I've been working on a website that lets users host stories in various media. I just recently have added a Kinetic Novel engine and it's going great! But, I wanted to see what features/etc. are general wants so I can make sure to have those. What are some of the features you want or expect in a Visual/Kinetic novel engine?
At this point, here are some of the features I have:
- Text automatically appears a character at a time, pausing for punctuation.
Can adjust the speed of text and add pauses.
Can have multiple textboxes at once.
Can use any image file type (including gif and svg).
Can animate and move character models and text boxes when text changes and in the middle of text
Can animate text (like shaky for fear, or a "shouting" effect where the text starts huge and quickly goes down to normal size. Think PPTTYD)
Any styles available in CSS can be used and animated
Episodic setup- you can build one part of your kinetic novel and then post another one later, which will then load automatically for readers finishing the prior part
Responsive design: set up your kinetic novel to work on any screen size; it's not set to a fixed resolution or aspect ratio
Add music and video
Estimate word length: instead of a word being written and then dropping down to the next line when it gets too long, if it's too long for the current line it will automatically start being written on the next line (it's not really done by estimating word length, but just to get the idea across...)
Can pause between sections or have it automatically continue after a set time
Can layer images for characters and models
It's built in HTML, CSS, and JS using JSON for part data storage, if that means anything to anybody. I've worked to set it up so that you can do basically anything that you can with HTML, CSS, and JS.
I'm using this engine for one of my own kinetic novels and adding in features over time and as I have need for them. At this point, interactivity is not a priority (thus why kinetic novels), although I do plan to add that in the future.