A Fake Visual Novel

As an avid fan of Fantasy TTRPG’s such as Dungeons and Dragons it should come to no surprise that I may dabble as both a player and as a Dungeon/Game Master of such games. In particular there’s one campaign where I provide the experience as the GM and another in which I am merely one of many participants.

In an effort to increase my own activity for this website that I’m paying for I will be providing more updates of my little passion projects, not only in the hopes of helping me get a new job, but just generally to show off things I should be proud of.

So what did I do this time? Well as the title says, I made a ‘fake’ Visual Novel, what is a fake visual novel you might ask? Well a Visual Novel (VN for short) is a kind of interactive narrative focused game, originating from Japan that has usually a lot in common with Choose Your Own Adventure novels (CYOA). They typically display lovely art, particularly backgrounds and characters, while text is displayed, specifically a narration or dialogue regarding those characters. Usually the protagonist isn’t visible and you see or hear the narration from their point of view while the other characters have avatars displayed with a nearby textbox displaying their dialogue, usually aimed at the player/protagonist or another character in the scene. Sometimes there are prompts for the player to make a choice, this is typically the sole interaction that technically makes it a ‘game’ and not a ‘sound novel’…

In any case many Anime TV series and Manga adaptions originate from Visual Novels, such as Fate/Stay Night. Which is one such games I enjoyed immensely for its detailed descriptions and engaging characters and immersive world building.

Anyways, so what makes what I did “fake”? Firstly I am inspired by John Eyepatch Man’s video on “The Bizarre World of Fake Video Games”.

John Eyepatch Man’s Video on Fake Games

In this video, Eyepatch Wolf the video’s presenter describes a subgenre of art in which creative teams and individuals upload content that is meant to merely evoke the idea of a video game while not at all intending to actually implement and create that game. It’s mainly ‘for the love of the game’ so to speak. It’s hard to explain but basically if you liked the trailer more than the experience of actually playing the game, fake video game trailers, concept art, demos and so on, kinda get across a certain nostalgic idea of a game. These fake video games can be extremely detailed and it is quite the rabbit hole so I would highly recommend watching the video above for context.

So my fake visual novel is me presenting the events of the Dungeons and Dragons game I play in but presented through the lens of being within a Visual Novel. Phew.

You can watch the video from my Art Gallery, or below!

Made using a combination of Davinci Resolve and Clip Studio Paint. If I do more of these to commemorate my D&D play sessions I might just do this instead in RPG Maker or Renpy.

Update

Greetings. It has been a while since I last updated the blog, I haven’t used the space here as I would have liked. I will attempt to rectify that, and post updates about my current projects in a more regular fashion.

Currently I am working on a Unity3D “game” project, game is in quotes because it’s more of a technology demonstration than a game, a procedural world map utility. My intent is for it to produce procedurally generated world maps for the Paradox series of Grand Strategy games, but likely I will reuse the code for actual fantasy rpg projects.

Procedural generation generally is about the principle of where given a specific seed the engine will deterministically produce a world, and the same world given the same seed, and different worlds given different seeds. The advantages of procedural content generation are better explained elsewhere in detail but in brief they allow a developer to produce a great amount of game content from comparatively a small amount of work. Instead of needing a large team of artists, 3D modelers, and so on it is possible to make a huge game world from a smaller team.

The downsides of course is that it is often more difficult to insure this world abides by specific rules, you don’t want any dungeons that are procedurally generated to be literally inescapable. Often such worlds may turn out to be very samey and boring because they don’t have the same beauty or interest as a hand crafted world.

Regardless I feel the advantages in my situation outweigh the number of well documented negatives and it is how I will proceed.

Above is a sneak preview of my progress. From a procedurally generated “height map” using fractal brownian motion perlin noise (or FBM) I went on to create a coloured “province map” by computing the voronoi map from semi-randomly distributed sites. I am using a node graph data structure in the back end to maintain information about each “province”/tile. Land tiles are in shades of red-green and sea tiles are in hues of blue.

Currently I am working on a rudimentary GUI in Unity3D to allow the user to produce their own maps.

First Post the Firstening

My website is now live, with my current portfolio uploaded. My portfolio currently includes:

• Links to my project's github repos.
• A short description of the project.
• Embedded Youtube demo reels of the project in question running/playing.

Todo:

• Upload my (albeit short) animation reel, which includes sneak previews of the above.
• Iterate over the Game Design Document I wrote for Project Soryuu, a game design & development project where I am going to make a mobage with RPG elements to gain experience working with a client-server relationship.

First?

Stub first blog post while I put content up on what is to be my own website/portfolio. Will I use a blog? Probably for any personal game development projects.