Converting a Novella to a Visual Novel (Thoughts?)

[Zathura]

Let me first say that I'm definitely more a writer than I am an artist. I would like to challenge myself to this month's NaNoRenO, in order to push myself to learn Ren'Py's programming language and syntax, while at the same time pushing my artistic boundaries to their maximum. Art aside...

How would you go about turning an already written story into a VN?

I'm not sure how often this comes up, because it seems that even in fan-fics, whatever story is being told has been written with a VN in mind.

In my case, I've already written and published (online, without pay, of course ) a novella, which I would like to turn into a VN, because not only does it mean something to me, but I think it would be an interesting story for people.

There's already a good deal of dialogue in the story as it stands, but as with most written pieces, it depends mostly on narrative. I'm thinking for a VN a good deal of this should be cut out, or rather, -shown-, via character interaction, rather than page after page of black -nvl-type screens.

Obviously, it's going to have to be adapted to the medium. The question would be, How?

I'm speaking in generalities, of course. So, for the sake of discussion, if you were going to take a short-story, novella, book, and make a VN based off it, how would you go about it?

[Tempus]

To make it the level of quality (in terms of utilising the medium) of most VNs you'd just need to identify the assets, alter writing that references things that are visually apparent... well, I thought I'd have a longer list. There's obviously more than that (a thematically related UI, for example) but it's, uh, obvious. Frankly, most VNs don't even utilise their own medium.

To adapt a novella into a VN and actually utilise the medium, consider the things you have available to you and what you can do with them to reinforce your work from many different angles. This necessitates rejecting conventions, at least initially—it may turn out a convention in VNs actually works for your project and that's fine. But consider how many stories are actually best told with 2D cutouts layered over a background* with a looping piece of music and textbox at the bottom of the screen. If every movie used and re-used the same shot again and again (hello inexplicable Dutch-angled CGs) the medium would be considered a joke. (Kind of like VNs are!) You have user interaction, visuals, audio, and words—at the least. Consider that visuals, audio and interaction can be metaphorical and not just literal, as with words.

• *I know why this is done. That doesn't change the fact it's a practical choice and not a stylistic one.

[Zathura]

This necessitates rejecting conventions, at least initially—it may turn out a convention in VNs actually works for your project and that's fine.

Examples?

To be honest, I've only played about 8-9 VN's at this point, and I've honestly found each of them to have something unique unto themselves, so I haven't run into any "conventions" yet, other than an 'anime' art-style to the characters, which is what I'm trying to emulate (badly, I might add) with my own.

I don't expect my first VN to be a work of art. Quite the opposite. It's probably going to be a kinetic novel, and if there are player choices, they'll probably lead to only small 'fake' story alterations, which at this point, I'm considering not including because they would be so insignificant. I want to make it enjoyable for the player, but at the same time, I don't want to change the story too much.

As a player, I don't enjoy kinetic novels nearly as much as those which let me choose different paths. Then again, that may be a consideration for a future project, and not necessarily this -particular- one.

I'm more wondering how one would go about transforming pure narrative into character-driven storyline. It's not an easy thing to do, especially if you're trying to transform third-person past-tense into first-person present-tense. :/ (Even the text version is confusing, lol).

[Cith]

If it's a kinetic novel, what's stopping you using 3rd person past tense? You can very easily use 3rd person past tense for kinetic novels, it's visual novels where things become a bit difficult. That being said, Loren was done in the 3rd person past as well and that was a visual novel(/RPG hybrid.)

If you're just doing a kinetic novel then:
- Cut/reduce the bits of description made redundant by the visuals
- The text box introduces different subtleties when putting text onto a screen. You can "hide" information better then you ever could in a book, for example.

[Tempus]

This necessitates rejecting conventions, at least initially—it may turn out a convention in VNs actually works for your project and that's fine.

Examples?

Common routes, the background and character sprite paradigm, text and the placement of it, key-bindings, main menus, developer splash screens, credits, Dutch-angled CGs, the presence of CGs to begin with, looping music, optional music, reducing music volume to make voice acting more audible instead of scoring the music to work with dialogue, menus for choices (as opposed to other modes of more passive choice making), first-person and present-tense writing, and so on.

To pick on one of those examples: optional music is a bizarre convention in visual novels. If a developer lacks so much confidence in their game's soundtrack that they need to give users an option to entirely disable it then that may indicate a problem with their creative direction. It's as strange as giving a movie an optional soundtrack. The volume, presence, mood, motifs and so on of the music should be an artistic choice not just an afterthought. It's one of the many elements that ought to be working toward conveying whatever it is you're trying to convey.

This isn't to say optional music is a universally bad idea. One example where this is a conscious choice by the developer is in Digital: A Love Story. In Digital the player can disable the music, but the music is diegetic and it makes sense to be able to pause it or adjust its volume because you're roleplaying as someone using an Amiga. It's your music player you're pausing, not something outside your pretend roleplaying world.

I'm not saying no VNs break the conventions I listed (I can think of quite a few), nor is a design choice coinciding with convention necessarily a bad thing. It's just that design choices should be made consciously, not dictated by convention. I've made two other posts somewhat related to this in another thread, here and here if you're interested.

[Zathura]

Interesting. I'll give those threads a look. Thanks Tempus. It's a lot to think about, lol.

[Zetsubou]

In turning Sickness from a novel (83k words) into a Visual Novel (120k words & climbing), changes to descriptions and monologuing have been the most prominent.

When the transition first began, I was cutting out huge chunks of descriptive text, because I figured the sprites, backgrounds, etc. would make it redundant.
Similarly, some events no longer needed to be written because they could be replaced by animations, sound effects, changes in expression, etc.
There were also scenes that needed to be rewritten for the purpose of impact (eg. the lines immediately preceding a CG), paragraphs shortened or reworded to better fit the textbox, and a bunch of other rewrites I never saw coming.

