Lemma Soft Forums

I was curious as to whether people tend to do all aspects of their novel themselves, if people tend to just do one, if people who do art are more likely to do the music as well or......and if this is due to cost of other people doing it, lack of time to do it yourself, not enjoying a certain bit, not being good at an aspect.......
Personally, I'm doing the writing, art, music and coding myself. I am decent at writing, but suck at the others, I enjoy the first 3, but I want it to be all my own, so I'm also doing the coding.
tl;dr: Which aspects do you do yourself and why?

When doing a visual novel was still just a 'hey, this seems cool' idea in the back of my head I'd figured I'd do just about everything except the art myself and get music from sites Creative Commons sites. While this could work, in theory, it wasn't very feasible.

Much, much later and with quite a bit of working in IT projects I took a good hard look at my ideas and realized that if I ever wanted to make a game that would had a realistic chance of seeing the daylight, I'd have to let go of things and start approaching the bunch of insanely creative people that I actually knew. So far things are shaping up nicely, and currently I am taking the storytelling aspect, the design, the programming and the organizing aspects of the project. The art, dialogue and music I have asked or will ask other people to do. So far it's been me calling in favours or exchanging effort. As soon as I finish episode one of my idea I'm going to have to flesh out other possibilities for getting the work done of all those things I know I can't do myself.

For me, it's definitely simpler to do everything myself, but that doesn't really mean easier. I'm just starting out on the Lemma Soft Forums and I've moved a bunch recently so I don't have much of a community to call upon. That said, I am a writer at heart and am perfectly comfortable coding for my own projects. Art and music are still difficult, and I just use creative commons 0 sound effects, but I've managed to pull all of those together before.

You can't really have a visual novel without all of those elements though so when I just feel like writing and don't care to do my own music and art, I usually just write a short story, not a visual novel. I feel like the creator of a visual novel should have the ability to do as much of each aspect as possible instead of trying to lock themselves in a box and say "this is what I do, I have someone else for that" for little other reason than knowing how to do more gives you more creative control.

I find it rather time-consuming to even just do ONE of those things. I tend to work alone because one, I won't be sure if people would be interested in my ideas to help and two, the product that I have in mind might be different than what I would get. But hey, what you get is what you get. I hate to embarrass myself in public. So I'm a shy, self-conscious person. There were those times where asking help might've been my best bet; it would've been easier on me. And faster.

I think I'm rather decent in art and writing. But the music, oh boy. I don't even know how to read music without having to think about every single note I come across. I know NOTHING about music, much less about making it. And for coding, I started out, just reading every tutorial I could find, played games that have interesting features just so I could think about how it was coded. Even now, I look at some of the codes of games I like. It helped me a lot with gallery stuff. I do these all in a messy order. I start a story and create the outline and plot of it. Then either, I do some coding or some art. I usually leave the music and sound effects last. Or when I get to a certain "stop" point.

I'm kind of glad I don't have to do everything myself and that we got a musician now whom I just have to guide, because it makes us quicker and gives better end results. Right now I do all the art, GUI, writing. The reasons are that I tend to write faster and am the only one who can draw, although I wouldn't let anyone else do the art because it's my main hobby :p.