3D Art Is Tougher Than It Looks

I’ve started work on a sequel to the Dating Sim.  The new one will be of a very different nature, because I have pretty much exhausted all my good ideas that fit in the format of the first game, and now have to come up with some new stuff. More on that later.

I want to keep the new program “clean” in the sense that I don’t want to borrow from copyrighted material.  There is not a huge amount of copyrighted material in the dating sim, and what little there is is primarily in the downtown areas and the night club.  The problem is that the sequel is set extensively in the downtown area and the night club, so in order to keep it clean, I have to completely redesign the downtown and night club.

But since I have to redesign the whole downtown anyways, I may as well redo all the pictures in the first game as I go.  Its way too much work to do this from scratch, so I purchased some new models.  Even then it took a good day and a half to do just one picture, the “downtown” picture above. 

The picture is supposed to have a lingerie store, a night club, an art museum, a home store, and a dress shop.  What took about half the work was that the generic building models I purchased had to be turned into these things.  The other half of the work was that the generic models were designed to be rendered in day scenes, and the date sim takes place at night, thus requiring a bunch of custom lighting scenarios.  There are still some things I am not completely satisfied with (people waking on the sidewalks?) but it looks OK.

A humorous thing in the new picture.  Most home stores today seem to be “box” stores (Home Depot, Lowes, Mor Furniture, IKEA, etc.), so I made my “Home Place” store literally from a single box.

There are about a half dozen more pictures in the game set in downtown to go. Then the nightclub, the art museum, the restaurant, the gas station, and convenience store are all going to be redone eventually. There are other places in  the dating sim that use video game screen shots as well, but it would be too hard to to redo them all. I’m just doing specific places I plan to reuse.

Some people think that working in 3D is easy, that the only people that do it are people that can’t draw. The truth is that an original 3D work requires at least as much work to do as a 2D drawing, it is just a different kind of work.  It takes just as long to do 3D animated movies as it does to do traditional drawn animated movies.

Second Life Dumping Teen Grid

In a stealthy announcement as part of the SLCC keynote.  Philip Rosedale broke the news that Second Life was dropping the Teen Grid.  This is bad news for schools that use Second Life Teen Grid as a learning platform for students.  (For those schools affected, I’d recommend Reaction Grid as a PG alternative.)

Those of us who observe what is going on knew this was coming a long time ago.  With Zindra and the added A rating, the adult parts of Second Life are cordoned off from eyes that should not be seeing them.  This made the Teen Grid obsolete.  And, lets face it; most of the under aged SL players were signing up for the main grid anyways.

Schools interested in using SL as a platform for giving students an opportunity to learn 3D art and graphics, should consider Open Sim in my opinion.  Stuff built in Open Sim can be moved easily enough to Second Life, and you can build a secure grid just for your school, or if you want to open things up to other schools, or allow students to create from home, you can join Reaction Grid, or Science Grid.  Many schools and colleges have done so already.  It also saves money.

It shall be interesting to see what happens when they merge the two worlds.  I’m kind of curious to see if there is anything in Teen Grid worth seeing that cant be found in the main grid.

Visual Novels

In my last post I discussed Japanese Dating Sims and that they are a subset of a general category called Visual Novels.  The Visual Novel is a hybrid media form that has never caught on yet, but thanks to devices like the iPad, they could in theory become very popular. We just need a breakaway hit to finally emerge and then all the copycats will follow.

So what is a Visual Novel?  Well that depends on what direction you come from.  From a static media perspective, the visual novel is a comic book with choices.  From a video game perspective, its a graphic adventure game without an inventory to keep track of.   They all have text and pictures. Most have choices to make, some tell a linear story (aka Kinetic Visual Novels) without choices. Most are hand drawn graphics.  Some have voice over, music, sound effects, some pictures are animated.

