Developer Diaries, chapter 10

[Aura]

A bit of new text has been written over the week, but that's not interesting. Anyway, now that we got three editors, we aren't actively looking for more but we still accept applications (or the equivalent). We also might need more editors sometime in the future (not to mention quality checkers and beta testers), so let's get back to the subject in the future, possibly next week or the week after that, when text-only version of the upcoming demo should be done, unless something terrible happens to me and if our lovely programmers manage to transform the trainwreck of a script into a working game. Lilly path writer position is somewhat open still, hopefully not for long. Writing talent needed. With that out of the way...

I don't like visual novels.

I came to this conclusion yesterday when I was playing Yume Miru Kusuri. While admittedly it's not the apex of the genre, but more of an average sample of its brethren, it serves the purpose of my rant better than an orgasmically stellar perfection like Narcissu. I have been suspecting that visual novels just aren't made for me before, having only completed three VNs ever, the two other being the pair of very short kinetic novels; abovementioned Narcissu and Planetarian. Some of the characteristics of a typical visual novel (forcing the reader to assume the role of one of the characters, the endless amount of words used for nothing interesting, painful replays) and their consequences (or causes) annoy me to no end. Now that I am writing one myself, I realize that many of the things I don't like about reading visual novels are nigh-impossible to avoid when making one. Or perhaps more accurately, hard to avoid in the archetype we picked for Katawa Shoujo. It seems (and should be somewhat evident when you think about it) that a visual novel is a genre of literature of its own, not just a novel with music and pictures, thus you can't write a VN like you would write a book, or anything else for that matter. When viewing the world through Hisao's eyes and mind, or thinking of how the story will branch, or writing a scene about (superficially) insignificant slice-of-life event like a school lunch, i am being sucked into the same habits that everyone else has too. Especially the strict first-person pov combined with the main character being the alter ego of the player are somewhat constricting. Anyway, this could be why I have had a hard time reading and rereading the script of the game since the hate reaction is immediate and I constantly want to rewrite everything, until I realize that

*This is how it should look like*.

I wonder why nobody has tried porting a visual novel into an actual book. There are manga and anime series based on VNs, so why not books? Unless I am ignorant and just didn't know about the flourishing unvisual novel market in Japan.

There, six uses of parethesis in one post, should be enough.

[PyTom]

I can think of at least one visual novel that was turned into a book, Planetarian. IIRC, Tsukihime was as well, but I could be wrong about that, and I know little about other titles.

[Envy]

Japan loves their light novels.

I would be very suprised if there wasn`t light novel versions of many VN games.