Further to that, one thing that I'm running into even now is dialogue vs narration. As a first-person novel, copious amounts of content within Sickness were explored purely through thoughts/monologuing. But as a VN, having the main character talk to himself doesn't feel as engaging, so concepts and opinions are often brought up through dialogue instead. It then became a balancing act; is this conversation dragging on too long? Would this monologue be better as a conversation? Would this conversation feel more natural as narration?

Ultimately, I wound up adding back a lot of the descriptive text and narration. Not all of it, and there's still way more character dialogue than when it was a novel, but enough to make it feel more natural and less like a "generic VN". True, a lot of VNs are more dialogue than narration/description, and some do a damn good job of it. But if you're converting a novel into a VN, then rather than remove the descriptive text or completely rewrite scene after scene, I think it's best to instead work what's already there into a more game-friendly format. Rework anything that can be better done with the new tools at your disposal (SFX, animations, etc.), but don't go hacking and slashing; you can add SFX and still leave the character's summary of what they heard.

Getting back to your question of "How would you go about turning an already written story into a VN?", my process was (and still is) quite aimless, so I wouldn't recommend it... but if I could go back in time, I think a good approach would be to code in some of the story, play through the first chapter or so (even without BGs, sprites, etc.) and see how the progression feels compared to other VNs, then progressively implement stock images (concept art) and edit the dialogue as it feels necessary.
After all, text is easy to edit, art doesn't need to be perfect from the beginning, and music/animation can be added at your whim. So try constructing a scene with creative commons sprites and BGs from the forum, even if you have no intention of using any of them in the final product, and remember the types of changes you needed to make in order for the scene to "work" in the new medium. Rewrite until you're somewhat satisfied, move onto the next scene, and repeat. And when you're done, go back over the entire thing, because by that point your style will have changed and you'll think "Did I seriously write that crap?"

[OokamiKasumi]

How would you go about turning an already written story into a VN?

I've done it twice with previously published short stories of mine. A novella would have been considerably longer.

Warning! Adult Content:
Torrey & the Vampire (My very first project.)
Alchemical Ink

However, these are not Visual Novels, they're Kinetic Novels. There are no choices or other game-play. They have only; story, images, sound, and music.

[Taleweaver]

How would you go about turning an already written story into a VN?

I did this with "The Thirteenth Year", which was already a dialogue-heavy novella to begin with. I rewrote each scene to change the point of view from an auctorial perspective to one of the people in that scene (changing POV in one of them), and then I chose a point in each scene where the POV character decides for a certains answer or interaction, and wrote an additional part outlining how that changes the scene's original ending.

Eventually, I wrote two more endings to the novella to reflect player choices, and that was that.

[Zathura]

@ Taleweaver

That's a little how I envisioned this one going. Having a "true" ending that reflects the novella, but write in a few choices that would make small changes to their own particular scenes without disturbing the flow of the story, but would cause the ending to pan out a little differently.

Not sure if that's actually a good idea, or if it would feel cheap, lol. Guess it depends on how I write it.

[Lesleigh63]

I'd been inclined to write the dialogue first and then add what ever narration is required to make the meaning clear if it can't be garnered from the visuals or music. Remember that you'll possibly be writing in a text box (only takes a couple of sentences at a time) or you can use the bigger box covering more of the visuals (NVL style) and perhaps show a paragraph at a time.

Good place to branch would be at the climax (protag attains their goal, and protag doesn't attain their goal).

[Zathura]

The dialogue isn't the hard part for me. That's often my favorite part of (and what I spend the most time on) in any of my written pieces, because I feel it gives the reader an insight into the character, whereas pure narration falls flat. Nevertheless, narration is good for when you need to describe events and day-to-day activities where dialogue would be superfluous.

Also, while we're here...mind if I ask:

How exactly do you get a -nvl- page to reset? I tried this in the current build, but it would just switch back and forth from the -nvl- page to a scene, and back again with all the previous text still in place. I'm sure I'm just missing some basic command, here. :/

It's just adding paragraphs to what was already there, instead of starting over on a blank page.

Either way...it's highly doubtful I'm going to actually get this done this month, because I'm working on my own art assets, and it's stressing me out to no end, lol. I consider the actual writing the 'easy part', because in a way, it's already there, and with only a day or two of buckling down, I can get it done. It's the art aspect that's causing me despair, because I want it to look nice, and my skills are......'decent'...but unpracticed and unpolished, and the simple act of creating a pose-sheet for my characters is pushing my sanity to it's limits, lol.

As for music, I haven't even gotten as far as to think of that. Since this is my first attempt, and whatever the end result will be, will be released for free, it's all going to be CC or royalty-free music, so I feel that that's an afterthought, at most, because I will doubtfully be able to find pieces that perfectly represent the mood I'm trying to achieve at any given point.

[OokamiKasumi]

How exactly do you get a -nvl- page to reset? ... It's just adding paragraphs to what was already there, instead of starting over on a blank page.

What you're looking for is:

Code: Select all

    nvl clear

Unlike ADV mode, NVL mode does not automatically clear it's text when it gets to the bottom of the textbox. You use nvl clear to manually set the textbox to clear for more text. If you don't use nvl clear, not only will the text run right off the bottom of the box, the next time you use NVL text all that text will pop right back up in your textbox.

Also...!

Use window hide when you are done with your NVL text.
-- If you don't use window hide the nvl box will STAY THERE empty of text, and covering your images.

I find it best just to simply type them both at the same time.

Code: Select all

    story2 "When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true."

    nvl clear
    window hide

[Zathura]

Thank you Ookami, that's precisely what I was looking for. I knew (vaguely) of that command, but wasn't sure how to implement it.