How would you design a VN?

[Tom]

If you had the money, team and will to make your very own Visual Novel what would it be like?

[Guest]

Well I'll post more once I'm finished thinking about it, but i'm pretty sure i'd do a Romance, psychology, mystery Vn with a few riddles  and many choices.

In a deep and well contrasted setting, jumping from a sunny to a dark atmosphere.

A long VN : 80 hours or so.

[Nosebleed]

Romance. Slice of life. And a lot, LOT of lolis. In fact all heroines will be lolis. And they're all the protagonists' imoutos. And there's an unlockable harem ending. And surprisingly enough they'll all have an awesome arc with backstory and drama believe it or not. 

If only this was physically possible..

[DeadIEnd]

I'd design something ambitious. A combination of VN and open world FPS-RPG gameplay. It will be Sci Fi + Horror + Fantasy + Psychological and will take place in the year 4036 in a world that suffered 3 apocalypses. There will be 3 protagonists: 1 male, 1 female and 1 more genderless creature (that will be unlocked after finishing the first two stories). The art will be 3D-2D cell shading and will resemble Huke's art. The OST will have great variety from Pop, to Metal to Electronic to Hip Hop. It will have time travel, alternate worlds, reincarnation story elements and a time loop subplot. The female and male protagonist will have romance between them in a route called "The abridged Sunshine". The last route called "Blaze of the last apocalypse" will have an epic conclusion that will make the fans go wild. It will be scored 9.90 on VNDB and many gaming sites will give it a perfect score, and everyone will praise it.

 

I just came up with all this just now. Forgive me if it was too unrealistic to actually make it happen; I always like to imagine things like that.

[FruitsPunchSamurai]

Mines would have a Masochistic/submissive Protagonist, lot's of sadistic heroines. There would be mostly reverse rape and sex where the females are dominant. It'll be an overall story with an awesome mastermind behind everything. It would have one true end, some heroine good endings and lot's of bad ends as well.

[Undying]

Im actually with the ideia of making one with a Dark Souls type of atmosphere, but I still trying to think things through, I do enjoy the idea of an opressive atmosphere with sinister characters.

[Yeah Way]

It'd be a typical highschool setting for the most part. The most important thing to me would be to make the protag a foreign exchange student, for all us westerners looking for a great RP experience. ^^ After that, put in some beautiful heroines, good writing, H-scenes; and we're good to go.

[Izuru]

Romance~, Tragedy,~ Anti-Hero Protagonist~, And The Visual Novel Should Have A Fight Scene's~

[Helvetica Standard]

I started last year on my own. Back then I only had my bones...

I came across this page: http://www.renpy.org/

 

And then I began, first I learned how to program and script, then I showed my prototype, then people joined, then I had a team

and last thing you know my project has evolved a lot.

You don't actually need money, and the community will always help. The will? yes.

And plenty of patience and dedication.

 

My advice: Go for it. The sky's the limit.

As for what platform to use, Ren'py has everything you need to get started. :3

[Clephas]

I have a ridiculous amount of brainstorming for settings lying around... mostly brutal stuff.  Sometimes a female protag, other times male (it is about 60/40 female/male).  I just don't have the time to actually write them out like I used to... I once wrote out an entire vn, got an artist (who bailed on me a week later when someone offered him a paying job) and a programmer (who also bailed, when he heard the artist left). 

 

I pretty much write fantasy or sci-fi exclusively... and I usually mix in a lot of superviolence and gore.  Also, infodumping... I have a bad habit of infodumping.  lol

[AqworldThunder]

I'd have a really strong douchebag type character (Like Rance for example) running around raping lolis. The story would be him pretty much running from the government as he rapes every loli alive, I dunno why but that seems like it would be so damn entertaining to play. The soundtrack would be full of compositions by Yuki Kajiura and Joe Hisashi. It would have a story that takes over 5000+ hours to beat with like a hundred good endings and one bad ending in which the protagonist figures out he rapes all the lolis and killed himself.

[Tom]

i do have many ideas, this is one of them:

the idea is to mindfuck you as much as possible. nothing for weak hearts. it would probably get banned soon after release because of the high amount of violence and gore.

playtime around 20 hours.

 

a group of VERY evil people doing VERY nasty things.

i would try to show the most possible evil behaviour a human can come up with. torture level: over the top would be a nice thing to say compared to what it would be like

 

what do you hope to achieve with this?

people do very cruel things all over the world. they have no shame, no morals. earth is hell at certain places. most of us dont even comprehend whats happening outside our nice living rooms.

words can nolonger explain, why not show it in a VN.

