Multimedia

[dorne]

What do you guys think about incorporating multiple medias into your works? One example I can think of is Serial Experiments Lain, as per the wiki:

The Lain franchise was originally conceived to connect across forms of media (anime, video games, manga). Producer Yasuyuki Ueda said in an interview, "the approach I took for this project was to communicate the essence of the work by the total sum of many media products.

The anime, video games and manga share the same characters, but diverge into different expressions and stories.

You can consider other forms of works like Superman, or Spiderman, who started off as comics, who then were used in animation and games.

In the case of visual novels, many of them spawned anime and manga adaptations (Fate/Stay Night, Steins;Gate, Higurashi, etc.)

Are there any series on this side of the genre that has attempted to do so? Whether it be additional novels, short stories, web series/comics, artbooks, animations?

I understand that Megatokyo started off as a webcomic, which started a visual novel, but I'd like to know more series that have gone this far.

[TheJerminator15]

This is something I actually wish to do in the future after completing my courses at college and then university. However, it wouldn't be the same characters but a shared universe with each different iteration standalone for the most part to attract fans from each medium. I'm also working on a project currently which is a standalone hack and slash game, with a visual novel serving as side material the player can choose to download to gain access to lore and the story of the game.

For the EVN scene, I personally do not know of any attempts to do so however.

[dorne]

This is something I actually wish to do in the future after completing my courses at college and then university. However, it wouldn't be the same characters but a shared universe with each different iteration standalone for the most part to attract fans from each medium. I'm also working on a project currently which is a standalone hack and slash game, with a visual novel serving as side material the player can choose to download to gain access to lore and the story of the game.

For the EVN scene, I personally do not know of any attempts to do so however.

In that sense, you can attract different types of people, even though it's in the same universe. That's not bad since you can cover a wider demographic, which would eventually ripple to your other works.

I'd be up to hear more about your hack and slash game + visual novel. Do you require the player to first play the game and follow along with the VN, or can it be digested separately? The VN could become an advertisement for the game.

[Parataxis]

I am actually working on a series of short comics about Side Characters to strengthen my art for doing the visual novel, so almost pre-doing this. In addition to focusing on characters who don't get much play, they also allow me to delve into world building questions or themes I might not otherwise be able to get into, or just fun one-off adventures since the VN plot itself is a more serious continuous mystery. (One features a character in college, another is basically just two people talking about homework while fighting monsters, a third is just my characters going to an amusement park etc) The ability to tailor tone to the specific comic has been a pretty cool boon since the VN itself can be grim at times due to the focus on the Narrator's Psychological state.

However, this is less motivated a desire for a multimedia story and more just having more stories to tell in the universe, that and needing some practice creating and finishing things rather desperately.

[TheJerminator15]

This is something I actually wish to do in the future after completing my courses at college and then university. However, it wouldn't be the same characters but a shared universe with each different iteration standalone for the most part to attract fans from each medium. I'm also working on a project currently which is a standalone hack and slash game, with a visual novel serving as side material the player can choose to download to gain access to lore and the story of the game.

For the EVN scene, I personally do not know of any attempts to do so however.

In that sense, you can attract different types of people, even though it's in the same universe. That's not bad since you can cover a wider demographic, which would eventually ripple to your other works.

I'd be up to hear more about your hack and slash game + visual novel. Do you require the player to first play the game and follow along with the VN, or can it be digested separately? The VN could become an advertisement for the game.

The story for the hack and slash would more or less be entirely contained within the VN itself, with only some dialogue in the hack and slash adding to it as standalone speech which has more meaning if you've played the VN. Both work entirely separate of each other in that sense, so you are not required to play both.

However since it's my first experiment at such a thing I don't plan on eventually releasing both. I may release the VN to test the waters on such an idea so to speak, but nothing after that is planned at the moment. Sunrider and Love in Space have actually done something like this before though, as I believe they had someone create a novel which was a more in depth and cmplete retelling of their first game.