Cliche vs. Original, Game vs. Novel, and Marketing OELVN

[CaseyLoufek]

http://www.brashmonkeygames.com/spriter ... de(a2).pdf

This seems to be the summary with links to more detail.

[OokamiKasumi]

Does anyone know where there's documentation as to the spriter format?

http://www.brashmonkey.com/spriter.htm
Documentation download in on the bottom left of the page.

[PyTom]

That seems pretty easy - but is it suitable for character portraits in VNs? It looks like the only things that it implements at the moment is combining different parts of a character into a single character, with rotation and scaling.

I guess my point is that I'd like to see someone throw together a character sprite, and show that it can be animated using these features without the result looking silly. I'd like an easier way to implement complex character animations, but I'm not 100% convinced that spriter is it, and I don't really have the time to make my own format. So if spriter works - great! But I don't want to commit to supporting formats that VN creators won't use in the long run.

EDIT: Compare this to, say, the animations Mugen has been removing from his games, which seem to be done with morphing? I've seen those in other VNs, as well. So maybe there's some tool for making those?

[CaseyLoufek]

but is it suitable for character portraits in VNs?

Yes, I do believe it is. I've seen the beginnings of a system like this in several projects and I think it's the way of the future ( as well as the past). Ren'py isn't all about character portraits. I don't think we should limit the software's capabilities because of past genre conventions. That said I suspect your concern is due to scaling/rotating and such being the only tricks in Spriter's bag so far.

After a quick test drive I think Spriter is missing one thing that once added would make it a good GUI: boning/attachment points. Right now I can't find a way to attach one sprite to another and have it rotate or drag with the other. I can do this in ATL and have been relying on it a lot. The workaround in Spriter is to select multiple images at once when doing this but it is true it's in a very early state.

There isn't much Spriter does or will do that ATL doesn't, it's just being able to lay the pieces out visually. I'm the progammer on my team but I'm the only who understands ATL well enough to animate. If something like Spriter worked with Ren'py it would make a world of difference in workflow.

I have a demo of Super Robot Wars style giant robot animations using my technique in ATL. If that's enough proof of concept for you I should have a video up soon. Otherwise I don't have the sprites but I know myself or one of our artists could animate a character.

[CaseyLoufek]

I've uploaded a video of what can be done as far as this style in the ATL, without a GUI. This could be a lot smoother looking and faster to do with such a GUI.

That said, until Spriter can do bones and the fire points ATL is probably better. The fire points would be a great deal of help since I can't currently draw a new displayable at a certain point based on another transform. Hence the shots you see the mech fire are actually part of that transform, represented by nulls until their time of firing. The trouble is they are going to be bound to the master transform in this case. I can't really have them following a dynamic path without doing the screen cut thing I did until I have some kind of fire point.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sb5p9bt ... e=youtu.be

[jack_norton]

Quite impressive video!:) I agree that such bone animations could help a lot to make 2d games look less static.
And yes, I don't think that we need to consider Ren'Py only a "visual novel tool" anymore. It would be too much wasted potential to use it only for that

[rasim]

There is a lot of talk about marketing OELVNs and such. But is there a product worth marketing in the first place? Can you name a single one that can compare to something like Umineko, Higurashi (yeah, I don't really care about the art and voice acting that much), Ever17, Fate/Stay/Night, Steins;Gate, etc.? That's not a rhetorical question btw. Is there an OELVN (either free or with a decent demo) like this?

[TrickWithAKnife]

It's not really fair to compare our works to some of the best VNs out there, with massive budgets.
It's like comparing an independent film to Avatar.
It won't make as much money, but it still has value.

A lot of people here who do go commercial are just hoping to recover some of their expenses.

[Blane Doyle]

It's not really fair to compare our works to some of the best VNs out there, with massive budgets.
It's like comparing an independent film to Avatar.
It won't make as much money, but it still has value.

A lot of people here who do go commercial are just hoping to recover some of their expenses.

VNs have also been around since the 80s while OELVNs have only been a thing for... less than a decade.

Isn't that like comparing animated shorts from the 80's to Rise of the Guardians or Tangled?

I would argue that, even at their worst, everything people create has value. (Yes, even Twilight. Or 50 Shades. Or....... Boob Wars: Big Boobs vs. Flat Chests I guess. It's got entertainment value in there at least.)

[papillon]

Higurashi is hardly a big-budget title.

However, it is very true that the pool of Japanese VNs is much, much larger than the pool of non-Japanese ones. Given that very few people are working on ambitious English productions, it's unrealistic to expect any of them to have yet surpassed the absolute best Japanese games.

That said, if you look at the output in OELVN over the past ten years you will see drastic increases in both number and quality. The more different creators challenge each other, the more we learn from competition and feedback, the more effective our output becomes.

What we need most are more new creators with new and different ideas.

As for being a product worth marketing - the English-written titles are already competing evenly with or in one case vastly outselling the Japanese-translated titles on the PC, based on the numbers that have been released...

[Blane Doyle]

I have to agree with you papillon. I remember some of the early games and when you look at a lot of the stuff that has come out lately or is being made now a lot of it is much better. (No offense to anyone who made the early games I will not actually mention) In the last decade, things have certainly improved. The competition is definitely part of it, no question, and the more people in the pool the more help and feedback you get too.

I don't think it is a long shot to say that we'll keep improving as the years go on. There are already more games released in 2011 and 2012 than I thought would ever be made back when I first discovered visual novels back in 2008, and of much higher quality.

And I didn't know about numbers. Granted, given what MangaGamer had admitted to and how long it takes JAST to put out anything... maybe I shouldn't be surprised... (and that makes me a little depressed too)

(Yeah, Higurashi is hardly big budget. But depending on who you ask it is either "amazingly written" or "hashed together baloney". I lean toward "pretty damn good" myself. It's almost a testament to how good writing can surpass... eh art.)

[papillon]

Jast tends not to say anything about sales numbers so it's quite possible theirs are a lot better. IIRC all we know from them is that their games are not making a loss.

My best guess is that it's pretty safe to say that the Japanese translated games are not making huge sales on the PC.

If we branch out to look at the DS and PSP games the suggestions are a lot better, although most of those are not 'pure' visual novels. But sales figures are almost always conjecture.

[Blane Doyle]

True. It just takes them so LONG to put out anything (or even update) that I am sometimes amazed fans (myself included) stick around for them.

I wonder what their numbers actually look like. From what I have heard from MangaGamer interviews they are doing better than MG, but they seem to be under the impression that it's not by all that much. (Then again, could be exaggerating.)

The news that OELVN titles are selling well enough to be competition is STILL good news to me though.

[rasim]

Let me clarify. I didn't mean to offend anyone. If I did, I apologize. I'm just kind of... potential target audience, maybe?

1) I've run out of good VNs to play. I don't speak Japanese or Chinese, so the pool of VNs was fairly limited for me in the first place, especially since I'm not into games like Da Capo and the like. There's probably a bunch of people in the same boat, so the market is there.

2) I don't believe that "true" VNs can only come from Japan. VNs are just gamebooks with pictures, music and voice acting (optionally).

[Blane Doyle]

Alright, that makes more sense then. Your wording was just... off I guess.

For the most part, going to VNDB and narrowing the games down and sorting them does the trick well enough for a starter. Since this is slightly off topic, I'll shoot you a PM with recs.