Developing a visual novel engine

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Aediono
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Developing a visual novel engine

#1 Post by Aediono »

Bear with me, I'm posting from my phone. I'm currently programming a visual novel engine, designed to be as flexible as popular. Progress is slow, I just finished the basics of text boxes. Despite my fondness for VNs, I have no idea what people want in such a tool. Please offer ideas. For now, for simplicitys sake, games can only be exported to PC. My ultimate goal is to ease the porting of games, and allow extremely fast development without programming experience.

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Re: Developing a visual novel engine

#2 Post by Blue Lemma »

Small tip: You might also try browsing the forums and asking here: http://www.visualnovelty.com/

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Re: Developing a visual novel engine

#3 Post by papillon »

Unless you have _specific key features_ in mind that aren't already available in the existing VN engines, this doesn't sound like a great idea. Making a new engine from scratch and getting it to be as robust as tools with a long development history is not easy; reinventing the wheel tends to lead to people giving up in despair when they realise nobody actually wants their new wheel. :) (Although it doesn't stop them trying. Last I looked, every year the interactive fiction competition would have one or two people who'd insisted on trying to build their own engine from scratch... and always placed badly.)

The most important feature that would get people interested in such a project would be if you were cross-platform from the beginning to things like handhelds, iphones, ipads, kindles, etc, because that's something that's currently hard to get - and since you're ruling that out, I'm not sure what else you'd have to offer.

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Re: Developing a visual novel engine

#4 Post by Aediono »

I could make it work on about any platform by exporting to javascript, but that'd increase development time and limit what can be done. Time to learn HTML5, methinks.

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Re: Developing a visual novel engine

#5 Post by LateWhiteRabbit »

What makes your engine stand out? What do you plan as features that current engines lack? From what I can see, you aren't offering anything that Ren'Py does not already do. It can be quickly used without programming experience and games can be automatically ported to PC, Mac, Linux, and it has Android support. I'm not meaning to be discouraging, but like Papillon said, it sounds like you're reinventing the wheel.
Last edited by LateWhiteRabbit on Tue Mar 06, 2012 7:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Developing a visual novel engine

#6 Post by Fawn »

I wonder why so many programmers come to our forums to say they're going to make a "new" vn engine... What's the point, really? Both Ren'py and Novelty offer great vn making solutions that are easy to use. Their developers work their butts off for years to get where they are now; it's not some walk in the park that you make a great engine and everyone uses it...

If someone really wants to make something cool, please please PLEEAASE make a free engine that can easily create JRPG-style VNs like Eternal Will's games: http://youtu.be/awcgHudP8T4 with very little coding and lots of customization; or even an add-on to ren'py that could pull that off with easy coding... I would use the sh*t out of that engine. (but, it's probably an impossible dream...) Or, make a free video editing program that's specifically for VN ops (yet another impossible dream...)

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Re: Developing a visual novel engine

#7 Post by SusanTheCat »

Fawn wrote:I wonder why so many programmers come to our forums to say they're going to make a "new" vn engine...
I think it is a programmer thing.

Back when I was young and energetic, I was always trying to rediscover the wheel.

Now I'm old and lazy and am perfectly willing to use pre-existing libraries.

That doesn't stop be from trying to find the ultimate software for fiction writing. Maybe I'll have to write my own. :)

On to the original question.

I don't think there is such a thing as "extremely fast development without programming experience". I have tried several HTML templating systems which turn out to be just as complicated as HTML. The trick is that maybe the new templating system works the way the user thinks.

For example:
I'm a code head. I program HTML using a text editor. I have tried fancy HTML editors, but they annoy me because I can't see the code.
This is totally me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vAnuBtyEYE
I like Ren'py because I can see the code and get my hands dirty. Ren'py does not stand in my way.

Other people are more visual and would prefer something like Novelty which is graphically based.

So, what is it about your engine that is going to make it stand out? What is it about the current engines that you don't think is working.

Maybe you are picturing a wizard that takes you step by step through the process by asking the author questions.

Maybe you are thinking of something that was more drag and drop different components together.

What is it that you can offer that doesn't currently exist?