[AqworldThunder]

i do have many ideas, this is one of them:

the idea is to mindfuck you as much as possible. nothing for weak hearts. it would probably get banned soon after release because of the high amount of violence and gore.

playtime around 20 hours.

 

a group of VERY evil people doing VERY nasty things.

i would try to show the most possible evil behaviour a human can come up with. torture level: over the top would be a nice thing to say compared to what it would be like

 

what do you hope to achieve with this?

people do very cruel things all over the world. they have no shame, no morals. earth is hell at certain places. most of us dont even comprehend whats happening outside our nice living rooms.

words can nolonger explain, why not show it in a VN.

Wait... can a visual novel even be banned? I mean Saya's Song had a shit ton of gore and it's there. 

[Tom]

Wait... can a visual novel even be banned? I mean Saya's Song had a shit ton of gore and it's there. 

 

yes, certain things can get banned, some movies for example (i do remember a few japanese movies that got ban)

 

i did not see saya no uta as gore at all. they did not show any mutilated corpses or hardcore stuff

[Yukiru]

It would be a saga, the first game being the same story told from many characters perspectives, then the prequel telling the story of the characters' pasts as the second game and finally the epilogue as a third and last game.

The first two being kinetic visual novels and the last one having a third person narrative with a few choices (and the limited edition with epilogue with first person narrative and artbook).

 

The genre would be horror themes with some romance to add spice to the ending, Obviously chu2 but without superpowers.

I'm not sure if i would make it an eroge, but it would most likely have sexual themes, i'd like to make H implicit but mindfuck comes together with explicity.

[ServeTheServant]

I would basically design a choose-your-own-adventure novel set in western middle ages, with magic.  Plot changing choices every 5 minutes.  Epic bad ends.  Kings, quests, monsters, tournaments, monstergirls, giant turkey legs -- it'd have it all.

 

It'd have a secret ending that you could only get by answering every single decision with the dumbest possible choice, which leads to a harem ending with all 100+ female characters mentioned in the entire plot.

[Scars Unseen]

I was working on a children's novel about a kid that discovers a time traveling device.  I ended up quitting when I realized that some of the stuff I was writing could possibly give kids nightmares.  It could work out as a visual novel instead...

[Oxidian]

Romance toradora style + yandere and splatter.

Best combination you could ever get.

[krill]

my idea is a self parody

 

the setting would be a fictional modern city taking place roughly 5 years in the future. the protage would be a hikikomori who during the prologue is forced to leave the safety of his apartment and look for work as his older sister refuses to pay his bills any more. then move in to your first real choice which of several possible jobs you take. these jobs will unlock the setting and heroine routes for the first chapter and include a dinner with a cute waitress, a otaku centered retail store with a female boss (oba-san type), a job as a gopher in a small office with a sadistic office lady heroine, a school janitor with a loli student heroine, an amusement park with a delusional chunni style girl, a bookshop with a meganekko girl who is obsessed with books about tragic romance, a bartender at a nightclub with a goth loli type heroine, and finally grounds keeping at a local shrine with a miko heroine. the game will have gameplay elements in the form of mini games one for each job that unlock money and prizes used to make your ability to date the heroine better. but if you get bad enough scores you can get fired and abandon the current route. there will be a points system that determine how much the heroine is won over by you and depending on if you get fired and are forced on to a new route can cause the girl to possibly go yandere on you leading to bad ends. also there will be many other bad ends because i like bad ends and think you don't get a games true experience without playing all endings. i would add in a option to turn of h scenes in the configuration menu. there would be eight main heroines with unlockable routes for side heroines such as his onee-sama and imouto as well as possible girls met during the initial routes these mini routes are more of bonus content features then relevant to the main story line .

[Clephas]

VNs tend to touch on sex, even if they don't touch on violence.  In most western countries, portraying sex is a taboo to one degree or another.

[Supah Kawaii Weeaboo]

If I were creating an indie VN... I'd want to research the market first. It seems logical to understand what computer games people are buying, and what stories people enjoy. It would also make sense to make sure the recruited artist's style is appropriate to the story's tone and theme.

 

Here's an interesting goal for an indie team: create an adventure story in which the player has a variety of non-mandatory romance options available. It's worked in a variety of WRPGs and Persona 3-4, and I think it can work again.

 

...And then I began, first I learned how to program and script, then I showed my prototype, then people joined, then I had a team

and last thing you know my project has evolved a lot.

You don't actually need money, and the community will always help. The will? yes.

And plenty of patience and dedication.

 

Very true. Step #1 is inspiration. Steps #2-99 are perspiration. In other words, it takes work to create a visual novel. And it never hurts to be quite interested in your story.

