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For the past six months, I’ve been working on a BL visual novel Head In The Stars that’s a mix between Steins;Gate and The Three Body Problem (I’ll have a proper synopsis ready next time…).
I’ve got an outline, some concept art, some character designs, and about 30 thousand words of dialogue. Things seem to be going smoothly, except… they’re not.
My messy outline in Obsidian. It just keeps going…
At the moment, I’m using the Ren’Py game engine. I love how lightweight it is and how fast it is to get writing. The online community is also large with hundreds of forum threads asking the very question I wanted to ask and things I haven’t even thought of.
The problem is, as I’ve been writing, I’ve also been testing how to actually make the thing and… I think I need to change game engines.
Early on in the year I played a game called PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo. It’s a mystery horror visual novel set in 80s Japan. Quite spooky, very pretty, highly recommended.
The thing I love the most about this game is it’s cinematography.
In most visual novels characters are drawn straight on without any foreshortening or perspective while the backgrounds are drawn toward a single vanishing point near the centre of the screen. Since the imagined eyeline of the player or camera is roughly at the same level as the character’s eyeline and the horizon line of the backgrounds, this feels immersive enough. However, it can lead to a creeping sense of disconnectedness as the scene goes on.
PARANORMASIGHT does this differently. Here you can see that their sprites are drawn at a 3/4 angle and also include an angle from the back. Then, with a few adjustment to things like pupil position and head variants, they’re able to create a fully embodied scene.
They then use techniques more common to anime and film to visually tell the story, such as establishing shots, shot/reverse shot and even ‘atmospheric shots’. It’s pretty exciting. I’ll probably write a post later that analyses it in more detail.
For now though, this isn’t to say that this way isn’t superior to the usual. For one thing, PARANORMASIGHT is a lot shorter than, say, something like Steins;Gate. But despite that, this way of depicting space rather piqued my curiosity and inspiration followed…
Not a terribly good mockup screenshot (the background is just a portion of a 360 degree photo I found online) but it’s still something.
Which… leads me to my problem: I’m struggling to get the level of variation and customisation I need from Ren’Py.
One obvious solution to this is to just simplify what I want to do. Take out lip-flaps and blinking and try to do something more like a normal visual novel.
Another solution… is the Naninovel plug-in for Unity.
It’s a rather robust visual novel engine that also utilises scripts like Ren’Py does where everything is written out, and I also happen to own it already. For me, the main downside is that it’s in Unity. Unity scares me. It (probably) shouldn’t, but I have to admit that it does. There’s just something about it that always makes me feel like I’m about two seconds away from Unity crashing, my laptop exploding, and me quitting game dev forever.
Okay, that’s a little melodramatic, but it’s in the same ballpark as the truth. Unity is a scary piece of software, up there with DAWs.
… I don’t have a problem, I swear.
All that aside, for now, my plan is to do a little test.
First, I’ll draw up some rough artwork for the beginning of the game, then try to code it up in Naninovel using the dialogue I’ve already written in Ren’Py. If it goes well, then… I suppose I’ll try to convert everything over. Or if it doesn’t, and I revert back into primordial goo, I’ll start working on simplifying my goals and stick to Ren’Py.
Ultimately, I want to balance the desire to get a project finished and the desire to learn skills that will serve me in the future when the scope of my projects inevitably balloon out of control.