Just as comic books have a reputation of being about superheroes (since the majority of them are), Visual Novels have a reputation of being about romance and sex because the majority of them are.  But just like Comic Books do not need superheroes, VNs do not have to be about romance or sex. Some of the new independent producers are doing adventure, horror, sci-fi, etc. Most of the new ones stay in the “rated T for Teen level”

The best way to learn about visual novels is to just download a few and try playing them.  A couple of good sources, many of which are free:

http://www.renai.us/ – A collection of mostly free independently produced Visual Novels. Windows, Mac, and Linux links available for most VNs.
http://vndb.org/ – A database of Visual Novels from around the world, and thus mostly from Japan in Japanese.

If you are interested in creating your own:

http://www.renpy.org/ – Ren’Py is an open source freeware Visual Novel development and publication suite used by many independent VN creators.
Lemma Soft Forums – A forum dedicated to making of Visual Novels. A lot of creators meet here to post their work, get feedback, help each other out, etc.

I have been trying out a few:

Ripples - A kinetic short romance available as an iphone app. Also downloadable. Rated PG.

Fantasia, Realm of Thanos – A Fantasy Adventure. Rated PG. There is also a sequel I have not tried yet.

Daemonphilia – Romantic Comedy. Not Graphic. PG-13

Each Uisage – A mystery story set on a remote island in 1985. I love the original watercolor painted graphics. Rated R.

Digital: A Love Story – A story told over BBS messages on 1988 computers, some of which you have to “hack”. Fun concept PG.

Is There a Future Here?

As a commenter in the last post pointed out.  Visual Novels today come from two different sources.  Japanese games translated into English, and independent authors/artists mostly doing it for fun in their free time.  Neither source is likely to bring about any breakaway hits anytime soon.

The Japanese games tend to be very Japanese, and tend to cater to the shy teen males in Japanese prep schools.  They are very dialogue heavy, so you can spend time and get to know the characters.  As one commenter puts it:

This is the secret of the visual novel. They are socialization simulcra. I don’t mean a simulcra in the sense of a simulation, an accurate model which can duplicate responses. I mean it in the sense of a substitute that elicits and provides many of the same responses. Visual novels are not dating simulations, they are dating substitutes. Virtual dolls. Little computer friends.

Consider their first person presentation, their stylized graphics that focus on expressive faces and communicating emotion, the hours of voice acting directed at the player/protagonist who never breaks the illusion by speaking with a voice. All highly effective and relatively cheap ways to simulate social interaction.

Consider also the mundane hours of banter in place of traditional narrative. I found it boring while playing Yume Miru Kusuri but if I consider what was said, how long it took to say it and what meaningful new information was exchanged, then I compare that to a typical session of socialization in Second Life I’m stunned by how similar they are. I don’t mind that when talking to my “real” friends, because a lot of social is not story telling, it’s simply connecting and expressing support and interest in each other. I was bored by a simulcra of it, but even for me it quickly began to be captivating. I can only imagine how strong the impact must be for an anxious awkward high school kid in a society like Japan’s.

The problem with these dialogue heavy cultural specific visual novels is that they tend to be weak on plot.  These games cater to a specific demographic that does not exist much outside of Japan.

The other source are the independent sources. Ordinary people with some talent for writing and/or drawing and/or programing who are looking to express themselves in a medium they find suited to their talents. This is what attracted me to the medium myself.

Generally speaking there are usually only a small number of people working on these VNs, often just one person.  Its a rare individual that is good in writing, drawing and programming, which is one of the reasons that VN development is uncommon.  Quality varies extensively, unfortunately sometimes it varies within the VNs themselves.  Then there is also the imitation problem.  Many indie VN developers are heavily influenced by Japanese VNs, pushing the bloated dialogue, weak plot, and Hentai content too far.

On the other hand, the visual novel is a media format that anyone can break into, is not dominated by anyone outside of Japan yet.  Even better, I mentioned above that the iPad is quite possibly the greatest visual novel distribution device ever made, and yet there are practically no visual novel apps available yet.  Comic book publishers are already creating comic book apps for the iPad, and a visual novel is essentially a “choose your own adventure” comic book.

The market isn’t there yet, but it has potential.