Yeah! the art (well, at least the CG & sprites) will be 100% done by me! ^-^Diamonit wrote:Are you doing all the writing + the art by yourself?
This might take you a lot of time, especially considering that your art is looking really nice, I believe you probably have to put quite a lot of time to draw. Even if you somehow might have a lot of free time, I would advice you to limit the number of heroine in a first time, so that you won't get demotivated too easily by the amount of work! You should probably limit yourself with two heroines with drawn sprites, and write their routes, and after you eventually reach this point, start to draw the other heroine sprites and their routes (if the structure of your VN allows you to proceed like that of course). And I would recommend you to at least find someone to draw backgrounds for you, even though I know it's not easy to find BG artist...^^
Also, as other people before me said, the "school-life comedy drama Charage" genre is a very common genre of VN (especially in Japan). It doesn't mean it's impossible to stand out though, but you need to take care of a few things :
- Using tropes for starters is okay, but keeping and overusing tropes all along is not. You want to create a tsundere heroine? No problem, I'd say go for it, people like those type of heroines. But try to make your tsundere character stands out, by giving her some interesting quirks and characteristics. You can have stuff more or less serious, for example a girl that is more tsun against other girls in general, and more dere with boys (that would be quite interesting to write^^), having the childhood friend being blatantly flirtatious with your MC and/or abusive toward him, have the motherly girl being able to own delinquents on hand to hand fights... And the list is long!^^
- Don't neglect the personality and the backgrounds of your characters! Because they follow some tropes is not enough reason to say : "This character is secretly in love with the MC because she is his childhood friend". Try to create a real backstory for each character, even if you are not sure you will need all the details. and try to make sure the current personality of each character fits and is a result of the backstory you gave them (this is even more important if you are planning to involve some drama at some point). Try to always have multi-dimensional characters (meaning that every characters has multiple sides to them that are more or less hidden).
- The main character is probably the point where you have the highest chance to stand out if done correctly. A well thought protagonist with a deep and interesting personality is a must in this kind of settings, especially since most MC in this genre of VN are very bland. Try to give him a personality that will influence his relations with girls : Misogynous, Flirtatious, Sarcastic and Bitter, Egoistic, Delusional, Tsundere... Give him some interesting thought-patterns : lyricism / scientific-mind / Very optimistic / Very pessimistic / Inferiority or Superiority complex / irresponsible... Give your character a real ability to think and have an opinion on everything that might exist in his universe. The more his thoughts / opinions are unique, the more your game will be interesting to play.
- Character growth is a must, and not only for your heroines, it is good to have some for your protagonist as well (but not mandatory). Character means exactly what it means, your characters have to "grow", and must have learned something by the end of their journeys. The easiest way is to have them become aware of their own flaws (that you will have included in their personalities when creating the characters) as human being, and to have them get rid of it during the story. There are other ways to induce character growth, but I don't have time to expand on it unfortunately.
- Comedy is sometimes tricky to handle. I'd advice you to try to not follow too much japanese comedic patterns as eastern and western comedy are really different, and since you are creating a VN in a western community. Good comedy comes from elaborated character's personality imo.
All those advice might seem pretty obvious for you and redundant, and if they were I apologize, but hopefully at least some of the stuff I wrote will be of any help for you!
Anyway, I wish yoou the best of luck on your VN! There are not that much school-life BxG oriented VN on lemma, and it's really nice to see some people that still want to create some!
I know it is a lot of work, considering I've been commissioned for 6 sprites each with 4 full body poses before, so I think I'll be able to handle it. But you're right. It definitely may be a good idea to limit. : ) But I feel as though my story would be able to develop more with more characters. : )
Wow! thank you so much for the wonderful advice, it's tremendously helpful! ^-^
I agree with what you have said, and I'll try to work on my problem areas more.
Thank you again!!! ^-^