iOS visual novel engine [C++,iPad]

[bunny.jessican]

UPDATE: the first VN to use this engine is out ( http://www.invisibleapartment.com ) - it's been approved by Apple more than two weeks ago & is live from last week. Now I'm making the core compatible with Cocos2DX to go cross platform.

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Hi everyone.

I've been developing mobile apps for several years now and I also like to read visual novels. For me the best platform for reading anything is my iPad mini. The MacBook seems to be too heavy when lying in bed in the evening

In general there is a lack of visual novels for the iPad and for tablets in general. There is also a lack of platform specific features in the visual novel engines we have. I don't know Python, so for me it's been simpler to create a slim engine from scratch than hack in the features I needed into Ren'Py.

My engine currently supports social sharing right from within the app:



so that you can tell others what you are reading.

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and off course the usual:



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I'll add more screenshots in the next days.

The engine was developed for the Invisible Apartment visual novel - http://www.invisibleapartment.com
there is a thread also here on http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... 43&t=26495

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Please let me know if there are others who'd like to use / want a visual novel engine tailored for iOS / iPad.
This is somewhat unusual, since it's a tablet first engine - but that's simply the area I come from

The core of the engine is coded in C++ - that's the parser of the script, which is in XML, so the core is quite portable. I guess that someone might want to port it over to Android. I myself will try to do Windows.

What's supported:

- well you can pretty much do all that's done in Dysfunctional Systems

- background can be split into separate moving layers (endless left-right movement, opacity) - so you can for example have a city behind the window move / make an effect of changing perspective
- broken light effect, effect of the background twitching, etc. (effects either per scene or per page)
- transitions of overlays / characters
- music effects
- text appearing on the screen
- embedded videos - so that you can play a video somewhere during the story
- social sharing
- multiple timelines, choices (you can define a script that moves between timelines)
- saving, quick saving, quick loading

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I'll be releasing more info on the engine & where I'm taking it soon.

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Here's the Invisible Apartment visual novel running on the engine on an iPad mini.



The thing is stable & production ready.

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[Rozume]

Oooh, this looks promising! I'm sure there are plenty of people, myself included, who would like to make Visual Novel tailored for the iOS.

Good luck with the engine!

[2dt]

Excited that you're sharing this so soon. Wish you the best.

[netravelr]

As C++ is my primary programming language, I would also be interested in this engine if the source was available to work with, especially if someone writes a RenPy to XML converter. Depending on how you format it that could be something I could write.

I think Twitter would be a good social to add, as I know I'm more likely to do that than facebook due to it being fully integrated with iOS.

Great work so far though!

[bunny.jessican]

I agree with adding Twitter - I'll just need to look into the available sdks a bit more
I'll need to find a few days to make it work nicely I believe.

As social media goes the next step is to do something like SoundCloud to not just enable you to post what you're doing and promote the work itself, but to be able to see other people's reactions on a per page basis.