Every now and then I remember that visual novels are REALLY COOL and wonder just how minimalist I could with the visuals—stick figures? collage?—and then I have to remind myself that I already need to hand in four books this year.
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Not that the time issue is in any way solvable, but if the visuals are a problem, you could make an interactive fiction novel? All the text and choices (and if you use Twine as your engine, plenty of customizable options like layout/backgrounds/style/music if you want) and doable just with writing!
Plus with text it's a lot easier to add more choices than when you have to have the visuals to compensate. I'm a big VN (otome) fan and interactive fiction scratches a similar itch. The Wayhaven Chronicles is probably one of the most well known but for style, Wayfarer is amazing, plays like D&D <3
The love child of a book & a PowerPoint presentation. Often uses minimal animation of character artwork with changes of expression over stock backgrounds.
Often written with semi-branching storylines depending on specific choices. The medium is heavily used for dating sim/romance genre stories.
This makes me think of the Open Sorcery games by Abigail Corfman - you play as a sentient "firewall" fire elemental bound to a protective computer program, and set to watch over the people your creators love! Very gripping, minimal illustrations, mostly ASCII art! https://abigailcorfman.com/Home/OpenSorcery
jon bois made an incredibly compelling story (a personal favorite!) out of pictures of satellites, old digitized newspapers, and videos from google maps
There's Greek Myfh Comics too; & Dinosaur Comics (which is itself a different sort of minimalism)
as much as the most detailed can show countless adornings & bear no message, as great as that lack of message one can lack in forms & be as rich as that first was in gilt to be in meaning
Look up The Failed Promise of Bradley Gethers. The entire comic is tiny panels and all the characters are just . (dots). It's incredibly effective in telling a story.
There are pretty great examples of visual novels. The Ace Attorney series; Zero Escape, and I suspect Fate/Stay/Night is good as a VN as well.
The best with branching have ending progress--where the non-linearity is part of the plot and there's a reason why the best endings need to be unlocked.
I mean, I thought probably. Wasn't sure where the line about tears was going tbh. since it's obvious that vn formats can engage well, so jumped to the branching path problem.
Higurashi is very good though the illustrations are....bad. Works fine as an anime because of how they order the arcs. I'm told Umineko needs to be played, but haven't managed to.
I saw a Visual Novel on Steam which was extremely minimalist on imagery.
The characters weren't stick figures, they were worked on more than that, but they were less detailed than Steven Universe.
The Novel did great because of the engaging storyline, multiple endings, and dialogue options.
I'd have to look it up by searching through Steam's visual novel section.
I can't remember the name, I only remember the art style and store description for the game, the game never interested me at all because I wasn't looking for visual novels but for some reason Steam reccomended it for me.
It was Black and White btw... and just to be clear in order to give numerous endings and multiple dialogue options providing real results you'd need a giant messload of work done into the game by coding in the numerous variable and effects of the variables to branch the storyline...
Stick Figure VN is a common in-joke in my VN dev community. The medium really is wide open and I love it for that, especially as our reader base is expanding past folks who will only accept manga-style art.
I would happily do filtered photos for backgrounds, no problem. It’s just all the sprites that have to match—you can’t put stick figures on photos, or at least I can’t.
Script/layout by you, finals by someone else could be an interesting compromise too.
Also probably a similar amount of work as a stick figure comic so, yeah, get those fingers back on the keys lady, mmmmaybe hack up a pitch and see if your agent can get it in the pipe for the next few years...
(also of course does having someone else draw it scratch the "I want to tell a story with pictures" itch, and how many ways will you find to make what's supposed to be a simple task complicated...)
You can certainly start there, and then only flesh it out as much as you want after you finish writing it? Because as far as actually encoding the thing goes, last year I went from "I wonder if I can learn Ren'Py?" to sending my friends a test game in two hours flat.
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Often written with semi-branching storylines depending on specific choices. The medium is heavily used for dating sim/romance genre stories.
(Don't get me wrong, if you do a visual novel I'll totally read it. But yeah, not a path to be lightly undertaken.)
as much as the most detailed can show countless adornings & bear no message, as great as that lack of message one can lack in forms & be as rich as that first was in gilt to be in meaning
The best with branching have ending progress--where the non-linearity is part of the plot and there's a reason why the best endings need to be unlocked.
Higurashi is very good though the illustrations are....bad. Works fine as an anime because of how they order the arcs. I'm told Umineko needs to be played, but haven't managed to.
Looking forward to your upcoming books.
It does NOT produce the picture you describe. It doesn’t even get human anatomy right.
The characters weren't stick figures, they were worked on more than that, but they were less detailed than Steven Universe.
The Novel did great because of the engaging storyline, multiple endings, and dialogue options.
I can't remember the name, I only remember the art style and store description for the game, the game never interested me at all because I wasn't looking for visual novels but for some reason Steam reccomended it for me.
Personally as a very huge huge book worm, idc, gimme an enticing story ill eat up anything
Would it be possible to do a visual novel entirely composed of bird photos you have taken?
The crucifixion ones were particularly odd.
Also probably a similar amount of work as a stick figure comic so, yeah, get those fingers back on the keys lady, mmmmaybe hack up a pitch and see if your agent can get it in the pipe for the next few years...