A new kind of game...

[Sasuya]

Ok, I have an idea for a type of game made with Renpy.
I can't exactly call it a 'visual novel' because, well... It lacks visuals.

Well anyway. Here's my idea. The game will contain simple or no visuals at all. All it will be is text and sound. The games will describe surroundings and characters with words. The characters will be voiced by real people and lots of sound effects will be used.

The protagonist, however will have no voice, for he/she is whomever is playing the game. All he/she will do is pick choices, and a voice or sound will be the reply.

Think this would be a good idea? And if I do happen to make a game like this, will I be able to put the game in the 'completed game section' in the forums? Or would it not be classified as a ren'ai game anymore? o.O

I have a question too... Is it okay to export the BGMs and Sound Effects from one of the RPG Makers and use it for your game?

[DaFool]

That is a 'sound novel', I believe, which is a perfectly legitimate form of storytelling.

It qualifies as complete if that's how its supposed to be.

I don't know about what licence the sounds are, you better check first, otherwise use the free sounds linked in resources.

[dizzcity]

Darn, there goes one of my ideas for a future SN. Anyway, good luck with the project. I'm sure it'll turn out to be interesting. Want to try and make a Helen Keller story?

-Dizzy-

[lordcloudx]

minus the emphasis on the sound effects, this game sounds a lot like an interactive fiction like those made with TADS and Adrift.

[Sasuya]

DaFool: Great, thats a bit embarrassing... Ha ha...

dizzycity: A Helen Keller game? Probably not soon... But that is a good idea.

lordcloudx: Yeah... I guess it is >.o

Well better start making my sound novel now -_-;

[GLACIER]

That is a 'sound novel', I believe, which is a perfectly legitimate form of storytelling.

A sound novel actually includes background art. It's just missing character illustrations =)

Yeah, all these Japanese game classifications (sound novel, visual novel, ADV) are kinda pointless and strange.

[Haeleth]

And to make things even more confusing, some sound novels (such as the original Sound Novel series from Chunsoft that coined the term) have character silhouettes, just not detailed pictures.

However, most sound novels actually lack character voices, so a game that concentrated exclusively on text and voice would be quite original - I don't know if it's been done before, but it certainly hasn't been done often. :)

[PyTom]

I'm thinking that for a game that consisted only of text and sound (and menus?), that it might be interesting to play with the look of the game. Instead of an 800x600 or 640x480 window, one may want to try something like an 800x200 window.

(Or not, just throwing ideas out there.)

[monele]

How would this work when going fullscreen? Kaboom or not? (I'm thinking of LCD monitors with fixed resolutions and such)

[Jake]

How would this work when going fullscreen? Kaboom or not? (I'm thinking of LCD monitors with fixed resolutions and such)

I run an LCD monitor in portrait - 1024x1200 - and things going fullscreen tend to do one of three things:

* Nice things (Ren'Py is one of these, as are most media players) fill the screen horizontally and centre themselves vertically, leaving big black bars at the top and bottom.
* Not-so-nice things (most older programs, also things like Blue Lemma's games - are his Allegro-based, do I recall?) go fullscreen in landscape, so I have to rotate either my head or the monitor 90 degrees to see what's going on properly.
* Broken things (most recently the new Sam and Max game, for one) open a window when they're supposed to be fullscreen, and then fail to render anything into it at all.

I'd imagine you'd probably get similar results anywhere that the game's resolution was not one of the native modes of the monitor - save that I suspect the fullscreen-in-landscape is likely to not cope with non-4:3 resolutions.

[RedSlash]

If its fully voiced and has no pictures, maybe a bit of text.. would it be more worth it just to make it a mp3? But then, it would be hard when you got choices, etc..

[papillon]

.... I wonder how hard it would be to make a game with voice-recognition so you could speak the choices as well?

(Probably beyond most of us here. But it would be a cool new twist on such a game if you had to speak the PC's lines.)

[PyTom]

Hm... if someone could figure out how to train a free voice recognizer (like CMU Sphinx), then it probably wouldn't be too hard to make Ren'Py deal with the output. I just don't have the time or the inclination to figure out how to model conversations. (It's not my field.)

[Mihel]

I suppose the question is, does Ren'Py have a text parser? Because then all we need to do is find a good speech-to-text app...

Unfortunately, last I heard, there was still no such thing as a good speech-to-text app

[Sasuya]

papillion:Yeah.. It would be pretty cool to speak the lines. It would make one feel like they're actually speaking with the characters.

RedFlash:There will be pictures in the game. Probably at the end... So making it into an mp3 would cut out a lot of things I'm planning to put in. Also, like you said making choices would be hard.