Jump to content

A Kametsu Visual Novel


Emotional Outlet

Recommended Posts

So based on the mild interest in this thread, I figure we might as well put any brainstorming on the possibility of this project into its own thread so as not to overwhelm the other in case anyone goes looking there for talk about actually playing VNs.

Basically akin to what nemarious is doing with his game, there's the distinct possibility of making a Kametsu exclusive visual novel. Assuming a finished product is ever put forth, not only can it bring in some traffic (I've seen people with Tumblrs who made little visual novels that garnered some interest in their otherwise relatively boring blogs), but depending on what we all decide on, it can even bring in a couple of dollhairs. More on that last bit in a moment.

First, the story. Without one, there'd be no point in moving forward! I know Dan has expressed some interest in some sort of school-based VN, but we can do pretty much whatever. A lot of visual novels tend to be otome dating sims, and having that romance aspect seems to benefit most from the branching storytelling style that most people tend to expect from VNs. All your what-ifs are answered through various playthoughs.

Having branches would also seem to be rather compatible with having multiple writers, responsible for different branches or for different main characters, different personalities of the main character... It goes on. This would give us quite a bit of opportunity to make a fairly large VN--if nothing else, an amusing mishmash of disparate parts like some sort of terrible modern art. Either way, it'd be pretty cool. Once there's a basic premise, building off of that shouldn't be too difficult.

There's also things like what kind of character stats to use, mini games and combat systems, morality and personality gauges... Lot of that stuff we won't really be able to consider until we have a story, though, lul.

It also doesn't have to have any of that stuff and can be a straight-up kinetic novel, which is basically a story--zero branching--that has art and music.

Speaking of art and music, that comes second. This is stuff that would pretty much have to wait until we have some sort of story going on. You can't draw characters or backgrounds that don't exist! For those unfamiliar, VNs usually have static characters standing in the middle of the screen while you're talking to them, so there's not much need for actual animation unless you want to get real fancy with the whole thing.

As far as music, if this were to be a commercial venture, Ren'Py does note:

Unless you use mpeg or mp3 support, in which case you're responsible for paying for the patent license. We don't recommend using these formats in commercial games.

There's quite a bit of music on Jamendo released under a Creative Commons license with varying levels of accommodation. If we wanted to have everything made special for this venture, Java and a couple other of my friends make and mix music, so if there is interest, once we got a story and different scenarios set up, we can start thinking about accompanying music to our VN. We can even have a little poll for the theme music of the VN and make a competition of it.

Third, the engine. The one I've been looking into is Ren'Py. It's one of the more established visual novel engines and I personally have played several VNs built with it, so I trust the support for it will be decent. It's completely free to use and even if we decide to make a profit off the visual novel, none of that money has to go back to Ren'Py. It's completely free and open source, and I know a couple of our techies here would be pleased with that sort of thing.

There are other engines like Novelty, which is also free and still in beta but claims to not require any programming knowledge to build VNs, but does have advanced capabilities available for those familiar with C++ or Java (the programming language, not my husband). And of course there's Japanese software, but I'm not exactly proficient in Japanese. I don't know if anyone who would be interested in a fairly ambitious project like this has any preference--I really don't because I'm likely not going to do much programming at all, but I personally lean towards Ren'Py.

Even if there's not much interest, I figure I might as well put it out there.

So, to summarise:

  • Are you interested in seeing a Kamestu-exclusive VN?
  • Are you interested in working on it?
    • If so, what part(s) would you like to work on?
      • Art
      • Music
      • Story
      • Programming
        • Is there a particular language/engine you're more comfortable working with?

    [*]What kind of story are you interested in seeing?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Wow, this is something new. A Kametsu VN....huh....interesting. I guess i can help with writing the story...but that's it. I can probably whip up a story and provide you guys with it. As for what kind of story the VN will be based on....why don't you put it up as a poll and see what the majority members around the forum chooses.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

i'm working on a VN myself at the moment but I'd like the idea of working with some of the other guys on a persona project. I'm in for all of art, story and programming and I'll post some ideas of stuff we can use as well.

There's some really creative tools for documenting the story element like articy:draft and Autodesk Sketchbook Pro for storyboarding.

As for the setting, maybe we can put up a poll with various genres and just let the people decide?

Edited by Nero D. Ace
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I can probably whip up a story and provide you guys with it. As for what kind of story the VN will be based on....why don't you put it up as a poll and see what the majority members around the forum chooses.

I'm certain there's no shortage of story ideas. The issue is getting people to agree on it, lul. It'd be easy to appoint a creative director, so to speak, but then it becomes more like that person's project and less of a Kametsu project. Polls are fine, but I'd rather people just talk about it. Free post count for everybody!

