs.

Q. What if we can't finish on time?

A jam is a jam. Remember the trusty old scope knife. In order to avoid having to cut scope from your game, do your planning well.

Release

Jams will give you a visibility boost, but remember to market regardless.

Plan to submit a few days before the jam ends. This gives your team leeway in case delays occur.

I believe in you!

Lessons from 8 Jams

There are 3 types of roles (a bit of a simplification) you can take on in a production regardless of your creative specialization:

Team lead

Solo developer

Contributor

Each comes with pros and cons. Jams are a great way to figure out what you like to do, and what your preferred team dynamic is.

Here's some questions that might help you:

How much creative control do you want?

How do you like to communicate?

Thus with these tips for jamming in mind, we ask and answer the key question:

Should you participate in game jams?

Yes, conditionally.

There are pros and cons to game jams.

But overall, jams are a great way to dip your feet into making visual novels. Make great friends and great games.

If you're aiming for a larger production, especially one with money involved, remember that you don't need to join every jam. Why not focus on your ongoing project first?

_:(´ཀ`」 ∠):_ That's advice I need to take myself...

After note

If you're interested in learning more via case studies, please feel free to check out the following:

Postmortem for NaNoRenO 2021

Postmortem: Spooktober Visual Novel Jam (2022)

[4noki-vns]

Happy New Year! To get these posts straight to your inbox when they come out, do subscribe to my newsletter!

Happy New Year 2023

Looking back on 2022: Who is the Red Queen Steam release, Lachesis or Atropos, and more!

As the world rolls into 2023, I’d like to look back on everything we’ve accomplished in the year 2022 and thank everyone who was part of it.

Who is the Red Queen? Steam Release

Alice, Alice, the Red Queen is missing. The queen has been dismembered and Alice must find all her pieces.

In August, with the help of the Bellhouse, we were able to publish an updated version of Who is the Red Queen? on Steam. The updated release includes new CGs, tracks, a LatAm Spanish translation, and more!

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Lachesis ∨ Atropos Release

This world is woven of strings, of fate and of hate. What do you see, detective?

At the end of September, we released a horror-mystery, yuri visual novel Lachesis ∨ Atropos. Coming out to over 45k words and 4 major endings, LoA is our biggest game yet!

The game was shortlisted for the Spooktober 4th Annual Visual Novel Jam.

Postmortem || Fun Facts

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Other

In addition to the two major releases…

In January, I presented a talk on game jams at VNConf 2022—write up available here.

In February, Moon Archer Shooting Stars received a Chinese translation with the help of Yuan.

Thank you to everyone for the wonderful year, and let’s have an even more wonderful 2023 together!

This upcoming year, I will be working on an unannounced project and collaborations with Quill Yuri, Quill Studio’s yuri branch. Please follow me on Tumblr and Twitter for updates!

Happy New Year (*´▽`*)

shino

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