Tulip

Visual novels are fun. Trying to predict the future is also fun. Therefore, I've been trying to build up a community of people trying to predict the future specifically on the topic of visual novels! More specifically, there's a site, Manifold, whose core thing is crowdsourced predictions: everyone who joins gets a bunch of play-money (to be clear: fake internet money, not real currency); they can bet it on predictions regarding what might happen in the future; those bets get aggregated into estimates of how likely the bet-upon future events are, based on what odds people are willing to bet at; and then, once the future events come around and the true answers become clear, people who were better at predicting future events' likelihood tend to get more returns on their bets, gaining more play-money and making their way up the site leaderboards. It's fun! So I've been creating a bunch of questions-open-for-people-to-bet-on related to visual novels there! Examples include: Will Ciconia: When They Cry Phase 2 be released by the end of 2025? How soon after the release of Fate/stay night Remastered will there be a working fan-patch to re-add the sex scenes? What route order will be enforced in Tsukihime -The other side of red garden-? ...et cetera. (There are a bunch more, ~all listed on the site's Visual Novels topic page.) Currently, Manifold doesn't seem to have very much visual novel fan-community-presence. Not many people there are asking visual-novel-related questions, and not many people are betting on the ones that are asked. But it seems to me that there's lots of potential for more! There are lots more VNs about which interesting questions can be asked than just the ones I personally take enough interest in to open questions about on the site; there are lots more VN-fans who might have good predictive insights on the questions already open; et cetera. So I figure it's worth pointing people at the site from here, as an attempted step towards building a relatively-more-robust VN-fan-community there.

In the short-term: good only for things which the AI is actually good at. The current state of the art in AI-generated visual art is already pretty good. It can pretty easily be used to generate high-quality backgrounds; it can potentially, depending on the broader artistic considerations at play, be used for CGs as well; and I suspect that there exist ways to get it to do even sprites to a reasonably-okay degree of quality, although I myself haven't yet learned the techniques. But AI-generated writing, currently, is pretty consistently unimpressive. While authors have found various clever ways of incorporating AI into their workflows in small ways—as a source of sentence-continuations to get unstuck (followed by totally overwriting the likely-not-very-good sentences the AI wrote), or as a source of character-names, or suchlike—we're still a long ways off from having any text-AI tools that can generate actual high-quality storytelling. Perhaps we'll be there some day, but for now, I don't expect any VN that makes extensive use of AI-written text to end up particularly well-written. Voice acting is somewhere in between the two, going by the AI voices I've encountered thus far. Noticeably worse than human voice actors, for now, with less grasp of timing and of emotional nuance; but still potentially better-than-nothing, for some readers. (And, of course, in any modern VN engine, readers for whom AI-generated voices are grating can always just turn off the voice audio-track, so there's not as much harm done by voices which only some readers like as by text or art which only some readers like.) I'm sufficiently uninformed on the current state of AI-generated music that I lack opinions here. I'd be interested in learning more, if anyone in this thread happens to know things about the current state-of-the-art tools available to the public AI-music-wise! (And probably eventually we'll get some real options emerging even for AI animation, but that seems a ways off still. Although 'a ways off' is, perhaps, less significant than it sounds, with how quickly AI-development has been happening lately.) Overall, then, I think the state of my opinions on use-of-AI-in-visual-novels, relative to the current state of the tech, is that it can be used for some parts of a VN much better than for other parts. The only area where I currently expect AI to actually compete quality-wise with non-AI creative tooling, right now, is visual art; for everything else, I expect AI to be—for now—purely the budget option, usable by creators who would otherwise be unable to pull together anything at all (e.g. for voice acting, which is otherwise expensive-and-logistically-challenging to set up) but not likely to produce VNs anywhere near as good as those created by more traditional techniques. For art in specific, I do expect VN-artists to be able to make pretty good use of AI in place of older tools in many cases, and expect the art-quality of low-budget VNs to be raised thereby. (Certain social spheres are big on claiming that there are ethical issues of some sort around use of AI art. The more-sensible ones on the basis of its causing technological unemployment for artists, increasing the abundance of quality art for the common person and thus reducing the market for specialized art-creators; the less-sensible ones on the basis of very implausible copyright-related claims, which if taken seriously would imply that a human drawing art inspired by the work of another artist is inherently in violation of that artist's copyright even if the art is different in all the particulars. I grant that the technological unemployment is going to happen, and that it will be a downside of the spread of AI-art; but I have a very hard time seeing "this product becomes more abundant, to the detriment of those who were profiting off of its scarcity" as being a bad thing overall, even if it's bad for a subset of people. The world is richer for the existence of cheap mass-produced clothing, despite the Luddites' objections and efforts to slow the adoption of the machinery that enabled that mass-production and despite the losses that many of the aforementioned Luddites genuinely suffered as a result of that mass-production; I would be very surprised if it ended up going any differently with art, or with whatever other media cheaply-accessible AI next moves into being seriously-competitive-with-human-creators-in.) In the long-term: AI tooling is likely to become competitive with traditional tooling, while more accessible to the general public, in increasingly-many media. Even if visual art is, for now, the only medium where it can really keep up, I expect that to change eventually, letting increasingly many of the multimedia elements of VN-creation be done via AI. As this process progresses, it will become increasingly practical for small teams or even individual hobbyists to create VNs of a scale and quality that was previously only reachable by large well-paid teams. This increased ease-of-production will, in turn, increase the accessibility of such VNs to readers: there will be more good stuff for us to read, much as the self-publishing revolution has led to greater abundance of high-quality traditional prose novels. (Along with lots of lower-quality ones; but it's not hard to skip past and not-read those, benefiting from the upside without substantial downside. I expect similar things to happen in the VN-sphere: the importance of reviews, and other such curation tools, will go substantially upward, since they'll become a core means by which people can find the good stuff amid the flood of less-good stuff.) On the whole, I expect this to be a pretty straightforwardly good thing. The more VNs are made, the more good VNs will be made, and even if it takes some effort to sift the good ones out from the bad, it will lead ultimately to a richer and more-fulfilling range of options for VN-readers. (Meanwhile, from the creators' side, I expect it to be an era of unprecedented flourishing for the small non-financially-motivated creators who, through their AI-use, can create VNs of vastly-larger scale and quality than would otherwise have been accessible to them. But, meanwhile, it will likely be an era of substantially harsher competition for the more-financially-motivated creators. Much as in the visual-art case, I expect this to be pretty straightforwardly to the benefit of the world overall, but with costs to those who are particularly benefiting from the current shape of the market.)

