So, as some of you might know, I am a big big fan of visual novel-type “games” in which you read a story that is accompanied by mostly static drawn characters on screen, background music, and lush backgrounds. I’ve been interested in making one of my own (using Flash) for awhile, but I’ve held off mostly because I couldn’t imagine myself producing all the background landscapes (I don’t mind doing the characters or the script or the game engine, actually, and of course I love composing).
However, as of yesterday, I’ve realized that all of a sudden, I seem to have acquired a (brain) program that allows me to generate scenes. I tested it out on the restaurant in Act II Scene 2 of “Mistaken” and it generated a pretty nice restaurant that I like quite a bit. I can sketch it out later (I have a pencil sketch). I’m not sure how I came to acquire this renderer, but it’s quite cool (except it takes near-80% of brainpower as it is generating images).
The features of this program are:
– instantaneous addition of an item
– very flexible rotation of texturing
– variable lighting from multiple sources
– sim-characters to roam around
– full 3D rotation (but this can cause headaches)
The main problems are:
– risk of losing an item if RAM requirements for the image get too high
– might get run over by a car if in use while crossing streets
Anyway, so now I can make my own visual novel! I’m gonna try thinking up a good plot now ^^. It had better involve a lot of girls, because I still don’t like drawing guys. Ha! Don’t worry, girls … I’ll still have male characters, and I’ll make them as attractive as possible.
I probably have to produce ~6 expressions/character (happy, angry, neutral, scared, doing activity, and uber-moe), plus a few costume changes. I need to be careful to program this well so that I can centrally set every single thing very easily (position of characters, which expression they wear, what text is on the screen).
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