Why so many unfinished VN?

[Lodratio]

Your understanding of why people don't finish projects seems to be mostly focused on their work ethic, lack of encouragement and other real-world circumstances. Isn't the game itself a much more important factor? Even with drawing and painting people feel silly for showing their work when they know that it isn't high quality. If I don't like something I've drawn I'm more likely than not just not going to bother posting it. Writing something is a much more intimate thing, since what you're offering up for judgement isn't just your abilities as a craftsman, but your thoughts about the world. When someone tells you you can't draw hands, it might mean that you don't know anatomy, or that you have trouble understanding three-dimensional forms, or some other technical matter. When someone tells you that your supporting casts characterization is naive, while your MC is is a SAO-tier self insert, it could mean that your understanding of other peoples inner worlds might be naive, and, just as you view your main character as superior to, and more complex than their surroundings, that view of the world might apply to you as well.

Writing a visual novel is difficult. Writing a good story is difficult, and drawing nice looking sprites is difficult, composing, or finding fitting public domain music is difficult, and programming can be difficult as well. Given the nature of the medium I imagine, that there are many people who come here simply because they've recently developed an interest in VNs as readers, without any previous experience in making a game. Of course their first attempts at putting together something as complex as a visual novel are going to be flawed, and if they're not confident enough to post the result, that's perfectly understandable.

[Krel]

I think it's a combination of the reasons that everyone's mentioned.
- Inexperience and not understanding the workload required
- Discouragement from a lack of feedback and interest
- Life and other commitments

On the topic of game jams and assorting teams together:
I like the idea of forming teams and getting newbies a chance to work together on a VN. One potential issue there could be, however, is too many and too few of certain roles (e.g. too many writers and too few artists), so that not many full teams could be created. I'm not 100% certain about that, so don't quote me on it.

I also like adding a competitive element, with not necessarily prizes, but awards of 'Best Writing', 'Best Art', 'Best Overall', etc. It's easier to find intrinsic motivation through the desire to compete.

[Klawzie]

I've abandoned VN projects because I just couldn't find a work flow that worked for me. I struggled with it. And probably NaNo was just not the best time to force myself to try to push through with a project I hadn't really thought out much beyond, "Okay - I like this idea! It'll be cute!" I just knew my art was pretty okay and if I worked with cute, non-human characters, I wouldn't be as self-conscious about it. I knew I was good at writing and I'd made a few CYOA games before, and had played a bit with Ren'py to test out some code I thought was neat - so since I had an idea of what I was doing, I should just go for it and learn everything as I went! Ha. I didn't know what I didn't know.

Embarrassed at being "yet another" collapsed project that people make all the pity-sneering noises about, I slipped back out for awhile and got busy with other projects. Slowly gaining more skill with art. Slowly gaining more skill with writing. Learning more about game dev in general. Sometimes poking my nose back in on the community to lurk for a few threads before deciding I wasn't yet ready.

Started publishing books and got quite good feedback about them. It was enough to make me say, "Yes - okay. Now to see if I'm as passionate about making games as I am about writing in general." Kept coming up with game ideas, but they'd quickly get out of hand. Definitely not first project stuff. Eventually ran across a relatively obscure Japanese folk tale/monster tale and the couple of different variations on it and said, "This. I can use this. Just set it in modern America so that people who might be familiar with it don't recognize it at first and take the tale's variations and make them into different routes. Done. Can't over-build that." Of course, the more I worked with it to blend the two or three variants together into a seamless whole, figuring out how to make it make sense in modern America, and bringing personality to the characters, the less like the original it became and the bigger the project got. Still not too big for a newbie, but by that point it was extremely, extremely personal. I'd put too much of myself into it. I couldn't release that as a first project. Writing erotica was less exposing. Plus, writing it was slow going because I still hadn't figured out how to do it in a way that was visual enough for me to keep track of. I was glad I'd only told a few people I was working on it.

Out of frustration, I decided to make an actual flow chart for a route system to follow and made up a story that would suit the flow chart: Go left or right. Those are the major story turning points. Done. It's working really well. I'm really enjoying the characters. I already have a sequel in mind (though that's definitely not a second project - I want another "small" one before I make things too outrageous).

Didn't come back to the forums until I was sure that the way I was working was working for me. Then I could talk about my project without feeling like I was "all talk". Haven't put the game name on my profile, because I'm not close enough to done to feel comfortable even passively hyping it. No intentions of making a thread until I'm ready to release the demo. I don't want to "make it a thing" for people to put on their radar until I feel confident the wait isn't going to be long enough for people to file it under "lost cause". (Which is apparently about a month?)

I wonder - am I a weak dev that should have been weeded out the first time? Or is it because I am a "weed" that I just keep coming back and keep trying - and that's a "good" thing? The more I learn about game dev, the more excited I get to make games. I have lots of stories to tell. I want to try all sorts of things. I want to make other people excited to make their own games and tell their own stories.

