new visual novel engine: bass novel

[Crocosquirrel]

No kidding, right? Korean might be a fun language to learn, if I weren't already hip-deep in Japanese. Maybe afterwards...

Is that Fifi I spy?

[bcunderscore]

BassNovel/BassAVG are great sites. The characters are all integrated and it's put in a form that's easier than NovelTY and Ren'PY. There are major advantages:

It's on the web. A link is a lot easier to convince someone to play your game than a visual novel-all.zip, have them extract it, find a folder. Gasp, installers. Ren'Py takes tons of resources if I remember correctly. You had to right click your process and give it high or realtime if you didn't want bugs like characters disappearing.

Also the characters are animated. They blink, move, pose, everything. Ren'Py is campaigning against animated gifs and anything that can be converted from animated gif. They're heavily vigilant of them. They claim it's inferior, but so are static people or having to add a bunch of lines of code to emulate a simple animation.

NovelTY is very charming, it has a tech demo-like feel to it in that you can just click on stuff and move stuff around, it's all GUI little to no CLI which has its advantages and disadvantages. As easy as it is to develop in NovelTY it has tedious forms where you have to keep clicking new line of code and the interface isn't speedy. There's a little witchcraft in making an image with all the potential poses.

You're not asking the person who wants to play it to download a huge file and either installer it or dedicate a folder. The interface is simple, and with a decent connection the images load up fast enough, they cache and it feels seamless.

And of course complaining about the novels already up, if they're not done by the people who make the games in Ren'Py or NovelTY or other vn creators, they're a different audience. You're only gonna get the results you want if your group(s) dev in it a little bit. I personally like what's offered there. I think the users need to learn how to put characters on the left and right side more often so you don't see everyone centered all the time. Also adding music to the levels would be nice. They're not up to everyone's standards and don't follow the tropes of a traditional O.EE.Ei.W.V.L owlvanessa or whatever acronym you use to describe the original western vn, but they all hold certain charms to them and it's almost like you're thrown into a world of outsider artists that aren't influenced by what should be in a story. They just make it up as they go and though results may vary, some are quite entertaining and again require no download/installer/etc/specific operating system. At the same time you may also be wowed by downloading and installing/running because it's the case where you're more invested in what you get than just simply clicking on a link and playing it. That's a definite factor in favor of just running jquery over an xml that links to the assets and plays the presentation.

Also item use? There's tons of items integrated in it and though there's variables of getting and giving items, it's a little vague on how it could be utilized to its full potential without going overboard on the development, but it's there and just showing the item on the screen integrated like that is one step over the other VN makers I've seen and gives it another element.

Screenclicking to approach different areas. There's a part where you click on the screen to achieve different branches/locations and that's automated. For the investigative type of novel, can be utilized as well for different results.

I'm not declaring that it doesn't have its problems; pardon the double negatives. The midi playback only works in internet explorer or an internet explorer tab extension or some quicktime alternative and the right browser. That's expected to change at some point and I got confirmation a port is likely to happen. There's also developing in bassavg as well where that problem doesn't happen.

There's also other stuff like lack of cinema. I'd love for it to be able to read swf files, you know like simple movies either for characters. Depending on how you do it they could be really small and faster than animated gifs. Better quality too.

Also maybe hotlinking to other pages though I could see that making everything a little more complicated on something simply anyone can use could make it overdone for people just wanting to make something simple. It appeals to a different audience but it works.

Apologies for the bump. I thought I'd chime in. I'd also like to see a good example of what the team/people here could do in it. It's always fun to try out different venues and I've had such a fun time with both that I don't think I could have with any other VN makers.