The "screenshot" project

[mikey]

So, in short, I would like to make "screenshot versions" of all my (original) visual novels - meaning take screen-by-screen (click-by-click) screenshots as I play the game, and then organize the screenshots into segments (albums) with information "where to go next" whenever you encounter choices.

In addition to that, I would create special picture sets for menus, unlockables, path maps etc. As for music, whenever the music changes, this would be indicated on that screenshot where the music changes. In essence, I would like to bring the whole game down to a series of interconnected sets of images and eliminate the game engine completely.

The drawbacks:
- inflated size (color game 1,5 hours: 1,6 GB)
- no special effects, animations
- calculations impossible, paths need to be flattened (segments repeated multiple times)
- not feasible for hybrids (RPG, Shooter) and sim/stat based games
- external audio needed (via pointers when music starts / stops)

The advantages:
- size manageable for low-color projects (b/w game 40 minutes: 170 MB)
- platform agnostic (needs only an image viewer, easy "installation", like photos)
- good for "archiving" without releasing the sources

Well, not many advantages it seems, but in fact that one fact that images are so universal is the reason I like it so much. Of course I never thought of this in 2006 when I was 2-3 years into making my own VNs (I'm sure I would feel it was ridiculous), but now it's been almost 10 years and these questions of how to best store your works feel relevant to me now - their "game design" value now feels less important to me than their "message" and sentimental value - in other words, I'd rather they were available as "captured experiences", than not be available at all, because I can't see myself, in the long run, updating to newer versions of engines again and again, porting old non-Ren'Py games to Ren'Py so they can be ported to Android or even transforming the games to emerging platforms which Ren'Py doesn't export to (especially iOS, low-end smartphones or even HTML5).

So I would like to know what people think. The more I test these screenshot versions, the more I like them and their ability to be enjoyed anywhere on any device. I would just stress that I know that this process kills a lot of the benefits of a visual novel format, but it's not about VN vs. pictures, it's about pictures vs. in a few years not being able to play the game at all (because I will most probably not have the energy and time to keep the works up to date technically). It's a pointless question for a first-person shooter, but a visual novel does not really need that much interaction and is largely static. Anyway, I don't want to ramble.

[Anna]

OK, I think it could work, but you'll have to consider cases in which it doesn't either and some big disadvantages, so:

+works well with linear VNs, since you don't have to browse to other story segments but read it in one go like a picture book.
+easy to store, share and 'run' on pretty much anything including phones, of which the latter is awesome.

-if there is a lot of branching, it will be annoying to look for where to go next if you don't have a system for that. It will require effort XD.
-if the VN has animation or awesome music which enhance the mood, it's a big waste of those resources and the experience goes down.
-you can't save, load or whatever when it's just a set of pictures.
-some VNs have mini-games or some sort of battle system/buttons - no go, or just doesn't work as well.
-size will still be big if you want the images to look decent, have an acceptable resolution and have any colour at all.

And what is an acceptable resolution when you don't know what exactly your audience uses? Maybe something to think about as well.

[luminarious]

Personally, this kind of thing is what the HTML was invented for. Hyperlinked documents, that is. Use CSS to resize the images to fit the current viewport and clicking on the image will take you to the next one, be it on the same page or in another document.

[PyTom]

For preservation purposes, wouldn't it make sense to put together a virtual machine with all of your VNs on it?

You could pick specific version of all the software and make sure it all works with the virtual hardware. Virtual machine have been pretty stable, historically - I can run one I created ten years ago, and it's possible to convert drive images between formats. I wouldn't be surprised if, 10 years from now, we run today's games in a VM - in much the same way that people run DOS games in Dosbox.

[Greeny]

As a programmer, I find this idea abhorrent. 170 mb? Back in the day there wasn't a computer on the whole damn planet with that kind of memory! Kids these days.

[mikey]

Thank you for your comments on this, and to the individual points:

Branching system:
Here I have thought of various approaches, but I have stuck with the simplest one - every choice means you have to open another album and if two paths share some scenes, I copy (duplicate) the scenes in both albums. This way I make "unique" paths from shared paths. Obviously this inflates the game, but on the other hand, it's very simple - just go where the choice says you should go. If you have paths that "calculate" points a lot however, "flattening" that into unique paths can become silly very quickly, so some other approach may be better. I hope to be able to flatten all of my games, even the ones which calculate points are small enough that it should be doable. Again, this doesn't work for everything.

HTML:
This is a great way to get around some of the duplication, though it destroys a bit of the purity of screenshots. I have tried several HTML layouts and the best ones are plain black, but with HTML a lot of the benefits of a just-copy-to-device approach are gone, since they are not just pictures. But it may be a good alternative for those games which as mentioned above are too complicated to reasonably make screenshot-only versions from. This is my backup plan for when a game turns out to be unfeasibly complex to "flatten" (I have only tried a few so far).

Resolution / picture size:
I thought to leave the pictures in native resolution, i.e. in the same resolution that the assets were put into the archive files, for most of my games this is 640x480. In pure picture mode I am not worried about screen resolution though, because the image viewers all have some for of zoom or fit-to-screen or something like that.

