Lemma Soft Forums

Hello! I was just wondering about the seriousness of a realistic sense in background arts for Visual Novel.

My colleague used to complain about the background art for school, classroom, swimming pool, amusement park (or just park), the beach etc. for being unusable without showing any crowds of people in the pic. He also said that those places look like they were abandoned or closed. He even said that if I want to make a quality game, I need the best and the most realistic pic. That includes having the crowd of people in the pic. However, I've seen too many backgrounds from VNs or other genres without the crowd. Though I don't know much about the complains.

So, I was wondering if it is really that strong of a factor to make sense to the game? Thank you!

Well, how realistic is it to show a crowd of people that never moves or changes, whether it is day or night or two weeks later? Empty background locations are often used for their versatility. They can be used for scenes when the characters are alone, or at different times of day, without having to create tons of variations. The best compromise is to have ambient crowd audio playing with the empty scene and that will give the illusion of other people at the location without having to show them.

To me, having a background without people is fine.
I do think, however, that if your script mentions 'the crowd behind us did x', then by all means, include a crowd as that is a detail in the script but not in the scenery. It irks me, but still isn't overly important.

If you think you can get away without drawing any crowds, then don’t draw them. The ambience they’ll add isn’t worth the huge amount of effort you’ll have to put in, and chances are it will just distract the reader from the speaking characters anyway.

Even the highest quality Japanese visual novels take plenty of shortcuts to reduce the amount of art required, including not drawing crowds. Knowing what to cut to keep your budget, time, and scope from running out of control is just as important as making high quality assets.

You can suggest the presence of other people using silhouettes if audio alone doesn’t cut it and you really need to show other people in the same location. If you do draw a crowd, make sure the figures, any shadows they cast, reflections etc. are completely separate from the rest of the background, so you can still use it without them.

I agree with what other people have been saying so far - while having a crowd in the background might be a nice touch, especially if the characters talk about the location being busy or something, it isn't at all necessary. I don't expect visual novels to show me exactly what's happening in the scene the way a movie or a bigger budget adventure game might. The sprite and background art is more of an abstracted representation of it. Real people don't stand around in the same position and stare at you while their facial expressions cycle between limited options either, but it doesn't bother me that they do in visual novels. When you're planning out the art for your game, you should consider factors like efficiency and reusability, so that you can represent different emotions and locations without too many resources. Worrying about realism can be secondary to that.

I personally appreciate it when city backgrounds have people in the background in them. But I grew up with different story focused games than Japanese VNs, so I tend to have different aesthetic preferences.

But lots of VN fans are totally fine with empty city streets. Or actual photographs for BGs and anime style Sprites. There are lots and lots of things that others may not like that are totally fine with the classic VN crowd. If you are aiming to get that crowd, I don't think abandoned backgrounds will be a problem for you.