Novelation - A Visual Novel Tool for Unity

[kristian221]

Hello everyone! My name is Kristian Skistad, and I would like to present to you Novelation, a visual novel toolkit made for Unity 5. It is in development right now, and I need your help to build it!

Novelation Blog: http://www.skistadstudios.com/category/novelation

Why Unity?
Novelation takes full advantage of Unity's rich feature set. It can be exported to 21 platforms, has a suit of graphics options, and Novelation makes extensive use of the new UI. The new UI allows for quick and easy layout customization, with minimal programming required! It is an industry standard, and as such is well documented and the support community for it is larger than that of any other game engine. You are also able to take full advantage of Novelation's source code, which was done in C#. If you dislike Novelation's interface or want to modify one of its features, you are free to do so!

Current Features
Novelation is still in the early stages of development, but here are some of the key features already in:

• Exportable to 21 Platforms
• Fully Modular UI
• Flexible rendering resolutions
• Support for multiple aspect ratios without designing your UI around each of them
• Source Code Access
• Easy Screen Creation and Editing
• UI preview as you build it
• High Performance
• Debugging Tools

Screens are simply things like the title screen, credits, the main game screen, ect. I wanted a way for you to easily make and switch between these different screens. The debugging tools are a must for those who are not familiar with Unity, so a lot of work is being put into them. I already have more advanced debugging features such as recovering lost screen data. This is just short list of what Novelation has to offer and it will grow with time.

Planned Features
Well for the most part, that is up to you fine folks! I am looking to make the tools you need to work your craft, so who better to ask than you? I want to know what all you need to make a visual novel, and what kind of workflow you are looking for. Though I do have some general features I want to put in:

• Drag and Drop Scene Scripting
• Node Based Scenes for easy overview and editing of you branching paths
• Novelation Scripting Language (optional use)
• Screen Transitions
• Animated Characters
• Skip Feature
• Auto Advance Feature
• Save and Load

As time goes on I am sure this list will continue to grow, I want to make the tools you need to bring your stories to life.

Design
So for the overall design I want the user to be able to stay away from coding, but not exclude it entirely. Anything that can be done in the scripting language should also be able to be done within the Novelation interface. I want to allow creators to get that story out of their head with minimal resistance. Novelation actually started out as a way for the narrative designer at my studio to get ideas out of his head without needing our programming staff to assist him. This way he can write stories in his spare time and actually release them as full games! That simplistic approach is the ultimate goal of Novelation, while still allow for complete control by more advanced users. And if you know C# the sky is the limits, as you will have complete access to Novelation's source code!

Final Remarks
So, I want to hear what you all think of Novelation. I will be putting up some videos of it in action when I get the time, but for now I need to know a few things. Does this sound like something you guys would like? Why or why not? What sort of crucial features do you need to get those stories out of your head? What sort of features have you always wanted but never had an easy way to implement them?

For any questions simply post them below and I will answer! I thank you all for your time in reading this, and look forward to continuing development with you all

[netravelr]

Hey Kristian,

Exciting to hear you're working on an asset for Unity. What do you think is going to be able to set you apart from other VN tools on Unity such as Fungus?

A killer feature for the users of this forum I'm sure would be the ability to import scripts written in RenPy to work with yours.

Cheers and good luck!

[kristian221]

Hey Kristian,

Exciting to hear you're working on an asset for Unity. What do you think is going to be able to set you apart from other VN tools on Unity such as Fungus?

A killer feature for the users of this forum I'm sure would be the ability to import scripts written in RenPy to work with yours.

Cheers and good luck!

Fungus is a fantastic tool, it can do quite a bit out of the box! I can't say I will be able to top those feature upon release. Novelation is certainly less complex, and that isn't always a bad thing. If you are a very advanced user Novelation may not be the tool for you. Think of it as the Game Maker of visual novel tools: It doesn't have the capability of the bigger name products but it provides an easy to use set of tools for a beginner to quickly create a fully fleshed out story, and advanced user can dig into its source code or get their hands dirty with C# to make something much more complex. It makes development faster, and allows a small team to easily share assets between each other. In general, I just want to make it easier to use

And I have a question: Normally you only see one main text box on screen at a time, which can have various layouts and designs throughout the game. How important of a feature would it be to have multiple main text boxes with differing text? It is something I want to add in eventually but if it is an important feature I will shift its priority higher.

