What I Learned Judging 200+ Visual Novels
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- Опубліковано 1 сер 2024
- I was a judge for the largest Visual Novel Game Jam to date, and many novice developers fell into the same mistakes and pitfalls. I compiled seven lessons that VN developers could learn from to not only make their game jam games better, but make their own games better as well!
0:00 How I Judged 200+ Visual Novels
0:33 The Important Lesson
3:39 The Hard Lesson
6:33 The Tricky Lesson
9:08 The Underestimated Lesson
12:00 The Labor-Intensive Lesson
13:34 The Unheeded Lesson
15:20 The Fun Lesson
itch.io/jam/spooktober-2023
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itch.io/jam/spooktober-visual... - Навчання та стиль
I literally cut a chunk out of the game because it felt like padding, even though the writing was good.
Making a novel vs making a visual novel, are two completely different things.
I've yet to implement camera pans, but it's in the works. I really dig the idea!
Hello, friend! I just started writing the first draft for my visual novel and I've been diving into your videos. Thanks for coming back!
I've been into amateur filmmaking and writing for years but when I came up with and fleshed out an idea for a show, my excitement got the best of me and I realized a whole month later I had no way of actually getting a show funded especially when I want it to be freely available. I remembered visual novels exist and realized the show actually functions perfectly as a VN, and now UA-cam recommends me this video. I hope to learn a lot so that it's a good VN, despite being my first.
I remember hearing a lot about the trend of taking screenplays and turning them into graphic novels with the intent of getting more funding for a movie than a screenplay would alone.
The same sort of principal could easily work for a Visual Novel, but it's worth looking into some of my other videos where I get into how to incorporate cinematic techniques into your game.
watching other games was like a HUGE impact to see how big the world of visual novels is and how little I'am and need to learn.
beary the hatchet mention! i was the head artist on that game thanks for shouting us out :]
It was great! I talked to another member of your team at GDC, so they knew this shout out was coming!
Keep it up man nice videos. I think my view to Ren'py as a game engine changed a lot and it seems more practical and rewarding for me to start "coding" with . I hope I can progress further into the fundementals and furthermore make something visually appealing. So I will be watching your tutorials a lot from now on and am thanking beforehand ❤
Yo, this was a wonderful video for advice on the games. And honestly, a little honored to see you mention Reaplaced as a good example as to how to set the tone and expectations for a game, especially since I was the writer for the game. I think that this for me was because I came from a background of writing a lot of AA fancases, which requires someone to be dead early on to even have a plot.
There's a lot of good advice that I'm sure both new and experienced devs alike will appreciate. For me personaly, polish is something that I struggle with a lot. I was blessed enough to have a team that was very good at applying neat flourishes to the game to help set the haunting tone and make the game feel very sleek among other things.
The writing REALLY made Reaplaced stand out!
I might have to do a separate video on polish, because a lot of the things that people can do to improve their VNs come down to identifying what they're trying to evoke with their work, and then making sure everything supports that intentionality, and remove anything that doesn't enrich it.
I'm adding these as a reminder in my design document. The tips are a great tool to make sure I know what to keep working on and what the next step is.
oh, you're back ! pretty good timing, i was binging your channel haha
Thank you so much for judging + giving tips!! (I worked on music for a couple of games in this jam, hoping you'll judge next year too because I love your notes on everything ^^)
Heyo, Vimi! Awesome to see a video on your judging thoughts for Spooktober 2023 (I directed “protoViolence”!)
It’s always a treat to see your advice to aspiring visual novel writers - in fact, I used your cinematography tutorial when I was coding “protoViolence”’s scenes. Your tips on what (not) to do for game jam works are beautifully edited and insightful, and I’m excited to share this with my friends who want to get into VN development.
Thank you for making this! 🎉
YES! Your entry was a really strong one, and was really well paced throughout. I'm glad my cinematography tutorial was helpful!
This is really helpful, thank you so much for making this video!
