EternalAmbiguity, so at 1st screen effects are: blurring and mist? Mist placed as I see at whole picture, not according to rain lines.
I don’t really understand what you’re saying. But the important thing there is not the effects, but the actual art. The two individuals closely touching one another, showing folds in the fabric of their clothes. The long hair draped over the girl’s body. The mutliple tree designs. There’s no way you can pull all that out of a free asset without extensive rework, if you can do it at all.
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Well I can say that backgrounds problem can be considered as solved, now I am looking for characters, maybe character artist at enthusiasm, but at the present I’m going o use free images again. My project is a story oriented short kinetic visual novell. While I learn coding I calmly port my story to 3d adventure (like Firewatch). But 1st version will be at Renpy. Coding requires much time to learn syntax -methods, constructors, etc, where is dot and where is “:” or at the left or at the right side must be placed new inherited, I can compare this work with sites building with those css - like “programming texts in MS WORD” - you can click by mouse at style buttons but you are forced to write statements. Lots of formal technical information. Need for “high level solutions” for story writers. It annoys mush if you don’t do great program but just short deep story… And no any high level solution. This stopped me studing programming long time ago, but now, it all seems not so difficult now after years, it was hard to learn by youth. Why Unity not UE - cuz I have not so poweful PC, and Unity has more assets as I suppose.
Just keep in mind that the audience that regularly plays visual novels will expect a certain degree of quality. If you fail to match it they will just quit your game and leave you a negative review. Very few will waste their time with it the quality that will come from using free assets.
If you plan on selling your visual novel I recommend finding an artist to collaborate with.
That’s a very bad idea.
Visual novels mean certain very high quality art standard, and majority of western games fail to meet it. Free art is not going to cut it, pretty much.
For example, this is “alright” art:
Muv-Luv from steam.
PsychoPass anime:
This is bad art:
Umineko - the game is good, but art could use an upgrade.
This is pretty much what you should aim at. Good quality:
Nightshader from steam:
And this is another take on high quality:
Because character have limited animation and can blink.
Western visual novels usually fall into “bad art” category, though lately there were few higher quality games released.
You definitely need an artist.
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And please make sure your assets are free and not stuff you get off google or out of other people’s games…or from screenshots of other people’s art. It is a serious newbie mistake that everything you see on the internet is free unless there is a price tag attached.
Copyright violations can take you down fast and hurt your reputation.
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I wouldn’t call Psycho-Pass “okay” art. I think it’s very good (if a little odd when it comes to a few women). It’s just not in that same style as otomes tend to be. Otomes tend to have a much…I don’t know the word, but more flowery type of art, like in your images.
I wouldn’t necessarily use character animation to denote “good.” Pixel Fade’s new VN Crystalline has quite a bit of character animation (and boob physics, because of course), but is still an OELVN, with that uniquely different (poor?) art style.
http://www.pixelfade.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Live2D-Teaser.mp4?_=1
We’re starting to talk about apples vs oranges.
The reason why I labeled last example as good, because it has higher fidelity visible in motion, and significantly larger amount of artwork (sepearte close/far distance sprites, animation, etc). You pretty much need to see it.
The reason why I labeled psychopass as “okay”, because even though it matches anime look, anime in general tends to have abbreviated slightly simplified art style. Plus the quality of cg scenes was not that high (based on screens).
Otome is just a random example of decent visual quality I managed to find. Another example of good art style would be persona 4 or sakura taisen character art from PS2.
Basically… sprites are big, detailed, there are a lot of them, there’s a lot of backgroudns, which are hand-drawn down to every detail without a rush. Then again… sakura taisen and persona 4 are very high budget games.
By the way, one easy way to spot western visual novel is shoddy/rushed linework and poor handling of shading wit with rushed/quick gradients which occasionally scream “low quality deviant art drawing”.
Japanese stuff almost always has extreme attention to quality of lines and gradients, to the point where there’s doesn’t seem to be any random errors, rogue pixels, or out of place details. As I said, western games usually fail to meet the same quality standard, though in recent years there were more new games appearing that reach “normal” visual novel art quality. Sunrider was a good example of decent character art, though style is still slightly different from what you’d normally expect to see.
On related note, decent/good westernized art could look like this, for example:
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Found it. here…
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Seems moderately useful. I like the flowchart style, rather than having to keep everything in a script in Renpy. A few things seem moderately strange, like there not seeming to be a way to go back and re-read lines (typically scrolling a mouse wheel up), and Esc skipping lines instead of bringing up a menu (though that might have been just one specific demo).
I imagine keeping track of flags would be a ton simpler too, though I’m not sure if it’s integrated into the asset.
I might try bringing a scene I threw together in Renpy into this and see how much simpler it will be (if at all).
Fungus seems pretty good. Pretty straightforward to create characters, dialog, add music, use variables (which is rather nice for big choice and consequence stuff).
The flowchart system is rather neat (and something I rather prefer to the scripting “interface” of working with Renpy), but it’s a little wonky. For example, I have a choice in my story that simply changes a variable but continues the same way (for the time being). In Fungus adding a choice means you’re forced to split off into multiple directions, and getting both back to the same place (without an additional menu choice) is a little tricky.
I would say the visual approach of Fungus is really good for a beginner (or for someone like myself who simply prefers the visual approach), but Renpy is probably kind of better for a beginner because while it does require delving a teensy bit into scripting for the actual writing, it takes care of the menu stuff–along with a number of standard options like text speed, volume options, and rollback. If you create a new Renpy project and “launch” it, you have a VN. Without the “visual” part and without the “novel” part, but it takes care of the basics more than Fungus does.
Kind of a mixed bag. I’m tempted to start working with Fungus now, though.
No way that I can see to change font though, and this default font needs to go. Urgh.
neginfinity,
thanks for help, actually I clearly understand importance of drawings in anime style visual novels. Graphical story has wider meaning.