If trying to make a game is all it takes to burn that passion out in their hearts - isn't that fine? Not everyone is cut out to be a game dev any more than everyone is cut out to be an actor or a doctor or a teacher or a park ranger. And, thankfully, most budding VN devs don't have to spend thousands of dollars figuring that out.

I know very well that most projects aren't going to make it to the finish line. Hard for me to get hyped about a game that doesn't have a demo out yet. Generally refuse to look at them because I've been disappointed by games that sounded amazing and never left the drawing board. I'm cynical too.

Not sure the "newbie boot camp" style of jam would work for me any better than NaNo. I'd personally be more interested in a weekly/monthly "paint by numbers"/"step-by-step" follow-along where someone with experience "hosted" and basically linked to tutorials and/or wrote one for what we were going to try that round and was available to answer questions about it. By the end of the follow-along, everyone would have a game that had all the same basic components, but free range on theme and to have added to it/continue working on it. Something like that wouldn't necessarily even have to be hosted by the same person, but could have a rotating host. I suppose it'd have to have an organized lesson plan in advance either way, though.

Train of thought derailed. Ahwell.

[Katta]

Now that you mention a follow-along I remember that there was a thread here that formed a group to follow each other's progress and motivate each other - I wonder how it went, though since they didn't post anything afterwards I can guess it resulted in nothing(

[curry nochi rice]

I don't know anymore. Well, I just summed up my thoughts into this hideous picture. Sometimes I think that a lot of projects just begin spontaneously.

Edit:
I should have included personal stability (income, personality, schedules, relationships) and time under the developer traits.

[zankizuna]

shots fired on the first statements, I'm one of them peeps who didn't finish
For this Reason I declared a VN plan to be my thesis project as a programmer...
I Really Need to finish this time!

[UntitledEXE]

Heyo! Soooo, I didn't actually manage to read through the entirety of this thread and may end up sounding like a broken record just repeating things others had said, but hey. Here's my two cents on the matter in form of-- well. Way too many words. :'D



Want a wall of text? Don’t want it? Too bad. Here, have it.
Lemmasoft is an incredibly accessible forum with a rather broad user scope as it doesn’t have a sign up restriction. There are developers of varying experiences, teams of all sizes, and a large pool of projects under the works of different genres, gameplay, lengths, ambition, and goals. It really is quite wonderful having such a community, new projects constantly appearing on the Works in Progress board, though it is an inevitability that not all of these projects will manage to ascend to the final stage at the Completed Games section with quite a number being cancelled and many more being put on indefinite holds. There could be a whole multitude of factors to as to why a project had been unfinished; inadequate time management, unrealistic expectations with unachievable goals, lacking motivation and interest, bad or no reception, strenuous circumstances, and the list goes on.

Expectations and reality, who knew some writing and art could be such hard work?
In a way, with a combination of all these different visual novel softwares promising easy use and the sheer number of projects already being worked on by indie developers, accessibility to produce your very own visual novel has been easier than ever. This is evident by how many started projects there, but the disproportionately lacking amount in the completed section shows that this process of making a visual novel is a little harder than what some people may have expected.

In some ways there are misconceptions that it is easy to complete a visual novel, especially when some people compare the workloads to games from different mediums. After all, how could simple writing and sprites compare to the multitudes of 3D renderings, frames in animation, coding for an open world, and character models that could move about and interact with the environment? It’s already a rather flawed way of thinking in itself as the games that actually hold so many sections and fields tend to have a large group to compensate, and visual novels require a little more technique than just writing a couple sentences and slapping an image over it. However, there are also the music, sfx, and coding elements to be put into consideration during development, each section having their own significant workloads depending on how ambitious the project is trying to be.

Ambition. I’m sure that everyone at some point imagined a project of epic proportions at some point. Enormous word counts, an infinitely branching story, custom music, open world environments, extended gameplay other than simply picking from a choice menu, beautiful cgs and art assets a plenty, and a cast so large that would put Doctor Who to shame. Some realize that these dreams are unfortunately not achievable in reality with the amount of work having to be put into such a project being far too large and requiring more resources, like money and time, than the person has available. Sure it is easy to say that even when the project is on such a grand scale, with effort and perseverance, you’ll get it done. However, the looming pile of work yet to be complete and completion not even sensed over the horizon forces people who aims for a project that they simply aren’t feasibly able to complete to either drop it or drastically change the initial product. Unfortunately, many find that it’s just easier to drop it.

