Today I happened to join up onto NaNoWriMo for this year – or rejoin and start looking at the forums. Introducing myself onto my regional group, I went back to find that Alex had shortly after introduced himself, and his previous work. And from this came my introduction to a form of novels I’ve never known about until now – the Visual Novel (with reader interaction).
I’ve admired graphic novels for a long time, but Alex’s post showed me something different. He calls them Visual Novels, but they are more than that – they are also interactive.
The best way to explain them is to show you them. Alex links to two of his novels, brought about by NaNoRenO (National Novel Ren’ai Game Writing Month) and it is through Ren’ai Games that the novels can be downloaded from.
The Ren’Ai archive defines a Visual Novel as “multi-path games that use text and pictures to present a story.” The archive also has Kinetic Novels – “single-path games that use text and pictures to present a story” which are similar to a graphic novel.
Other definitions of the genre are available from the web. There appears an association with the gaming world, and also anime-style art which you will see in the Ren’Ai examples. In fact, many of the Ren’Ai novels held in archive also include other forms and icons from the anime-art world.
There are several downloadable Visual Novels in the Ren’Ai archives, and although I was not successful at running Alex’s example, I downloaded several which I was able to watch. The archives contain differently formatted novels, so watch out for those which fit your platform. Most are provided in zip format. Once downloaded extract all the files to your desktop or similar, then play the exe.
One of the Visual Novels I downloaded and watched had a couple of tracks of background music, but no interactive slant. It was more a graphic novel with audio – including a character voice at one point, and some animation of the graphics. I also watched two other short novels, both of which had interactivity in giving me options to choose from, taking me along different storylines.
There are several examples, some run at 10 minutes long, others up to one hour, all dependent on which options you take when given a question in the text. Multiple-path storylines (or story arcs) are an interesting format, as is the graphic nature of these novels, particularly if you come from a designer or graphical background. And although primarily sitting within the gaming and anime-art worlds, the format is an interesting one for other genres and art styles also.
More web research took me to Blade Engine, software which allows you to create these visual novels. Ren’Ai Games also has it’s own engine called Ren’Py. There is also a Visual Novel database website, listing over 1000 VNs.
Now all you need is the story, and the graphics (although Blade Engine provides some packs of these in anime-style, or you can find others via stock photography sites or websites such as Deviant Art). Visual Novels are certainly a genre which will give your muse a great outing.
Definition :
Visual Novels – A digital novel which consists of text accompanied by mostly static images, but can include animation and audio components also. Visual Novels can also provide reader interaction via choices which determine the story path and outcome of the novel. Such novels can be found in the gaming and anime-art worlds.
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[...] the original here: Visual and Interactive Novels This entry was written by admin, posted on October 15, 2008 at 1:56 pm, filed under [...]
[...] Serial Novels are not a new concept in themselves. Charles Dickens’ works were often published as serial chapters. As were Arthur Conan Doyles. And choosing your own path through a story is, again, not new - if you consider the interactive nature explained of some Visual and Interactive Novels, which I posted about in October last year. [...]
[...] – a serial format published electronically onto a website, and before that, a format called a Visual Novel, which is a graphical novel including text and graphics, and a partially interactive nature as it [...]