We made a visual novel!

Hi everyone. I’m Joyce Celeste Silvia Fisher, also known as the joystick system, also known as Audrey, Joyce, or Silvia. You can call me whatever you like out of those, because names are made up and brains are stupid. Today I want to tell you about the visual novel I made with my girlfriend.

Yes, I made a visual novel with my girlfriend. You can play it right now, at gravity-house.itch.io. And this is how it came to be, more or less.

So a few months back, I become aware of the Toxic Yuri VN Jam, a six week game jam wherein people are tasked with making toxic yuri visual novels, naturally. I think making a visual novel seems like a good idea, but I don’t feel totally confident in my ability to turn something around on my own. So: I turn to my girlfriend, four-time unpublished novelist Ophelia Cassandra Green, and say that we should make a visual novel together. We waffle over it for a little while, decide to enter, and then Ophelia makes an itch page for the circle consisting of ourselves, which she names Gravity House, after part of a cheesy roadside attraction she visited a lot growing up.

She writes a story, and I’m tasked with the actual production of the visual novel itself. I have some basic renpy knowledge on account of having a while ago been messing around with the scripts of the mangagamer renpy port of Sonohana 15, trying to put the erotic scenes exclusive to its Japanese PC version back into the renpy version. So I implement her story as a renpy script, pick some images, and then we have ourselves a pre-alpha prototype.

Still, I’m not content with having contributed absolutely no creative content to our visual novel besides the code and the image selection, so I take an idea for a novel that I’ve had for a while and rework the core elements into a plot outline that can much more easily work as a much shorter story. I write a draft, and give it to Ophelia to get feedback from her.

She doesn’t like it, and doesn't think it's very good, so I rewrite it. She still doesn't really like it, and I don't know how to improve it, so she rewrites it. I think her version is a lot better and don't think I'll ever be able to write anything even half as good, so I say I want to use her version instead. She says yes, but insists that I be credited as the co-writer of this story. I set my overwhelming humility (/self-esteem issues) aside long enough to agree to that.

So, then I set about coding the rest of the VN. Mostly, after that, it’s a lot of googling “how to do x in renpy”, picking out and then editing freely licensed photos and music, a bit of tweaking code to behave after some of it gets a little fucked after I decide to change the aspect ratio of the game. One of my patrons, korin, offers to draw something for us, and I take her up on that- and thanks very much to her for that, by the way.

After a few weeks, I have basically everything I can think of, like, mostly done, and then there’s only the pesky matter of, like, finishing it, writing the documentation, and such.

And now I guess it’s done. Or will be, when you’re watching this.

ahem

So, from this, a few things I’ve learned:

one:

making a visual novel is harder than it seems.

There's a lot of myth-making in the wider gaming community about how visual novels are easy, because, hey, it’s just text and images. And like, no. Not at all. Making anything happen on a computer is hard. There’s labor involved in writing obviously, but also in coding and UI design and, y’know, the complicated process of creation. There’s a lot more involved than just, like, putting text over images. and just because you think it’s not a real game doesn’t mean it didn’t take genuine work!

Two:

making a visual novel is easier than it seems.

Like, yeah, it isn’t easy, but it’s definitely easier than it is to make other types of games, since, y’know, you don’t have to do 3D modeling, or design any complex game systems, or anything. Maybe you have to write branching paths if your idea calls for it, but like. you don’t have to! We didn’t!

I guess maybe the correct way to phrase this is it was easier for me. because I already make video essays. and making a visual novel, it turns out, is actually quite a lot like video editing. I mean, the basic steps are the same. You have to write a script, then choose the visuals to go with it, and then assemble the thing and push it out to the world.

But it’s also easier, since you don’t have to micromanage every single second of the presentation manually. With a video essay, I have to write the script, and then I also have to perform (record) it, and then I have to do the production design (video editing!) while also manipulating every second of the performance to my specifications, which sort of in effect means every time I do it, I have to perform it twice. And the second performance, or, kind of reverse rehearsal, I guess, goes in super slow motion.

Video essays are a weird medium when you really think about it.

With this, though, all I had to do was pick the sets, and the orchestra, and then write the stage directions. And, yeah, that does sort of mean I have to perform it, like, once, at a metaphorical table read for the cast, so to speak. But the rest of the performance? That’s in the hands of the game engine, and the player’s machine, and the player themselves.

So, as a consequence, the nitty-gritty of the process felt familiar but comfortable, like, I was back to what I was doing normally as a YouTuber, but I got to skip the gnarly grunt work. Which was sort of nice!

So, yeah, I dunno, maybe you won’t find it easy, and I’d probably find it a lot more complicated if I was making a bigger project with a lot more moving parts on a longer timeline. but all you need, in the technical sense, to make a visual novel is like. A half-decent computer and some free time. Which I know isn’t a given for everyone, especially not these days. And, obviously, this doesn’t guarantee a good visual novel. You still need some good old-fashioned creativity and to put in the labor required to make writing worth reading, and art worth looking at, unless you decide to do what we did and use mostly freely licensed assets.

Or, unless you ask ChatGPT or whatever to make some or all that shit for you, in which case… well, I can’t stop you, but don’t expect any congratulations from me. Like, yeah, ethics or whatever, but setting that all aside I just think it’s lame. If you’re gonna surrender your creative agency to a third party, I think you’d be a lot better off choosing an actual human who actually made something, rather than, a frankenstein machine that doesn’t know how to do anything except find a pattern and fill it with reconstituted bytes.

