Best Way To Make A Visual Novel

Kamar

Okay, so I'm currently in the process of writing a visual novel (one without choices, Umineko style). The question is, how should I actually make the thing once I'm ready? I am wanting to release it in a sort of serial format, with weekly installments, but doing that using something downloaded and installed seems like a bad idea.

I can probably manage it in Flash, but as an amateur I don't have any clue about what kind of time-saving shortcuts and the like I should be using, so it takes me for-fucking-ever. Should I persevere and learn more Flash, or is there a custom tool or the like I could use to make similarly-embeddable content?

Or should I just use one of the standard tools and have people download something weekly?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Drswords

Flash is a good tool for this sort of thing. You can do a lot with animation and scripting with flash that makes it fairly easy to get your images to come alive with the shakes and bumps traditional in most visual novels, and you can do it with a fair amount of ease once you learn your way around a flash program.

Thats my reccomendation.

If you dont mind my curiosity, what kind of visual novel are you making? ( Genre, etc... )

Kamar

Genre is a blend of sci-fi and fantasy; world/universe-hopping epic with various groups pursuing goals ranging from getting home to taking over the multiverse. Magic works anywhere, because it taps the underpinnings of reality, but complicated tech is unreliable because physics aren't constant between universes.

So you have some super-tech sci-fi worlds and some worlds that are almost medieval fantasy fare. And some that use magitech and trade regularly among themselves as if they were countries, not universes.

Kamar

Not sure whether or not this warrants a separate thread, but since I wouldn't mind further opinions on the original question I think I'll just ask it here:

How should I go about getting music? Are there any sources of music I could use that wouldn't sound lame and generic? How about if I wanted to learn to make my own; what software and resources would it be worth looking into?

Or maybe I should just use generic stuff at first then find someone else to handle it when/if I get some popularity behind me?

Reznik

Kamar wrote: »

Not sure whether or not this warrants a separate thread, but since I wouldn't mind further opinions on the original question I think I'll just ask it here:

How should I go about getting music? Are there any sources of music I could use that wouldn't sound lame and generic? How about if I wanted to learn to make my own; what software and resources would it be worth looking into?

Or maybe I should just use generic stuff at first then find someone else to handle it when/if I get some popularity behind me?

There's a ton of sites out there with creative commons licensed music. Just google it and you should find something. I don't think you can use them if you're planning to make money off the project, but don't quote me on that.

If you want to try making your own and you don't have any instruments and you have a Mac, you could mess around in Garage Band for a bit. I don't know what the options are for PC.

vader111

If you're a novice at digital music production (and on PC), I could recommend Fruity Loops - it would be worth trying the demo, at least, to get a feel for what you might be leaping in to.

However, if you're not attempting to make money off this project, you should probably stick to using royalty-free music; there are tons of sites out there that offer such stuff.

RhalloTonny

Flash technically is an option, and a good one for producing content to the web- however, there's a lot, and I mean a lot of work to do to emulate the look and feel of a visual novel in flash. Text scrolling, bumps, fades, all of those would require you to either abstract the process to objects, or to experience tedium as you manually place each text box for dialog.

Ren'Py is probably what you're looking for- it's full featured, very easy to script for, comes with plenty of tutorials and examples (some that you just have to change the dialog), and all the major elements and animation are already taken care of for you- leaving you to concentrate on the content.

For weekly installments, it might be a bit too heavy for your needs, but I recommend choosing it over flash, if only because flash will present hurdle after hurdle for a visual novel system.

Pixel Blue

A super awesome game you may have heard of called Braid used music licensed throughMagnatune, and that's kinda what it's set up for. Listen, buy licenses. It's completely awesome.