I personally put my vote towards some sort of supernatural story, set in a school or otherwise. It doesn't necessarily have to be magical or medieval in nature, haha.

There are a few factors I'd personally be interested in seeing and developing, most of which would be suitable for any sort of storyline.

  • Character stats
    • Applicable to the storyline and not just combat. For example, a higher intelligence stat would unlock certain events in the story a less intelligent character would otherwise not be able to get to. We can even break this down into different categories of intelligence to allow people to pump certain stats and see how the character utilises them.

    [*]Personality/morality gauges

    • This can go different ways, but most games I've seen usually just have a sliding scale of Good/Bad.

    [*]Romance

    • Because YOLO. I'd prefer at least two male and two female options, each with at least three different endings--romantic, friendly, and some sort of terrible ending.
    • At least one or two "red herring" type romances where you'd be able to interact with them for a bit before something comes up, keeping them from being viable options.
    • They should be able to react to your character's stats in some way. One might prefer someone more buff and doesn't care if your character is charismatic, while another prefers a smart cookie who's at least a little toned. You get the idea.
    • OT3 OPTIONS???? Yes, pls.
    • They should also react to your relationships with the other characters or if you've done something prior they liked/didn't like. Jealousy, insecurity, anger, closing off or opening certain options when your relationship with another character is too high/low or if you activated certain events before that point. All that stuff.

    [*]Minigames/Combat

    • One of the things I liked a lot about Magical Diary was the dungeon exams. Your character would be dropped into a dungeon and you'd have to figure your way out of them. There were about five each--IIRC--and they all had different circumstances. Some were more combative in nature while others expected you to know certain spells to get your way out, but they all had at least two ways of succeeding.

    [*]Timeline

    • It should cover the span of a year or so--if we do a school type of thing, then including the summer vacation wouldn't be necessary. Though if we did include a summer vacation period, I'd rather it be something that happens at the start of the game than the end.

Rikuo, no stress on hurrying your Python learnings, haha. A lot of the stuff that would require coding--setting up the transitions between scenes and characters, getting systems like character stats and personality shifts in order--would come much later, once the story is pretty much all figured out. It'd be a pretty long term project with no deadline, so I wouldn't worry too much about taking too long.

As for programs beyond that of the actual VN engine, I don't want people to feel like they have to have certain programs to participate. We'd at least need a place to store the thing--I figure a Kametsu Dropbox would be good enough for our purposes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hmm, well about the stats thing, it can be done easily enough. We can have a "table" that records a person's initial stats in the SPECIAL format. That's something I took from Fallout in which you have to enter in your preliminary stats, so by using that as a starting system, we can put in a sort of RPG system in which the player gets to choose what kind of character they're playing, unlike in most visual novels.

This way, we can also opt for the "silent protagonist", though it's not necessary. The good points of an SP are that you don't have to enter the player's dialogues and they can just sort of imagine what it was they said and how they said it. It's been done before in Persona 3 really well and I LOVED the school system in that.

I think it should be relatively simple to do the Persona 3 kind of setting and have the stats according to that. At the end of each day/week, the player can choose to increase a certain skill by studying extra or weight-lifting, etc.

The romance options are a must and I think we should have a sort of "secret ending" that'll be the true ending when all the other endings have been explored. It gives a certain element to replayability and the choice of a "reward" for taking different paths.

Something that Mass Effect 3 failed miserably at, but I'm not gonna rant on that >.<

'Scuse me while I go rage on some bioware fan forums.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Oh lordy, no porn! Not only do I not want to write erotica, I wouldn't feel comfortable asking anyone who would do the art to draw porn for us, haha. I'm all for unlockables, secret endings, and "suggestive themes", but nothing explicit. That's what fan fiction is for, lul.

Having a silent protagonist seems interesting. Digital had one--you got to see all the other characters' reactions to your messages, but you never really learn what it is you're sending to other people so you just kind of fill in the blanks yourself. And it would certainly cut down on dialogue writing. It'd be a little awkward if the characters were talking face to face and you never really learn what your character says, though. Maybe something like in Ys where it summarises what your character says, but not the exact wording? I think it's worth playing with, at least.

One of my friends gave me Persona 3 to play since I never played any of them, so I'll fuss with that later this week, but yeah, I was imagining having weekly stat-boosting activities like studying, working out, sleeping, &c. If we do a school thing, then on Sunday, we can have the players choose their schedule for the week which would boost whatever stats and occasionally have special events depending on whether they take the "right" class on a certain day.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

a school setting would be pretty awesome, easy to incorporate many themes into it, and so many types of character we can use. speaking of character, would you use people of the forum? from experience, that could lead to a couple of issues. As for an SP, I'm undecided to be honest. I can see the advantage, but the game might feel a bit limited if we can't choose how we wish to respond to something, plus wouldn't it make it easier to access different routes/endings based on the things we choose to say?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

We can easily incorporate forum members if they volunteer to be, but I've learnt since I was wee that you shouldn't write about real people unless they let you, haha. I'd rather keep it closer to pure fiction to keep from stepping on any toes, and it gives us more freedom without having to worry about offending anyone by misrepresenting them.