You can do better than that. I believe in you.

So, anyway, thing the third that I learned:

I can live with others.

This youtube channel has mostly been a solo affair. I’ve commissioned a few people, and a few people have kindly given their work to me, and I’ve asked some people to read my scripts and give me feedback before I committed them to audio, but generally it’s been just me, doing all the writing, all the voicing and recording and video editing and exporting. And, part of that has been financially motivated- it’s a lot cheaper to sacrifice yourself to the grind than to sacrifice others, of course- but also a lot of the reason for that has been personal.

I used to think I couldn’t work with people. That I couldn’t coexist or collaborate with anyone without hurting, or at least, inconveniencing them. That I was too ambitious for my own good, that the only place I was going was off a cliff, and the only good thing I could do was do my best to not drag anyone else down with me.

And another side of it was an arrogant desire for purity. A belief that my vision was too perfect, and that I couldn’t bear to see others corrupt it.

I knew I was arrogant, that my arrogance was hurtful, and I thought I couldn’t change that.

But of course, I did.

The act of creation, the struggle to grow as an artist and as a person, the failures and disappointments I met along the way, taught me that I’m not perfect, that I’m not always right, and that I have room to grow.

I thought I couldn’t change, that I couldn’t live with others, that I wasn’t worthy of love.

I still think that sometimes, even though I know it isn’t true.

But I know now, because of Ophelia, that I can do all of those things, and that I don’t yet know the limits of what I’m capable of.

It’s thanks to Ophelia, and to everyone else who cared for me and brought me to this point, that I’m still here, and that I’ve come this far.

And I’m trying my best to get better for her, for myself, and for everyone else who once loved, presently loves, and will one day love me.

Before I close out this video, there’s a few things Ophelia wanted to add, and she says:

Hello everyone. My name is Ophelia C. Green.

I am a novelist, though only in the most technical sense. I have written novels. Audrey overstates things a little.

After spending a long time laboring down in the submission mines, to no apparent benefit to myself or anyone else, Audrey was the one who suggested we make a visual novel together.

At first, I have to admit, I was pretty hesitant.

I’m not exactly a visual novice, but I haven’t really explored the full breadth and depth of the medium either.

My favorites are all pretty standard offerings: Tsukihime, The House in Fata Morgana, that type of thing.

Any time I have to talk about visual novels with people who actually know what they’re talking about, it leaves me feeling like a big phony.

Certainly, as someone who has been subjected to any number of Western-developed “jRPGs,” of varying quality, I understand why VN fans can be so defensive around their favorite genre…

Especially when it comes to the inputs of dumbass white people who don’t actually know what they’re (or perhaps I should say we’re) talking about.

I thought that if I tried to make a visual novel, it would probably just end up like that, a potentially interesting but really just not very good offering that nobody would really care about if they could get the real thing.

But, when Audrey brought up the idea of doing the Toxic Yuri VN Jam, my opinion softened.

There were a few factors that led to this.

First, I’m still waiting on some of those submissions. And I’m disabled enough that I can’t really work a “real” job, so it’s not like I really have anything better to do.

Second, if we win, they give us each two-hundred-and-fifty dollars, which is half of a Nintendo Switch 2.

And, third, I thought it would be an interesting challenge.

I think a lot about the craft of writing, and how that’s different in each medium you have to write for.

A video game is different from a visual novel, which is different from a novel novel, which is different from a radio play, which is different from a stage play.

In short, what I learned is that writing visual novels is most certainly a craft, even as it’s devalued, and it’s one that, if we make more (and we plan to), is something I’m going to have to work on.

I think about the original Tsukihime, and now the remake, A Piece of Blue Glass Moon.

The visuals in Piece of Blue Glass Moon are of course breathtakingly gorgeous, but honestly, you don’t even really need them. They’re nice, but you don’t need them.

All it takes in original Tsukihime is Nasu’s prose and some limited visuals for the story to come alive, and in fact be extremely tense and thrilling.

But you can’t just write any old novel, throw it into Ren’py, and call it a day. You need to lean on those basic visuals and music and put your focus elsewhere in the text.

When writing for any medium, but especially those based heavily in text, it’s almost like jazz, where it’s all about the things you don’t write.

In the spirit of humility, I’ll admit that I think I could have done better with that this time.

But still, I’m glad I did it.

And, if our plans to do more come to fruition, I plan to only get sharper with time.

I’d like to thank all of you for maybe reading our work, Audrey for actually talking me into doing it, the jam organizers, and all the people whose contributions to Creative Commons made this possible.

I’d like to apologize in advance to the two people whose real faces we used. More on that if you read the VN.

And, one more thing.

IF YOU ARE OR KNOW A LITERARY AGENT THEN PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE GET IN CONTACT I AM BEGGING-

So, once again, it’s my pleasure to tell you all that our first project, the Gravity House Demo, a duology of tales of love and pain misused, is available now on gravity-house.itch.io, on a pay what you want basis.

It would not have been possible with either of us alone, and I’m very proud of what we achieved together with it. I hope you all enjoy it, and that you all follow us to whatever we make together in the future.

Thank you for listening.

And as always, thank you to my patrons, and especially: Pigeon, and Thijs. I know this is sort of an unusual video, but I hope you all liked it and I’m going to try to make another more normal one sometime soon. Bye bye.