NaVisNoGenMo

[dariusk]

I may attempt to generate infinite visual novels.

[enkiv2]

Is this going to be a script that pops out VNs, or a script that just keeps a single VN going on indefinitely? Either would be really cool.

[dariusk]

A script that pops out VNs -- I like the concept of generating large-but-finite stories, rather than infinite stories. The former lets you play with narrative arcing.

[enkiv2]

Are you planning to use ren'py?

On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 11:13 AM, Darius Kazemi notifications@github.com
wrote:

A script that pops out VNs -- I like the concept of generating
large-but-finite stories, rather than infinite stories. The former lets you
play with narrative arcing.

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#4 (comment)
.

[dariusk]

I love RenPy but I'm leaning "no" on that -- I find that when I build things that don't render in a browser, almost nobody looks at them. I'm going to try and find (or build) an HTML5 visual novel engine. But if I have to build one I may trash this idea for something easier.

[enkiv2]

I just whipped this up. Let me know if it's useful. https://github.com/enkiv2/jsvn

[zachwhalen]

So, if one were to do a visual novel, would that still be 50K words + images, or (following the cliche), just 50 images?

[dariusk]

Success and failure are really up to you, the participant.

[zachwhalen]

Definitely, I'm just thinking about viability, readability, scope.

And I've got the beginnings of a vague idea, so consider this comment my declaration of intent to try and bring this idea into existence by the end of the month.

[dariusk]

I've decided to abandon this, as I can't find a good browser-based engine for visual novels that I wouldn't have to spend an inordinate amount of time hacking on myself.

I'll retain & rename this thread when I figure out my next approach.

[zachwhalen]

What do you need from an engine? I confess I don't know Visual Novels that well, but aren't they just text + image + click to advance? One approach I was considering -- not sure how easy this would be in practice -- was to generate my content as HTML and then dump it into reveal.js or something similar. You might need to tweak some CSS, depending on how much content you include per screen.

Didn't you make an automatic slideshow generator a while ago? Could you re-purpose that?

[enkiv2]

While VNs are often fairly linear, they typically do have some branching.
When I implemented mine (which is admittedly very simplistic), I borrowed
Ren'Py's model of a scene, consisting of a background image, a set of
foreground sprites, some displayed text, and zero or more options for
progression. That might be a reason that a slideshow generator would have
problems -- lack of ability to handle branching.

(Ren'Py actually has a wealth of other features, including support for
fairly elaborate animation. But, a generated story would be unlikely to
take advantage of any of these!)

The idea that a generated story might be interactive is an interesting one,
so I'm a bit disappointed that this is being dropped. I am unlikely to have
the time to pursue something like that. Perhaps the person who hacked with
INFORM last year will be interested in producing a script for producing
interactive narratives?

On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 1:43 PM, Zach Whalen notifications@github.com
wrote:

What do you need from an engine? I confess I don't know Visual Novels that
well, but aren't they just text + image + click to advance? One approach I
was considering -- not sure how easy this would be in practice -- was to
generate my content as HTML and then dump it into reveal.js
http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js or something similar. You might need to
tweak some CSS, depending on how much content you include per screen.

Didn't you make an automatic slideshow generator a while ago? Could you
re-purpose that?

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#4 (comment)
.

[dariusk]

Yeah, I want animations and sound and the whole Ren'Py package, basically, but runs in a web browser. And yes, I could take a weekend and build something that meets those needs (I'm no stranger to developing game engine like things for browsers), but I'd rather focus my time on generation rather than tooling.

[ikarth]

Well, I did come across this: https://github.com/jdeisenberg/js-vine Which I suspect you may have already seen. Might be of interest to anyone else trying the same thing, though. I presume you're already working on other ideas, but a separate discussion about the overlap between interactive content and generative content might be interesting.