To my understanding, with a silent protagonist, you gain more "power" over what kind of character you play as at the cost of reading direct dialogue from them. I'd imagine you'd still be able to make dialogue choices and we can do little summaries/gists of what they said without having to reveal the actual dialogue from the protagonist's side. Or just eschew the gists entirely and just go straight into what the other character says.

Steve the Temporary: Kind of bleak, ain't it? Like straight out of a horror movie.

Agree with Steve

Disagree with Steve

[Optional Gist: Smiling, you tell Steve that you find the atmosphere to be quite exciting, hoping he doesn't notice the slight quiver in your voice as you recount fond memories of horror movies.]

Steve the Temporary: Really into that stuff, huh? I don't like it much. Gives me the creeps!

There won't be any epic speeches from the protagonist, of course, haha. But even without the gist, you should still be able to guess at what your character said based on the reaction of the other character. It would make conversations a lot more one-sided, dominated by all the other characters as yours just kind of... stands off to the side like an awkward wallflower? I don't know.

I personally wouldn't mind just having the protagonist talk, and have different dialogue options pop up based on where your stats are sitting at. I'd also like to have the option to choose between a male and female protagonist, but that'd probably require quite a bit more work to adjust scenes based on your character's sex.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Right-on, Right-on. I'm totally diggin' the idea of a VN. I'm a decent arteset, but when it come's down to it. Music and Story compalation's my specialty. I'll do any thing and every thing to help make this happen.

Also the paranormal school idea's great, I'm a sucker for good outcult storys.

And antother thing is, that you could (time consuming) a selection of 4 different script to choose from, and have like 13 preset reaction lines to each so even if you do choose one option once and then choose it again on another play through it'll seem different every time. Then we could just play with that a little bit to make it randomly generate different little scenerios with out stearing too far from the designated story lines. Say we have 3 endings, you put 100 of these 4 different selection things and it'll seem like your playing a new game each time. And we can always update the thing to change some things here and there and add more endings along the way. Another thing could be that in the begining there's a page that looks like a student registration forum and there you type the name, choose a gender, and maybe even upload a picture. That way it'll be that the VN will be about who ever's goin' through it and with all the dedicated members of the Kametsu forums in this paranormal highschool fantasy. Another idea would be the ability to interact with specific people to hear it-bits of back story, and if you interact with enough maybe get a "suggestive ending" of some sorts.

These ideas are pooring outta my head like water.

As for story, I was thinkink a classic "7 school mystery" type deal but no one could ever find them. Then once the characters start digging to deep into the mysteries, shit hits the fan. When the group starts digging up the first mystery they fall into an abandoned school, under the school, it turnes out that the 7 mysteries where for the underground school not the one above so they go exploring for these mysteries, and right of the bat, in the first mystery, the group might be introduced to some scary ghosts, zombies, what ever tickles your fancy. Then by the second one, you get mermaids, goblins, monster. Then shit keeps getting worse and worse as they move along, we could ether go for "real fucked up" or PG13. As an example for fucked up, look up the game Corpse Party on youtube.

Edited by Zanco
Link to comment
Share on other sites

how about stories from the art/lit section.

i'd suggest these:

Torture chamber (Gore) i don't think this is completed yet.

Murder at the convention... (Gore) not completed

Kametsu Island [Mae and Shazi Collab] waiting fro mae

Sketchbook Girl i came back to kametsu to read this story. and stayed.

Aboard the USS NoLight Twilight of kametsu :D

Requiem's Call[survival Horror] zombie story.

United People for Proper Entertainment (No Light Sequel)

RP's from kametsu.

Kametsu unfortunately this is the only one i've read :P

also could you people make E.O. and Mae as unlockable characters

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't want to use anyone's work without their permission, especially if they aren't around to give it. And again, unlockables and characters based on real people are fine as long as they give their consent. Mae isn't around to give her consent, so we can't use her. I don't know why you'd want want to have me in the game, but if there's a purpose, haha.

We could have people upload pictures into the game, which would be easier than having a character creator--though that would also be cool, but I suppose that depends on the artistic talent we manage to gather. I don't want anyone to feel overwhelmed, haha. I'd like the art workload to be divvied up at least three ways--character line art, colouring, and backgrounds.