Susan
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Re: Developing a visual novel engine

#8 Post by mugenjohncel »

I don't know how much progress have you done in your work so far but same comment as the previous people before me...

May I suggest something far-fetched...

Instead of working on another VN engine... may I suggest a sort of GUI shell specifically catered to the visual aspect of VN creation that will wrap around Renpy... based on experience, the hardest thing to overcome in renpy is the Graphical GUI...specifically how to make your beautiful graphics work with Renpy... experienced users will have no problem with this but those that are new to Renpy or people that are not gifted in the art of scripting in Renpy could really use something like this...

I have a rough idea how this will work... you'll have this beautiful GUI Editor where you import your Graphical elements for your GUI and give them attributes and behaviors, hover in - hover out mouse behavior... how will it behave and what and where it will go once clicked and many more and once done... the GUI Editor will then generate a notepad containing a renpified script of the things you did in the GUI Editor (preferably using Renpy Screens... ) which you will copy pasta to Renpy...

"POOF" (Disappears)

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Re: Developing a visual novel engine

#9 Post by SusanTheCat »

I just ran accross this paper:
http://www.wolldingwacht.de/if/if-auth-dev-guide.html
This document is not for authors of Interactive Fiction who want to USE a development system to create Interactive Fiction; this document is for programmers who want to CREATE a development system for Interactive Fiction, that is a system that allows authors of Interactive Fiction to write Interactive Fiction.
I have not read it yet so I can't determine how good it is.

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Re: Developing a visual novel engine

#10 Post by PyTom »

If you want to help with Ren'Py, I'd be glad to have you. There are several projects I'd like people to get involved with, from tools stuff to things like a rewrite of Character.

Otherwise...

I'd say there's probably a big opening, right now, for an engine that can target the web platform. The big problem with this is that web programming is massively unfun, as the tools are quite immature and you're very restricted in the languages and programming techniques you can use. Also, I suspect that the maturing of emscripten, pyjamas, or native client will render things obsolete a couple of years from now.

Customizability and Scripting are very important. If your engine gets adopted, then it will be hard to keep up with all the ideas that people have - many of the ideas being better than your own. Programming-language-level scripting is the secret weapon, as it allows people to do things you never thought of. (It has its problems too - but they're worth solving.)
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Re: Developing a visual novel engine

#11 Post by Funnyguts »

Tom: I know there's a way to stuff Python into HTML5 with Javascript. Would it be possible to have Ren'Py work with that?

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Re: Developing a visual novel engine

#12 Post by ffs_jay »

Speaking as someone who cobbled together a simple engine for their own means, what exactly are you trying to achieve that hasn't already been done? Why not just use Ren'Py or Novelty?

The only reason I made mine was to save myself a huge amount of time down the line and make the best use of the scripting knowledge I already had, and also that I knew I'd be including complex sub-games which'd be a drag (but still far from impossible)to code in python. For most other projects, and straight-down-the-line visual novels in particular, I can't think of a reason I wouldn't use one of the existing engines. Well, short of some really robust portable device support, as mentioned by others previously.

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Re: Developing a visual novel engine

#13 Post by sake-bento »

The one thing I would drool over in ANY visual novel engine would be an easy web export version. HTML5, preferably. Android and iPhone support would be cool, too. Or X-Box. But web. Really, really, web.

Looking at the current state of things, there might be a place for an engine that helps with dating sims (with elements like stat raising and scheduling), since the DSE is still difficult for many non-programmers to use.

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Re: Developing a visual novel engine

#14 Post by luminarious »

An editor-launcher combination for Ren'py would be great, especially if it featured a tool for visualizing the branching labels and such. I even made a rough mock-up for it.

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Re: Developing a visual novel engine

#15 Post by jack_norton »

sake-bento wrote:The one thing I would drool over in ANY visual novel engine would be an easy web export version. HTML5, preferably. Android and iPhone support would be cool, too. Or X-Box. But web. Really, really, web.
Considering how things are going to be in next years with all the appstores insanity, definitely this is the king feature of ANY game engine, not just for visual novels! 8)
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