I LOVE your videos. Each one is developer gold. Thank you for all the knowledge and wisdom shared - I hope you keep making these for years to come!
Such a good video - thx for making it.
missed this upload but great video :) always love when you drop a new one
For the past couple of days, I've been fretting over what hypothetical vn i would turn my story into and figuring out what needs to happen to make my story more exciting and interesting & player interactivity via combat and investigation mechanics (even though I've only written down the broader strokes of the first half of the story and a bit of the ending). Watching this video made me realize that i played more vn hybrids than pure vns themselves so to help me with this, im going to through some of the vns from the game jam as well as Muv Luv, steins gate, witch on the moonlight demo, etc.
Hi just wanted to comment and say, seriously thank you sm for ur videos 🙏 everything related to renpy and VNs is outdated and confusing, so all your videos giving tips, guides and more has seriously been a big help! Tysm!
awesome content as always!
I look forward to every video you post!
i've been working on a fan visual novel set in the project moon universe and the videos i've seen from you so far have been a huge help! the project is really just a passion project and rather niche since it's set in an existing franchise (and its going to be kinetic/no choices), but it's my first project i've planned this extensively and gotten this far into development with so i'm hoping it'll help me learn the tools to develop my completely original concepts in the future. i'll be looking through a bunch of your other videos, but i really am glad your channel exists! your videos are engaging unlike a lot of other tutorial videos/channels out there, i find them very easy to pay attention to (which is usually pretty tough for me)
PROJECT MOON!!!
This has hyped me in continuing my visual novel!
I just wanted to come on here and say thank you so much for your videos. All of them have been so easy to understand and follow, I enjoy your tone and thanks in part to them I just finished making my first game jam visual novel that's going up for ranking here in a day. I'm very excited and my family and friends are all super impressed not only with the game but also that I'm the one who made and completed it. I'm giving myself a month to take off from the cramming and going through some courses, but I do plan on jumping into another visual novel jam next month and I'm just so excited. So thank you. And your judging event sounded amaZing! Does the USA have a visual novel event do you know? That would be so cool to go but, alas, flying to Vietnam isn't possible. LoL thank you!
I just wanted to post and update that out of 1115 entries into the game jam I just did with my first visual novel -- I ranked 176 overall and my story placed 5th!! Out of 1115 people. I am so excited and cannot wait to write my next story. Thank you again
16:31 best visual novel right there
Oh. I didn't expect Враже footage. Love this song❤
First time coming across this channel, I've recognized the other game from the thumb and decided to give it a go. Not sure if you've actually played it or just added for illustration purposes but I'll have to disagree, it's a pretty good game! Either way your tips were amazing, keep up with the good work!
I would like to see a visual novel made in powerpoint
There are a surprising number of youtube tutorials on making games within Google Slides. I won't be making one of those.
@@vimi Are you saying you are not up to the challenge?
@@flibflob2785 The juice isn't worth the squeeze.
fair enough
To be fair, I know of a friend who made a RPG in PowerPoint for a NGO. At this point I feel everything is possible.
I currently have around 5 games that I am working on, some of those are split in chapters/acts.
I noticed that I myself need feedback in order to have my motivation keep on going.
But still, I always end up take way too long brakes cause it feels endless to code something/create something you don't know if it is going to be good and rewarding (in a feeling sense).
With especially this video I kind of instantly had something in mind I wanna do:
I want to create a game, with an ending - My current problem is, I always want to have an open ending, cause I like to keep going on older projects.
So with that being said, I try to make a short and compact one this time, set the scope real small - like 20 - 30 minutes and maybe that type of coding fits me better!
16:38
... In hindsight, maybe us having only a handful of judges when I'm constantly trying to expand and improve the event was an... administrative oversight? We're already getting some inquiries from potential sponsors for the prizes, and I started recruiting judges early. Shooting for 10 judges this year, fingers crossed the burden will be lighter per judge this year.
The issue isn't the work load, the issue is when you play a bunch of visual novels with perfectly fine control schemes, and then you get a game that decides to go rogue and makes an abominable control scheme. It makes it SO MUCH WORSE, because clearly a decent control scheme is possible!
