WotS:SV postmortem

WARNING: The following contains a lot of me talking out of my butt.  Intake of a pinch of salt is wise and recommended.

There were a bunch of things I noticed while making/testing this game. Simple things I wish I thought about when I first setup the project.

Screen composition

I opted for putting text and buttons on a separate area underneath the pictures, just to avoid worrying about what part of the picture would be covered by the text. That came with a price I didn't foresee.

Having text and picture in two different area makes it harder for the player to know where their eyes should be.  When the game transition between the two, it is not immediately clear to the players where their eyes should be looking for the next scene.

With a traditional VN screen composition, the text is just on top of the pictures. So if you want the players to look at the picture, just remove the text box and the players' eyes are already looking at the general direction of where they pictures are.

With the screen composition I went with, it is less clear when players should switch where they are looking. It gets worse if I had some short line accompanying the picture/animation. Ultimately the screen composition increase the chance players miss out on animation changes or text changes because they were looking at the wrong part of the screen.

Animation vs VN

My plan was to draw the important part as a standalone gif first, then if I feel good about it, convert it into a short  VN with multiple endings.

The conversion turns out to be way more awkward than I expected.

Scene planning or story boarding for animations are different from VNs. They have different pain points that need addressing and I wasn't really thinking about both format at the time when I drew the gif.

For an animation, unless you do hard cuts, transitional animation is important. For example, a scene where a character talks and then waves. Unless you cheat with hard cuts, you will have to draw the character raising one hand into position to wave. It looks really bad if you don't

For VN, transition animations are not important unless you want them to be. The click players do to advance the plot is very good at masking or justifying the gaps in between pictures or animations.  The important thing to think about, is which moment is left on the screen after a click from the player. That is because the player has near complete control of the pacing of the game. 

VN has problems with scenes that are action packed with no defined "pause points".  Cutting some one off mid sentence for example. Without something similar to using two dialog boxes at once, it is hard to make that scene look right. You can use something like "words words wor-" to denote cut off, which basically telegraphs the cut off before it happens. Forcibly advance the dialog without player input is another way, but depends on how fast the player reads, it may be woefully mistimed.

For most continuous "action" scene I had, I choose to not break them down. The downside is that players don't get to control how fast those scene goes by so they might miss some details. I decided that was better than bad scene pacing, but I have no way to know if it is the right call.

Sound effects and BGM

The sound effects are tied to the animations, thanks to the loop nature of most of the animations. Sudden disruption of a animation would introduce a distracting change in sound effect rhythm.

To avoid the disruption, I have to sync the animation changes. This makes the game feels "laggy" because when the player clicks next scene, the game will have to wait for the looping animation to reach a finish point before transitioning.

I wanted to avoid having the sound effects repeat long enough to become a rhythm, but I didn't think of a good way in time.

Now for something I think I done right.

Not having BGM playing for majority of the game was a good idea. I don't have access to many audio tracks, having the same track play all the time really wears on the player. In the future, I want to try to supplement the game with more short audio stingers (eg. the Zelda you got a thing jingle) instead of just a BGM here and there.

I want to try making some simple jingles or stingers myself next time.

Conclusion? 

I wrote a lot crap just now, but I think it all boils down to:

• There are benefits to think of VN as text or graphics in alternating order instead of text plus graphics at the same time.
• Avoid looping animations and sounds over long duration or multiple scenes.

Oh? There were only two points?  Now I feel silly typing all that up.

Finger crossed that I remember all that next time I make a VN!