I'll second Highway Blossoms, as already recommended by someone earlier; it has very high-quality character-writing-and-development. Also, off in the space of recommendations not already made elsewhere in this thread: We Know the Devil. Made by the same team that subsequently did Heaven Will Be Mine, and still my favorite of their VNs, despite HWBM's relatively-larger scope and broader popularity. WKTD is a short VN which manages to be very efficient about conveying a high-impact story in a small space. Three teenagers in a Christian summer camp spend a night staying up late in a cabin together, having compellingly-messy relationships with each other and with the world around them and very much not neatly fitting into the social boxes everyone around them is trying to push them towards. (And also the devil is involved.)

Hi! I'm Tulip. After a few years of being scared off by all the casual spoilers flying around, I've finally decided to take the plunge into joining this forum; I'm still likely to be cautious in my browsings, given worry about those, but I figure given some cautious browsing it should at least be possible to have worthwhile interactions here while avoiding spoilers, and given its being possible I figure I should give it a shot! I have, perhaps, a somewhat weird history with visual novels, in that... I get the impression that a lot of people have clear memories of how they got into the medium? But I really don't. I know I started getting into visual novels no later than 2017—I specifically remember that, around the end of that year, I got the first five Higurashi chapters in a Humble Bundle, and by that time had enough prior experience with relatively-short OELVNs that I remember having found Higurashi Chapter 1 strikingly not-what-I-was-used-to in its visuals and pacing—but I don't remember much in the way of specifics of which VNs I'd [played/read]* prior to that point in order to form those initial impressions. Regardless, I've been getting increasingly into the medium as time has gone on. Early highlights among VNs, for me, included We Know the Devil (late 2018), Heart of the Woods (early 2019), and Umineko (early-to-mid 2019). Around the end of 2020, I started Fate/stay night, which turned out to be a very good idea, because that's now pretty solidly one of my all-time favorite works of fiction, with only one other story particularly in competition with it for the top spot; that, in turn, got me into the rest of the Type-Moon VNs (of which I've now read all except Mahoyo, and will be reading Mahoyo as soon as my copy of it arrives at the end of the month). And then, in mid-2022, I started hanging out in VN-fan corners of tumblr—or, well, mostly I just started following toskarin, but she sure does do a lot of VN-fan-blogging—and that's gotten me even deeper into the medium; probably the majority of my fiction-consumption in the second half of 2022 was made up of visual novels, and I expect that pattern to continue into 2023. Meanwhile, off on the creative side of things, I've been forming various half-baked plans for potential future VNs—held back, thus far, mostly by my chronic inability to convert writing ideas into prose, but that problem is a work-in-progress which I'm expecting to solve sooner or later—and also accumulating ideas for visual novel engine-design which I hope to eventually publish in one form or another. Both of these are slow going, not necessarily going to bear fruit soon, but I'll get there sooner or later. And, off on the community-contribution side of things, I maintain a small Discord channel for visual novel discussions, as well as being the emergency backup admin for the visualnovels Dreamwidth community, and I have ambitions of continuing to scale up from here! Because visual novels really are very good, as a medium, and there's a lot of valuable work to be done both in drawing in more VN-fans (thus helping make VNs be a lucrative business to work in, thus helping more of them be created and translated) and in improving the state of community resources and patches for those VNs which already exist. And this forum seems like a place with its share of likeminded people, in these fields! So I look forward to spending time here and hopefully being able to help some such projects along. * We really need some better verb for consumption-of-visual-novels than either 'play' or 'read'. At some point when I'm feeling particularly linguistically inclined, I plan to go invent some etymologically-plausible term which more properly captures what it is we're doing, then do my best to popularize it in as much of the English-speaking VN-sphere as I can reach.

This was a fun survey! I look forward to seeing the results, once they're all in. Do you have a good idea of when / how you're likely to publish the results, once the survey is done? Or is that still up-in-the-air, currently?