It brings me back to the early days of 3d games, where everyone had their own control schemes for 3d camera + control movement, and almost all of them were bad in their own way.
I know, I'm just remarking on how often the imagery of fire, death and torture accompanies some of the more taxing parts of judging. :)
@@MakeVisualNovels I needed to add a visual "pick-me-up" to the last few minutes, and I found it was a nice way to break up the pace so people would be more likely to stick around to the end card.
I am always operating on at least two levels
Funnily enough, I seem to get most inspiration from things I didn't quite like vs things I did. When I don't like something, I tend to focus in on "why" a lot, picking out what worked and what didn't to help me in my own writing.
Admittedly, I really want to make an original visual novel as I've already made some small fanfic ones to practice and I think doing a small one for a jam would help kick me into being less afraid to do something original.
Do you know the average script length for jam games? You mentioned they were 20 minutes to an hour (though I guess the reality is more what can you do in a month)
I'm not sure about the script length, since there are a lot of design + writing decisions that can make script length differ from reading length.
For jam games, aim for making a really good stand-alone tv episode, not a movie.
@@vimi The tv episode vs movie is a great comparison. Cheers!
VND IS HERE
Holy cow. I'm mainly familiar with the Furry VN scene, where big mechanics like walking or even simple stuff like moving the textbox from the bottom center of the screen are just absent. A lot of those things seem very daunting to implement.
The early hook thing is generally good, but exceptions are genre-subversion titles, like Doki Doki, where the "hook" takes like an hour to appear, I believe, or Madoka (though it's not a VN), where the "hook" fully appears first in episode 3.
Regarding Rance: Didn't it have a normal control scheme? I don't remember. It's still a hugely successful visual novel, so well yeah.
When I made March of the Emissaries for NaNo jam of 2024, and one of the biggest critiques was that the buildup took too long.
It makes me wonder how many people actually played into the action scenes I busted my ass to make lol
Players always have the option to stop playing, so your primary goal when crafting your games is to keep them as engaged for as long as you can.
Different game genres have different strategies for this, but it's worth looking at modern tv and movie structures and pacing as a good point of reference for how to plot out your story (there's a reason I wouldn't go with book plot structures, but that'll be a different video!)
He's backkkkkk
Thanks for making this! Tbh I was just wondering whether to participate this year since I was pretty let down by the judging last year. I didn't care for the lack of transparency and some of the judges experiences they wrote about kind of rubbed me the wrong way.
A lot of them spoke about not liking horror games or just skimming the games. Which sucks if you're a horror game trying to build suspense. I also felt the criteria for the shortlist didn't make much sense. Things like bugs disqualified you from it but there were several games with bugs on the list. I just think there should be more judges, the judges should be compensated for their time, and it should be required they like the genre a large portion of the games are going to be.
Anyway I wasn't trying to be like grr my game should have won change your judging or anything. I just think that with a jam that has a prize like that it should be taken more s- oh shit fillerbunny? Comment cancelled, whered you get that????????????
STRANGELY ENOUGH, I picked it up at a secondhand shop in Japan. It was 1000yen, they had it listed as "pink bunny", and it was a steal!
I love that Corpse Party comes to mind right away at 1:34 lmfao... man it was such a great game though.
ive always been passionate about reading dating sims, and later on trying to make one i felt like needed to exist, knowing plenty of the places where VNs have succeeded or could've done better. i sadly worked on one by myself entirely solo for around 5+ years (between college and all that) and eventually gave up on it when i couldn't properly transfer my progress on a different computer sometime ages ago. that made me want to give up, besides the little faith i had in myself and the fact i was doing everything entirely solo for free. but i think part of the problem was how long and ambitious i tried to make it. it's been years but i've been interested in starting fresh and maybe hoping one day to pull something off and have an actual queer VN that i would've loved to find and read for myself
Join a jam! There are plenty of queer-focused VN Jams year round, but I think a great starter VNJam is O2A2, which should be coming up sometime this July?
