What essential features should modern VNs today have?

[Scars Unseen]

4 hours ago, CeruleanGamer said:

Oh yeah sure it has to be more subtle. I'm not saying Neptunia executed it well but they are heading the right direction in terms of making the characters not be like a frozen tuna.

It seems like it'd be pretty easy to pull off.  Spriter Pro could do it with likely minimal effort, and there should be plenty of people that have that from the Humble Bundle that practically gave it away with some other game dev tools a while back(I really should get around to playing around with that stuff...)

[simon4811]

Anyone thinks that the GIGA system in Majikoi has everything that's listed here? I personally think that's as close to perfection as you can get in terms of features and customization. 

[Yuuko]

Amanari had pretty nice system. Too bad that I didn't like default settings and had to change pretty much everything but at least I could do it.

Spoiler

 

 

 

[EdwardWongHPTIV]

On 2/25/2016 at 11:51 AM, CeruleanGamer said:

Better solution: Dont be a premature ejaculator. Ladies irl would also love you more if you dont get off before they do.  

The irony being that it requires communication or at least knowing your partner to pull that off and he was asking for... communication (via the ui). That said you can always err on the side of caution and do plenty of foreplay.

On 2/25/2016 at 11:55 AM, Fiddle said:

Background H-scene voices.

Panic button.

Ehhh.. I have mixed feelings on background voices. I'm new to VNs so I've only run across one title with them... and they didn't work imo. They were either really subdued like BGM and didn't really add much or they were so incongruous with the scene that they were distracting. Maybe I just had a bad first experience. Probably not the best way of putting it after admitting I was recently a VN virgin.

On 2/25/2016 at 1:52 PM, CeruleanGamer said:

I wonder how much they pay sex ed teachers in Japan. Also I wonder if this has any indirect impact of why Japan has extreme birth rate decline?

Too many grass eaters. They need a moe spokesperson encouraging them to eat more meat. Turn the old people into Dashi - because soylent green is too old school.

On 2/27/2016 at 11:11 PM, Eclipsed said:

If every modern day VN had Neko Para's animated sprites Visual Novels would be renamed to Animated Novels

E-mote you mean? I'm actually kinda afraid of what Japan will do with such powers once decent AR comes on the market. Which won't be too long if investments made by Google, Qualcom?, and others is any indication. MS hololens is kinda a joke unless they are really able to improve on it's FoV, etc.

On topic -

As a newb to VNs I like the idea of a flowchart (haven't used one) just because I'm kinda paranoid I'll miss something. I mean I save at every choice and skip until unread text but it just seems a lot easier/faster/more elegant solution. It'd be equally nice if they visually indicated sections of the map that contained unread text (If they don't already). If a game is already structured in chapters it might be nice to have a plot summary that reflects your choices up until that point. Sometimes it might be nice, especially if I'm pulled away from a game for a while (days, weeks),  to have that as a reminder. If it's not chapter based then worst case you could autoplay from the last choice on the map to refresh your memory.

If you really wanted to get fancy with the flowchart you could add bookmarks. A novel with bookmarks?! Along with notes it would be nice to not only mark your favorite moments, but also keep track of say clues in a mystery. /shrug. It might seem redundant with saves but being able to visualize them within the flowchart seems useful compared to trying to figure out how you organized your save slots (again from the perspective of a hiatus or even a re-read).

Now that I think about it, it only makes sense for VNs with gameplay elements to have saveslots.

[Fred the Barber]

1 hour ago, EdwardWongHPTIV said:

As a newb to VNs I like the idea of a flowchart (haven't used one) just because I'm kinda paranoid I'll miss something. I mean I save at every choice and skip until unread text but it just seems a lot easier/faster/more elegant solution. It'd be equally nice if they visually indicated sections of the map that contained unread text (If they don't already). If a game is already structured in chapters it might be nice to have a plot summary that reflects your choices up until that point. Sometimes it might be nice, especially if I'm pulled away from a game for a while (days, weeks),  to have that as a reminder. If it's not chapter based then worst case you could autoplay from the last choice on the map to refresh your memory.

If you really wanted to get fancy with the flowchart you could add bookmarks. A novel with bookmarks?! Along with notes it would be nice to not only mark your favorite moments, but also keep track of say clues in a mystery. /shrug. It might seem redundant with saves but being able to visualize them within the flowchart seems useful compared to trying to figure out how you organized your save slots (again from the perspective of a hiatus or even a re-read).

Now that I think about it, it only makes sense for VNs with gameplay elements to have saveslots.

Comyu did a pretty good job of some of what you're asking for. What it had was:

1) you could start a game at any time from any scene you'd already seen

2) there was always a clear indication, in that "scene selection" menu, of when any scene had unread text.

But in spite of its choices, Comyu is very linear, so this kind of thing would be a little easier for it than for most games with choices. A fully-resumable flowchart would also be a little unwieldy for games which use more of an "affection points" system, where your choices only send you one way or another temporarily, with an internal counter changing and that counter ultimately deciding things like what route you're on, what ending you get, etc., Although you could do that if they made it so you could quickly fiddle with those values (just blow through the necessary choices), but that might pull you out of the immersion too much...

I like where your head's at, though - maybe we don't have an ideal answer, but there's definitely a problem to be solved here that can make for a better VN-playing experience.

[EdwardWongHPTIV]

3 minutes ago, Fred the Barber said:

Comyu did a pretty good job of some of what you're asking for. What it had was:

1) you could start a game at any time from any scene you'd already seen

2) there was always a clear indication, in that "scene selection" menu, of when any scene had unread text.

But in spite of its choices, Comyu is very linear, so this kind of thing would be a little easier for it than for most games with choices. A fully-resumable flowchart would also be a little unwieldy for games which use more of an "affection points" system, where your choices only send you one way or another temporarily, with an internal counter changing and that counter ultimately deciding things like what route you're on, what ending you get, etc., Although you could do that if they made it so you could quickly fiddle with those values (just blow through the necessary choices), but that might pull you out of the immersion too much...

I like where your head's at, though - maybe we don't have an ideal answer, but there's definitely a problem to be solved here that can make for a better VN-playing experience.

Hmmm.. yeah I guess it wouldn't work with dating sims or anything using any stat/point system to determining your route. Would it be too meta for them to show the needed values for certain routes? Err... nvm it's not necessarily a distinct A to B path. Certainly a flowchart wouldn't be a good fit. How about an interactive relation? chart? You know how some romance manga will have a page that gives a brief description of each character but also arrows indicating the relationship between each? It could graphically display the status of your relationship with any characters as well as drilling down to a display listing the scenes you've unlocked? The scene icons could be color coded to indicate if you've previously watched a scene on another playthrough vs ones you've never seen. I'm actually envisioning something akin to the diplomacy screen of endless space (I know completely unrelated genre but...). That said you'd have to keep the saves and bookmarking wouldn't really work here.

As far as Comyu goes I'm assuming you mean that a game with a greater number of branches would make for a display to crowded to have the additional scene selections? You could always do something similar to what I described above and just have the scene selection appear when you drill/zoom into the space between choices - inter-node if you will. In other words when you're zoomed all the way out all you see is the flowchart showing the choices you've made, you can pan around as needed, and when you want to see scene selections/bookmarks you can mouse wheel in or click on the line connecting two choices.

I realize this will probably take extra coding so it might a tough sell, but I think it would be worth it. Especially if you could make it flexible/extensible enough to reuse with other titles.