

A common pitfall is for an amateur prose writer to attempt this style, simply because it is the most common one and likely the default style of their engine. This type of style leads to a large emphasis on the visual aspect of the Visual Novel, so it is a terrible style to use if you suck at drawing and are more used to writing in pure prose. While this forces the writer to focus on a script-like format with little space to describe the setting or character actions, the background images or CGs can do that for you since a picture is worth a thousand words. The text is put into a defined dialog box at the bottom of the screen. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.
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How to present the text: There are multiple ways, but the two major ones are ADV (short for Adventure) or NVL (short for Novel).Even something as simple as moving a sprite left or right or the way the text is shown on the screen is important! Quartett is a great example of sublime visual presentation of the story text itself and use of visual effects to evoke emotion, and Umineko: When They Cry is a great example of using these effects to Paint The Medium even using them as a plot point. A flash here or falling snow there, can easily enhance the amount of emotion of any given scene. Visual effects cannot be used by physical books but can be used by visual novels. Special Effects: Sure, they may not seem important, but a few well-placed special effects can go a long way.Just look at Sekien no Inganock with its fancy and artsy backgrounds which complement the text and the characters. Furthermore, with self-created backgrounds, you can create your own unique atmosphere.

It's a lot of work, but hand drawn sprites just look better on hand drawn backgrounds. Backgrounds: While most people won't care if you just take real pictures and use a watercolor filter to save money on backgrounds, they are still important.Visual novels walk the border between a game and a story, from kinetic novels with no interactivity to ones with complex branching plots or detailed minigames. Presentation is important, after all.Īnother aspect you need to consider is how game-y you want your VN to be. Text and dialogue are undeniably the most important aspects of a Visual Novel, but you cannot neglect the visual or even audio aspects of them. Alternatively, there are those that are like interactive manga such as Quartett. While many can undeniably be described as that, others like Muv-Luv Alternative have Visual Effects of Awesome so prominent the action scenes are akin to movies. So visual novels are just electronic books with fancy anime pictures and music, right? Not exactly. You can also use Episode if you have a mobile device and want an easily understood coding system and/or pre-made character models that are customize-able with and include many animations. It's easily accessible even to someone with almost no coding experience, and comes with numerous helpful tutorials to get you started. While it's certainly possible to handle all this stuff yourself from scratch, there is a wonderful open source Visual Novel engine known as Ren'Py. The first place to start is the engine for the Visual Novel itself.