[renoa-heartilly]

i suppose the most basic function i need is a right-to-left language support for my Arabic games you'd be surprised how many novel making tools are out there with zero support for a different language direction!

good luck with the production ^^ will it be a paid engine?

[kristian221]

i suppose the most basic function i need is a right-to-left language support for my Arabic games you'd be surprised how many novel making tools are out there with zero support for a different language direction!

good luck with the production ^^ will it be a paid engine?

Interesting, that is something I hadn't thought of! I am putting that on the feature list for sure.
And yes, it will be paid, though the price will be fairly low.

So I have a first draft as to what the scripting language will look like, take a look!

Code: Select all

//anything that begins with these two slashes '//' is ignored, which is usefull for placing comments!

//this is the label denoting a new scene, in this case the starting scene.
#scene start:
screen 'MainStage' //this changes the screen we are on to the 'MainStage' screen.
background 'Backgrounds/Battle1' // this changes the background to the 'Battle1' background.
music 'Music/Calm' //this starts playing the music file 'Calm' on a loop.

//This simply puts the text in a text box with no name box
"The world seemed still, but there was a foul odor in the air. Something was coming."

//This does the same thing as above, but all the character data from the character Frii is attatched to it.
//This includes things such as: Font, color, name, and direct access to character images.
Frii: "Looks like I'm not alone after all. This should be fun!"

sound 'Sounds/Enemies/Roar' //this plays a one shot sound file, in this case 'Roar'.

//This takes things one step further, because we are setting some parameters for our dialog.
//Parameters are set by placing a comma after the initial function and supplying the variable you wish to alter.
//In this case we are assigning the dialog with a sound file for voice acting, as well as overriding the font and color for the text.
//By default the font, color, ect. are detirmined by the charater's data. If no character is specified it uses the global settings.
Frii: "There you are, show me what ya got!", sound = 'Frii/Cocky', font = 'Fonts/Default', color = '255, 0, 0, 255'

//In this case we are using 'Beast' as a character name without actually having a character named 'Beast'.
//This will use the default font and color settings unless specified.
'Beast': "Leave, outsider!"

scene 'battle' //this leads to the 'battle' scene, so it will exit our current scene.


//this is another scene. Scenes are highlighted in purple for easy searching
#scene battle:
screen 'MainStage' //we are already on this screen, so this will actually do nothing. Though it is nice to always specify this for when you are testing out individual scenes.
background 'Backgrounds/Battle2', transition = 'Fade' //This will change our background to 'Battle2'. We have set the transition to fade effect.
music 'Music/Combat' //Currently we are playing 'Calm' on a loop, but only one music will be played at a time so 'Calm' will stop playing and 'Combat' will start playing on a loop.

//so this seems similar to a previous example, but notice how for the font we are setting it to 'Frii.font'?
//this sets the font to the font that the character 'Frii' uses, even though we aren't officially using the 'Frii' character.
'Frii': "Woah, that was a close one!", sound = 'Frii/CloseOne', font = Frii.font, color = Frii.color

//this is just a standard line
"The beast goes in for another attack."

//Notice how we are setting the 'wait' parameter to false? By deafault it is set to true for sounds.
//When wait it true it will wait for the sound to finish playing before continuing, but in this case it will start playing it and skip straight to the next action
sound 'Sound/slash', wait = false

wait 500 //this will cause a delay of 500 miliseconds before moving on

//whatever is between the <i> and </i> will be italicized
Frii: "Ok, <i>now</i> this is getting personal!", sound = 'Frii/Personal'

//There is a scene after this one, however, because we never told it to go to it this is where our game will end.

#scene victory
screen 'mainstage'
Frii: "Hah, I knew I would win!"

screen 'Credits' //this will go to our credits screen, and because nothing is after this the game would also end here (if this scene could be reached).

Of course this is just a first draft, and I am looking for feedback specifically on readability and functionality. I want it to read as though it is a screen play script.

[renoa-heartilly]

i'm not a coder but this looks pretty readable to me!
good luck

[SHiNKiROU]

Nice idea! My old Unity visual novel engine I made in high school, which has elaborate indentation parsing, JSON save/load and questionable OO design anti-patterns, died after upgrading the project to newer Unity versions due to broken references, can finally rest in peace.

[Camy]

Looks readable to me too, not cluttered at all.