Behind The Scenes:
Sour Muffin and The Pumpkin Princess
By William Clarke
How many of you are familiar with the term, "Visual Novel?"
That's what I thought. Let's investigate...
Back in December of 1994, the story of a new software called a graphical web browser was the cover story for Dr. Dobb's Journal. DDJ was the monthly bible of professional programming and so our world was the first to dive into this new "face" of the World Wibe Web. No more looking at green or orange ASCII text and using "helper" programs to view photos.
Marc's software became Netscape and commoditized by Microsoft. The thing was, his web browser began a revolution because now you could look at a webpage with, gasp, inline photos and text of different colours on coloured backgrounds. You could look at exhibits in far off museums, read scientific journals, follow along in astronomy - and of course, advertise your business. Actually, one of the most important tenets of the new cyberspace was now you had the ability to publish yourself
As the web grew and high-speed Internet access became the standard, we could stream more and more data faster than ever before. Soon you could go shopping on the internet (If you want to see the interview I did in November of 1998, email me.) and suddenly - smartphones and tablets gave us a portable web.
For those of us in communication, we looked for ways to get our message out in ways that harkened back to the time of pages and books. We had PDF magazines and flip books, but they remained static and "disengaging" so that the churn rate of subscribers remained high, typically you would be subscribed for a year before you noticed stories were repeating.
While all of this was happening, we saw the growth in gaming and online gaming communities. An entire generation grew up either gamimg, or watching people gaming, and the main draws were tasks and interaction. When you're playing a game, you we're actually doing something. So the next expansion has been the move into visual storytelling through the use of game development platforms like Ren'Py.
See, you can turn pages with a flipbook and look at wonderful pictures, but visual novels allow you to interact with this world. You can go on quests to collect objects, determine your own ending by choices you make in the story, basically have an experience as opposed to just clicking your way through pages. Authors also now have to consider the overall user experience.
I won't lie. Most of the visual novels out there are, well, pretty bad. They're written by software developers instead of storytellers - so they have a tendency to be extremely weak in the writing. I mean, most have to do with some type of digital pornography, terribly written romances, extreme violence or terribly written fantasy. Look, if you give someone a hack experience for your own perverse pleasure, well you're not doing any favours for the genre!!
I set out to create an experience for families. I wanted to write digital children's adventure stories with gorgeous images, multi-platform support, powerful scripting language, and the ability to engage with my audience through providing multiple options on their adventure.
However, even a tool like Ren'Py has a learning curve!! But I'm confident and ready for my next project. Sour Muffin? Sandy Claws? Archie the Apache Attack Helicopter?
Stay tuned!