The customer is apparently never wrong, but they’re definitely something.
Whether the project is commercial, to share a story to others, or a person just for fun thing, the community’s input is a large factor. Motivation, or rather the lack of it, is a big leading cause to projects being dropped. Look at the Work in Progress board and it’s always said to see those topics without a single reply. The reason to this is a whole other convoluted story (the story being incredibly niche, lack of content in the thread that would allow input, bad presentation, and again the list goes on), but it should be pretty obvious how disheartening it must be to a developer as they check a week – even a month – later to see that the community don’t appear to hold any interest to their baby project.

However, feedback can be a double edged sword depending on the developer’s motivations and interpretations of criticism. For some, they’re to take criticism like a motivating pat on the back. For others, it’s a little more personal. A project is fuelled by the developer’s thoughts and ideas. In a way, it can be believed to be a very loose representation of themselves as people; whether it’s their ideologies, views on the world, recount of personal struggles, or criticisms to issues they believe in. Sometimes developers put more than just a little bit of themselves in the story, and this can cause some serious negative thoughts floating about with criticism to said story. I’m not saying to avoid criticism in the slightest, as personally I’m quite an avid believer that with criticism comes improvement, but it is unfortunately a reality that people sometimes can’t distinguish between criticism to themselves and how criticism in itself is an opinion that should be taken as advice rather than a personal attack.

When life gives a disorderly person appendicitis.
The developer’s life circumstances are a very obvious reason as to when people drop projects. Financial instability, lacking understanding of visual novel development, maturity and reactions to criticism, and time management. These can be very loosely put into two categories; personal skills and strenuous circumstances.

Personal skills aides in the development of projects. Many dropped projects generally seem to lack any kind of planning; deadlines, structures, and a list of required resources not being made. At this point it is easy for the developer to lose direction, then motivation, and hence no clear completion of the project. Bad end, project dropped.

On the other hand, something that is not as in control with developers are the strenuous circumstance that sometimes smash people in the face. Here will be a more personal tale of such a thing happening. A while ago I had been working on a NaNoRenO project with a few absolutely wonderful people. I had been helping with the art, designated with CG and chibi art. However, an act of pure stupidity resulted in some not so healthy circumstances and then being out of commission for a while. Thankfully, the group had managed to complete the project while I was off the face of the Earth. However, sometimes people who have to drop projects even though they would very much wish to continue.

More than a thousand words later… What was the point?
As some people probably have realized by now, the whole one person that read this senseless monstrosity of a ramble up to this point, that I’m really just stating the obvious with how there isn’t only ever one real reason for why all these projects are dropped and there are a multitude of factors. Take out of this what you will, but I hope that the next time you see a project you want to see completed to leave a comment of interest and to understand even then that many people within this forum aren’t necessarily professional developers who may not have all the skills required, the experience, motivations for the project, and many other things in life taking their priority. As sad it is to see how small the Completed board is the Work in Progress, it is an unfortunate inevitability.



tl/dr
Here stating the obvious and just saying reasons are a plenty for projects being dropped.

[trooper6]

UntitledEXE, I enjoyed your post.

I want the add...that maybe we are looking at the dropped projects number the wrong way. This forum is full of people saying everything at every stage...we have people posting WIP that are barely conceived thought...bits of inspiration. It makes sense that so many projects are unfinished. I suspect that other programming communities have similarly high numbers of unfinished projects...they just don't have as much transparency..and welcoming to complete newbies..as we do.

[LateWhiteRabbit]

I think it's a combination of the reasons that everyone's mentioned.
- Inexperience and not understanding the workload required
- Discouragement from a lack of feedback and interest
- Life and other commitments

A combination of things combined to scuttle my own NaNo project.

One factor, under the "life and other commitments" (though not the main reason) is that my step-father died in March. He was ill, and it was expected, but I spent a lot of time with my mother during the month.

The biggest issue was my perfectionism, however. I had hoped a deadline, even self-imposed, my help overcome my tendency to work art assets and design documents to death. If anything, I think at times that my experience working at professional studios actually hurts me trying to work as an indie. I'm used to the quality possible with a dozen or more people working full-time on a project. That's kind of stupid to expect on my own, yet I keep doing it. A professional environment also helped combat my worst traits of re-working art, because I had project leads who could say: "We need a funny fat goblin. You've got 3 days." "Okay, times up, give it to us. Looks good! Here's your next assignment." Didn't matter how happy or unhappy I was with an asset or piece of art - I had to turn it over and start on something else. Basically, I suck at being my own boss.

Lastly, when the energy and creative juices were really flowing on my NaNo project - I felt bad about not putting that energy toward my long term projects. It's not like I have a lot of free time these days - mostly weekends and what I can steal in the dark hours at night a few times in the middle. So I would solve a technical or creative hurdle by working on the NaNo project - and then spend the rest of the night adding that into the long term project.

And finally, finally, there came a point in the NaNo project where everything just wasn't meshing. The story was thin, and the gameplay wasn't nearly as fun or engaging as I would have liked. I had already started over once (I had spent a week concepting a project for NaNo that I abandoned for the final project just as NaNo started), so it seemed the better use was to scrap the project entirely.