I'm not sure I understand your concept of having four different scripts to choose from, but having randomly generated scenes mixed in with those that generate depending on your stats would be neat. I wouldn't want them to randomly generate on random days, though--that'd get pretty ridiculous and I'm not sure what kind of coding that would entail, but I don't want the programmers to lose their shit, haha.

Having a series of mysteries like that would be interesting, especially if they have to keep going back to class with their newly gained knowledge. We can even include an ending where you don't find out anything about the mysteries--you just went through the school year like a normal person. It wouldn't be a bad ending, per se, but it would be heavily hinted that you missed out on a lot of the storyline. Writing scenes for that path would be funny--you'd get people acting really ridiculous and suspicious, but you never find out for sure why they're acting that way because you didn't choose to investigate some strange event in the beginning of the story.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Heheh. Yeah, it'll be like a gag real of sorts. We could also incorporate "Bluff moments". Where you think some thing bad already happened or is about to happen, but it turns out that you where just hearing voices from the people coming from the school above, but at the end they get to a room start hearing voices, but disregard it because they think it's just people above, but then after they get out of the underground they find out there was no ventilation for voices to've traveled into that last room and the gang freaks out for shits and giggles.

Edited by Zanco
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Depending on how many writers we accumulate and whether people are interested in moving ahead with that type of story, it'd be pretty easy to divvy up the workload as far as storyline development.

I'm imagining three main paths.

  • You solve none of the mysteries.
  • You solve all of the mysteries.
  • You solve some of the mysteries.

Failing to solve any of the mysteries means you fail to obtain a certain skill, bit of knowledge, or whatever vital to the final confrontation. I don't think there's much reason to write entirely different endings based on various combinations of missing items/knowledge/skills because, wow, that's so much work. You might be able to see the effect lacking that particular thing has in different conversations or events, but the ending would ultimately be the same. That way the only variables we really need to worry about are the relationships and potentially what kind of character you ended up with at the end after all your stat building.

In Cinders, there are four main endings, but they each have at least two variables. One based on whether Cinders ended up being smart, good, or bad; another based on her relationship with her family; and another based on whom she had romanced during the story. For example, let's say you ended up marrying the Prince--you can be a different type of Queen based on your personality, your royal adviser would change based on whom you had a better relationship with, and whether you fall in love with the Prince depends on whether you had any other romances before achieving that end.

Depending on how many mysteries we choose to go ahead with (I do like seven--it's a meaningful number), each of us can write and "direct" one or two of those particular scenarios. We'd all be each other's beta readers and have some say in how things should go (mostly for continuity's sake), but ultimately it'd be up to the particular director how it goes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Right. If any thing all we need to do now is devise two or three other possible VNs to make, see witch people like better, (Unless you just want to go with the school idea just to save time) then acumulate an croud of people that are actually willing to get this done, and contrubute. We NEED every one to pull their own weight. Also, since this is a forum project, we should try to get this on the front page of Forums and start things rolling from there with different divisions, for art, music, writing, programing. and hentai.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Haha, oh dear. It's not a big a deal as all that. We can work out of a thread for the time being since nothing is set in stone yet. And I steadfastly don't want any type of porn in the game.

We can certainly come up with other ideas--this is all mostly brainstorming, haha. Nothing is definite except for the whole porn thing, haha.

We could also do something in outer space! Space pirates! Intergalactic investigators! Intergalactic pirate investigators? Maybe it's the protagonist's first year on an alien planet/space station and we follow them through their (mis)adventures and learn about alien culture, and then they caught up in some ridiculous conspiracy. The only things I like as much as magic and supernatural things are aliens. (。♥‿♥。)

Edited by Emotional Outlet
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Heheheh. I know, I just wanted to push your buttons, adding "henati" in there.

Another thing could be earthly explorations of the sea. Finding humanoid merfish, discovering a renewable powersource in the deep that people can use to modify their body's or as a new source of unlimited ammunition, also discovering atlantas but it's inhabited by some sentien beins that traps the group there and the VN would be about them trying to escape.

Oh. Another thing could be space pirates or vigilantisim. Where you choose to be a pirate or vigilanty and have a story revolve around space's natural treasures. Then aliens get in there and wreck their shit so these two have to join (or stay seperate, it's alwas an option) to get rid of these evil monsters or just kill each other until none are left.

Actually, I posted a pretty fun VN under "Primum Games?" it's called Analouge: A Hate Story. It's about a space station that mysteriously shut down, then some time later it's elxpored to why it was shut down (whitch is the whole game), weather you find out or not is completly up to you.

Edited by Zanco
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...
Please Sign In or Sign Up