I'm not really trying to make an interactive visual novel game but these are good writing tips nonetheless.
Videos on Visual Novels?
Subscribed!!!
God, I hate it when visual novels won't let me progress with the space bar. Space bar should always equate to "next line of text". One visual novel had the space bar be "Hide the UI" and I kept doing it out of habit and it was so incredibly annoying.
Can you please make an updated version of drag and drop?
I am wondering if you could do a video on the financial side of creating and then releasing visual novels on store fronts such as Steam.
I have been working on my own visual novel project for 2 years or so using pre-existing assets for the sprites, backgrounds etc. (it’s a long story as to why, and don’t worry I’m not doing it for any profit) and despite getting a lot of positive feedback and 10,000+ downloads I am reluctant to put the extra effort in to make it a separate, full-fledged release. This is primarily down to my concerns about the overabundance of visual novels available so I am worried it would just get lost in the crowd, and also the high cost of commissioning CG's, backgrounds and so on. Just wanted to get your thoughts on that.
My "How to Make Visual Novels" video covers a lot of those basics - it's very money-focused.
For you though, I'd factor in that if you have 10k+ downloads and a lot of positive feedback, you can treat your "full release" like a sequel - double down on the aspects your audience loves, and pull back on the things they didn't respond to.
@@vimi Thanks, I'll give it a watch.
(using the translator) congratulations on the video! Hello my friend! Do you have a complete course or Ren'py video lessons for sale? I created a story and was thinking about doing an interactive type of manga, but Ren'py seems like the best option. I'm Brazilian, so the language barrier is the first problem, but your video lesson is well explained, plus Google Translate, I think I can handle it. Thank you for your attention and I look forward to your response!
No courses, but my channel has a few hours of content to check out!
@@vimi thanks for answering. I wish you great health and success!
@@vimi Hello my friend! Do you know how to disable the joystick in Ren'py? I use the joystick as a keyboard and mouse, with xpadder, but Ren'py goes crazy when I do that! That's why I want to disable joystick recognition!
@@alonsotglima9494 www.reddit.com/r/RenPy/comments/tmwmn0/disable_gamepad/
@@vimi Thank you very much for your help and forgive me for the inconvenience!
Finally vimi is back ... Means he is not death ☠️💀😂
inescapable could learn from several of these.........
Don't stop record ❤
Hold on a sec:
1. “Don’t bury the lead” and 2. “Build your atmosphere”
This does seem like good advice,
Yet DDLC seemingly breaks both of these rules. I mean It does build up an atmosphere for pretty much most of the playthrough, yet it isn’t for like a solid 30ish minutes before anything actually happens, and even then, all cards still aren’t on the table.
Can anyone explain how and why this exactly works?
I started writing a reply, but I feel like it will best work as a video.
In the meantime, it's important to recognize DDLC's place in visual novel history, the conventions it intentionally broke, the environment it was released in, its impact on the English visual novel scene afterwards, and how we, as developers in the VN scene, have to adapt.
@@vimi 100% agree! And, hell yeah! I get to be in a video!🥳😎😎
I don't know, visual novels, as a genre, feels very incestuous. I'd suggest looking at actual literature, and getting your ideas from other forms of media.
I mean, well, there's a concept I've been thinking about called "Friendscape" which is about parasocial media. People who read books because the characters feel like friends, or perceive media as though they're supposed to put themselves in the place of the protagonist, instead of process the story as meaningful entertainment. I think we have to ask ourselves what the purpose of a work is; and if it's intent is to replace something real, ditch it.
So I think the healthy approach to Visual Novels is creating an amazing interactive narrative, that can branch off, and still be meaningful as a story. Because that's what literature is, and because it's healthy. I don't know if I should post this. It's a bit rambly.
Huh. So that's what a "visual novel" is.
So you watched five minutes of something that usually takes hours to get through and bullshitting on whether something is good or not.