I don't feel NaNo was a waste for me - I solved two major technical hurdles that had been holding me up on my main project. But there is also the frustration of announcing a project and then failing to deliver on it.

EDIT: Also, to add to the discussion in a further way:
Many large game developers also have a lot of unfinished and unreleased projects that are canceled, never see the light of day, or our abandoned internally after a few months of concepting. We just don't see or hear about most of those games.

A rather famous quote from Blizzard back-in-the-day was this: When asked why all their games did so well, and were so fun to play, Blizzard responded: "We make lots of bad games. We only release the good ones."

[Ken Ken]

honestly, i think it could be that they have a great idea, start working on it but then kind of stop because it's a little hard working on ren'py... not to mention you need music and have to draw and continue typing up the story!
i think that maybe it all just becomes hard for them...

[UntitledEXE]

Those are actually some very good points trooper6 and LateWhiteRabbit.

Completely slipped my mind, but it is very true about how even the AAA developers do have games that have been cancelled. It's just the nature of how transparent the lemmasoft forums are, forums being made in the WIP section at the very beginnings of a project from the development of an idea. I may be wrong, but I think there's a bit of a trend that games dropped tend to be the ones that haven't progressed as much in terms of having the actual product. Like, not much evidence of coding or even the entirety of the stories and paths having a rough plan. While, games aren't even made public until they tend to have alpha/beta/etc versions of it already.

The whole welcoming thing is also quite an interesting take. Never really thought about it, but everyone on these forums tend to be super friendly so it's much easier to post your projects to get feedback. As much as I had said how some people drop due to a lack of interest on their forum topic, but I imagine it would be even harder to find motivation when you don't have any kind of development medium that have some super positive feedback. Especially if you were an indie developer and didn't have a team to generally encourage and keep each other on track.

P.S. @trooper6
Glad to hear someone enjoyed reading my rambles!

[marauderspirit]

In my humble opinion, the reason so many visual novels never are completed are simply because there are no reasons for the developer to complete them.

Let's put it this way, if you are a hobbyist illustrator/writer/developer/etc, then your enjoyment of the process is probably going to be your greatest reward. When development becomes difficult or chews too far into your time, what reason have you to continue? Money? Fame? As the hobby activity brings no joy relative to your other pursuits, it makes sense for you to quit. For the

On the other hand, if you are a professional designer of some sort, or have the ambition to be a professional, then the desire to keep going supercedes simple enjoyment. I created my first VN about a year ago and have decided to create another one and start a HOG with a programmer friend. Not because I expect to find fame and fortune through the venture (highly unlikely), and not just because I enjoy the process of making work. For me as a professional designer it is vital that my portfolio remains current, active, alive. Therefore I have to keep creating work which demonstrates an evolving skillset.

For the record, I do not mean to say that hobbyists are not dedicated, talented or prolific. All I mean to suggest is that the casual hobbyist crowd have very few reasons to churn out quality work with set deadlines.

[ciggydel]

*Stumbled Upon*
So many brilliant comments!

Not because I'm expecting the community say they love it when it is done...I don't imagine the game will be popular here at all...it isn't in the prevailing aesthetic of the group. I mostly imagine I'll put it out there and no one will say anything at all. Maybe no one will even play it. And if they play it, they may not like it. But I'm excited about it, I like it, I'm happy with it as a first project, and I'll be happy when its done.

@trooper6 - Your words remind me of this book http://www.invisiblesbook.com/ which I believe you will enjoy. Have a look!

In my humble opinion, the reason so many visual novels never are completed are simply because there are no reasons for the developer to complete them.

I want the add...that maybe we are looking at the dropped projects number the wrong way. This forum is full of people saying everything at every stage...we have people posting WIP that are barely conceived thought...bits of inspiration. It makes sense that so many projects are unfinished.

@marauderspirit - I think that pretty much sums up all the factors that contribute to WIP not being completed.

@trooper6 - Agreed. I don't think we should view unfinished projects negatively. Some of the devs clearly tried hard, and I'm sure not finishing a project they start would be a valuable experience for them. As the Silicon Valley guys like to say, fail fast and fail often. I like the idea of scoping/prototyping before release, and posting in WIP is part of that process. Personally, I would like to know what the community thinks of my work before going full-throttle into it and realising it's not as good a premise as I thought it was. I believe they call it wisdom of the crowds, or collective wisdom. Where better to get great advice than a place where experienced devs lurk

[LeetMusic]

At least it's better than 10 years ago with teenagers thinking they can make World Of Warcraft on every internet gamedev forum.

[Klawzie]

At least it's better than 10 years ago with teenagers thinking they can make World Of Warcraft on every internet gamedev forum.

I hang out on a couple of other general gamedev forums... They still think that.