Packaging with an emulator:
I like the idea of packaging all the games together with some WinXP-emulator so that there is one download with everything and everything works - it's probably even better than offering single downloads with emulators (which was one of my original ideas before screenshots came to my mind), because all in all, it's something like 800 MB, all 21 games. I would probably still like to do this somehow, because two future-proofing methods are better than one, so I can imagine having an emulated bundle for download, alongside the SSV (screenshot versions). Though I haven't seen a crossplatform WinXP emulator that can be loaded up with your apps and provided as an application for a different system (like Linux - because some of my games are non-renpy / win-only, but more specifically mobile OSs). Even DOSbox which is quite mature is a bit too geeky (though that may be because DOS is geeky in general

Size problems:
Of course, size is the penalty for the screenshot versions. But that's I guess always the case with these things - I have recently enjoyed on Youtube quite a few "playthroughs" or "video walkthroughs" of older games or games which I don't own and don't really want, but just wanted to get a feel for their atmosphere - often people make really nice experiences out of these - they play through the entire game, show you all the hidden things and often multiple ways of experiencing the games' highlights. There are even playthroughs for visual novels, and for those who remember Hirameki's "DVD Play" visual novels, you viewed them at automatic text speed in your DVD player, and then chose the next chapter, effectively this is a very similar "flat" system like the screenshot versions (SSV) have. I wouldn't say the SSV are the same as video walkthroughs / playthroughs, but I think they follow a similar principle. I don't want to say they are substitutes for the actual VN experience, but especially if you just want to remember a VN and recall the old times, you can "leaf" through the screenshots like you would go to your favorite DVD and select a few scenes to re-live.

[PyTom]

I like the idea of packaging all the games together with some WinXP-emulator so that there is one download with everything and everything works - it's probably even better than offering single downloads with emulators (which was one of my original ideas before screenshots came to my mind), because all in all, it's something like 800 MB, all 21 games. I would probably still like to do this somehow, because two future-proofing methods are better than one, so I can imagine having an emulated bundle for download, alongside the SSV (screenshot versions). Though I haven't seen a crossplatform WinXP emulator that can be loaded up with your apps and provided as an application for a different system (like Linux - because some of my games are non-renpy / win-only, but more specifically mobile OSs). Even DOSbox which is quite mature is a bit too geeky (though that may be because DOS is geeky in general

Thinking about this a bit more - the most important bit of preservation is simply ensuring the games survive as data. Renai.us is one way to help with that - but it's not the gold standard. (I don't know what would happen to renai.us if I was to be run over by a bus, for example. I'd hope that people would figure something out, but I haven't made plans yet.)

You want to make sure each and every one of your games has been uploaded to http://www.archive.org under a license that allows them to redistribute it. That is probably the best way to ensure that the games will remain extant into the future.

Once the games are extant, they need to be runnable. I don't think that's going to be a problem. Virtual Machines are pretty common now. 10-15 years from now, I expect virtualization or emulation of a Windows XP machine to be as common as emulation of an NES or SNES is now. As Windows XP stops being a relevant OS (it's still supported, right now), MS will start looking the other way as people put it on their emulators. And those emulators will get better and better.

And people - retrogamers, digital historians, and others - will be sure that old programs work. Tools are constantly improving, computers are still getting faster - so it'll be much easier to solve this problem from the other end, 10-15 years from now, than is to try today to anticipate what computers of 15 years from now will be like.

(from http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/03/14)

I wouldn't go to huge lengths to ensure runnability - especially not lengths that will alter the experience of the work. I'd assume it. Instead, ensure the digital artifacts preserved, on places like archive.org, renai.us, and others. And then have faith that people will figure out a way to make these digital artifacts live again.

[mikey]

I don't know, I do have faith that emulation will work, but I don't think it will be the way for anyone else than enthusiasts. I think to get to non-geeky people native applications will need to exist (or, as is my proposal, a lowest-common-denominator version like the SSVs), even for completely free works.

I'm just not sure that people will want (or even know how to) to go through the hassles of emulation and virtualization - I don't think they don't care, but I think unless the games are provided in a simple-to-install format, no one will have the time and energy to figure out how to get to them - even I often want to play a few of the old DOS games, but copying them from a CD, downloading and setting up DOSbox, I don't have that much time and therefore I just sigh and let it be a memory.

And I think this is the danger - I notice from looking at myself that in the old days installing a game from an ISO image and then applying a translation patch to it was zero effort for me - now, I feel that that's actually a complicated process and won't really bother with it. Especially with older games I feel that I when that one lazy Saturday afternoon comes, and I'll *really* want to play a VN, I will still go with the path of the least resistance and enjoy those which I am able to get easieste, because of my deteriorating computer skills.

The other thing is that digital historians (or rather the "digital historian" aspect of people) aren't necessarily who my games are for. I want to get the theme, an atmosphere or a point across to people, rather than ensure that a gaming experience from the past is reproduced in present day and that bits are identical. So it may be more important to reach people, than to show my skills in maximizing the potential of an interactive medium.

Music, pictures, text and movies are formats which seem to be more stable formats than software (interactive format), perhaps because of their static and linear nature. There may be some loss of quality when moving from analog to digital in those cases, but generally once transferred, those formats are relatively stable - unlike, I feel, software, which is dependent on more elements and these elements get outdated very fast (base OS or devices).

So I think as much as I would like to believe that emulation should be the primary method of futureproofing, I think that realistically this will likely ensure "archiving", but not necessarily "availability".