[InvertMouse]

If anyone out here is truly interested in building a VN, you can do it! Even if you're not a programmer, there are things like Renpy to help you out. I've made a couple of VNs for zero dollars all by myself. Of course, I also had all the time in the world back then, too. There was no such thing as Kickstarter back then. Not sure why there are so many projects asking for tens of thousands of dollars these days. You can do it !

[OriginalRen]

I can do anything if I try! I will make Flutterz marry me!

[Stoppy]

I'm actually working on a VN right now. I don't want to give away too much and spoil the story, but I'll try and say what I can. Note that the Novel Itself is only about half done so when it is finally released it may be a bit different that I describe here. i'm not the only one working on it after all.

 

First off, it's a yandere visual novel. I find the concept of yandere very appealing. It's a mix of conviction and insanity all in one. I suppose what really interests me is trying to create these absolutely manic and creepy characters both interesting and original. It's easy to say "she's batshit insane, that's why she cut off her boyfriend's cock because he looked at another girl". It's much harder to give them an interesting and believable motivation that isn't just mental illness. It's also pretty easy to have girls go into full Rena with a cleaver insane mode, but much harder to make their behaviors subtle and unsettling in more muted fashions. And it's also much harder to do with three heroines, which is what I'm going for.

 

There's a sister character, a girlfriend character (you actually start the game with a girlfriend), and kind of love rival character. Of course these are really just their relationships to the characters. As far as personality goes I think they will respectively be something along the lines of doting, intelligent, and energetic. But really those are just one dimensional summaries of their characters.

 

Appearance and aesthetic area also very important. Too many visual novels look like they could have all been drawn by the same person, the art styles are so homogeneous. I'm not saying it's bad to draw an average looking character, but I don't want them in my novel. So what I'm planning for (my sister is actually working on the art (no, she does not call me onii-chan) as it's planned for now, but that may change) is to make the characters look like they're paper cut outs of drawings, kinda like the witch's den scenes from Madoka Magica or the execution scenes from Danganronpa.

 

I also prefer games with text like Tsukihime that covers the whole screen (there's a term for it but I can't quite remember). I find that that technique actually allows you to see more of the art, because your eyes are always focused on the screen where the art is, instead of just at the bottom of the screen where none of the art can be appreciated.  I also don't like save, load, skip keys covering the screen, so there will be a single master key that opens the menu for all of these choices.

 

Sound is also very important. I've got quite a few pieces of the soundtrack picked out and there isn't a single one that could be called "happy" sounding. They're muted at best and downright droning at worst. This is not a happy game. This is a game made to eat at people's very souls. Music can accomplish that faster than any other medium (ever listen to the full Metal Machine Music album?) and as a supplement to my own visual novel I think it should be fairly effective. It's all classical sounding though. Things that are inherently rhythmic or arrhythmic like flavors of techno just don't do solemn well.

 

Sex? Nah, not really. I don't have much interest in the sex of visual novels honestly. A few visual novels do it quite well and make it a part of the story (Forest comes to mind) but this novel isn't really about sex so much as it is about kinds of love. True love, deep love, false love, etc.

 

As for plot and premise goes, it's writhe with twists, turns, flash backs, flash forwards, etc. It's supernatural but there's very little emphasis on the magic or anything like that. Rather, the supernatural dealings are used as a medium to pose hypothetical scenarios for the characters to act out. As far as the magic goes, I actually take a few pages from Type-Moon's book here. Magus families, power comes from eyes (and exclusively eyes), different families have different kinds of magic, etc. But it's all in modern times though.

 

As for routes, three girls, three routes. A good and bad ending for each girl and one other ending called the worse ending. The branching and flagging system is a bit different though. If you miss your chance with the first girl, you continue a common arc to the second, and if you miss her then the third, and if you miss her you get the worse end. However, good endings can only be obtained by setting flags obtained prior to entering the heroines routes. I'll try and stay away from blind choices (IE, go to roof or cafeteria to eat lunch, depending on where you go you'll trigger flags for certain girls, even though you had no way of anticipating where the girls would be) and keep most of the choices moral or something like that. But it won't be filled with too many choices. I have my own story to tell after all.

 

Sigh, this post is much longer that I intended it to be and I don't want to delete it. Well, here you go. This is what I'm working on, this is what I want to see.

[Guest loppez]

i would like to see a vn with more western standards. 95% of japanese vns share the same characters, schematic plot (at least new, after 2005). i mean almost everywhere we have 3 types - stupid, friendly, shy. something fresh would be great and this how i would design a vn. plot by western writer, where characters are not the same.