Marketing

[Kris Schnee]

The reason I tried RenPy was that I was thinking, "How can I produce a product I can sell at events like this convention I go to?" There are dealers' rooms where people sell lots of art, but writing gets hardly any attention. This is bad, because I'm a writer. I imagined selling a CD containing a story that has an interactive element... but I'm not sure how practical that is.

From playing my own demo just now I like the story, but it consists mostly of clicking through a lot of text boxes. I suspect players will think they're buying a computer game or comic, then get disappointed because it has little or no art/music and is basically just a text story where you make a few choices. But if I tried selling the story as a paper book(let), that'd be awkward because there are enough variables etc. being recorded that I'd have to stop the story sometimes and write, "If you've gotten 5 points of X, go to page 42." And isn't there a bit of apparent magic in seeing the characters react in different ways on the screen, without you turning to a different page? It seems neat to me to have a character acknowledge that I've done something, and a paper format wouldn't capture that the same way.

Thoughts?

What about, say, using larger text boxes and having several paragraphs on screen at once? Would that make it clearer you're reading a story rather than playing a game, also reducing the number of clicks you have to make? Do people have such an expectation of art that I really need to hire an artist? What about using just background images without character images?

(By the way, my icon here is from Rym, a story setting I really like that's maddeningly incomplete, but set up like an interactive story in that you can wander through the atlas seeing various parts of it.)

[papillon]

Well, to a certain extent, once you've made the sale at the convention they're kinda stuck with it. Which would imply that if you can make the box punchy enough to sell to people, they will have plenty of time to be potentially disappointed by the game and then give it a chance and grow to like it, since they've already bought it...

Selling as a pure-text book shouldn't be completely ruled out, though. Some of us Really Liked choose-your-own-adventures... If you're all about the writing and don't have the resources to come up with graphics and music and all, you don't HAVE to feel like they're necessary.

For that matter, you can make (and sell) text-only computer games. Visit the Interactive Fiction community for a start.

If the 'standard' visual novel format with all its shiny character images isn't right for you, you don't have to use it. Have you looked at Narcissu, for an example of a more minimal graphical design? I'm sure others can point you to some japanese "sound novels" which are strongly focused on the text (if I've got the right name)....