visual novel

Creating a Visual Novel in Unity⚑

These are notes on how to create a visual novel in Unity, based on this tutorial.

Planning⚑

• Intro: Decide what features you want to have, so that creating code later on will be easier and more efficient.
• Road Map: A roadmap outlines the entire game and what you will need at each step.
• Scenes: Think of these as the chapters to our visual novel. The scenes will hold the dialogue information for each encounter that you decide to create.
• Characters: You can’t have a “visual” novel without having characters. The characters will contain the information about their art and different possible poses.
• Dialog: What good is a character if it can’t say anything? The dialog will be our script that the players will end up reading.
• Choices: Choices are what separates a game from other forms of media and lest the player interact with the game. The choices will go hand in hand with the dialog to allow the player to experience a dynamic story.

Repo Link

Visual Aspects⚑

• Background Art: If you just take real pictures and use a watercolor filter to save money on backgrounds, they are still important. It's a lot of work, but hand drawn sprites just look better on hand drawn backgrounds. Furthermore, with self-created backgrounds, you can create your own unique atmosphere.
• Character Sprites: Each major character of your visual novel will probably have around a dozen sprites. It's reccomended for beginner's to avoid using too many characters
• Computer Graphics: These are still images made to appear when certain scenes occur. These images are best used to convey events that cannot be shown accurately simply by moving the character sprites.
• Special Effects: Visual effects cannot be used by physical books but can be used by visual novels. A flash here or falling snow there, can easily enhance the amount of emotion of any given scene. Even something as simple as moving a sprite left or right or the way the text is shown on the screen is important!
• Background Music: The background music has to complement and enhance the text it is behind. Describing a soothing Slice of Life scene? Then use calming music! An action scene? Heavy Metal, of course! A Plot Twist goes great with Ominous Latin Chanting, and so on.
• Sound Effects: As with any audiovisual media, a well placed sound effect can have a great impact.