As TheVulpineHero reminded me, we didn't really have a centralized place to discuss the backbone of our Visual Novel yet – the story part!
In order for the writers to really be able to start with their work, we'll need some set story and character backgrounds, of course. This thread is here to supply that vital information and to create a space for the writers to discuss fine-tuning of their scenes, character personalities, and so on.
To start off, I'd like to give a short, basic overview of some "general rules":
Writing Style
- Present tense
- First-person perspective
- EVERY paragraph starts and ends with ", and you'll have to make a new line (hit enter) for each new paragraph.
- If you want to display a person saying something, start a new line with their name, followed by the quotes (Koba "It sure is warm outside!")
- If you want dynamic text, you can use {i}{/i} for italics, {b}{/b} for bold, and so on. {w=0.5} makes a short pause in the text flow and {w=1.0} makes a long one.
- Thoughts are always displayed by simple text lines in quotes and italics.
- Different scenes for male and female protagonists are denoted by a simple If-Clause:
Code: Select all
If m=1:
Lion-Guy „Welcome to the battlefield, brother.“
else
Lion-Guy „Welcome to the battlefield, sister.“
Code: Select all
menu:
„Who is Leomon?“
jump leo-ending
„Anyways, do you know the way to Uni or not?“
jump goto-uni
- This might seem a little complicated to wrap your head around, but learning these basic rules will greatly reduce the time it takes to insert the script into the actual RenPy engine (since it won't need to be translated and can pretty much be inserted "as-is". If you need any other pointers, take a look at my writing sample a few posts down or just PM me.
General
- We shouldn't go "absolutely insanely crazy" with anything. Keep characters and events believable (at least to a degree), but don't make them mundane, either. If you want to depict Rikun dressing up as Marisa every second Tuesday of the month because she believes she can control the moon that way (and you can depict this in a funny way rather than just putting this in "for its own sake"), then, by all means, go for it. The main aim of this project is to be fun to make and fun to play!
- As far as I know, Concordia University operates in 2-semester-years, starting in September and April respectively. Keep that in mind for writing your scenes (aka early scenes taking place in Fall, etc.).
Setting
- The story mainly takes place in and around the Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
- The university has two campuses: SGW and Loyola. The former is the "main" campus, located directly in the heart of the city, while the latter is located about 2 kilometers south-west of the city center. Here's some (pretty detailed) info on what's located on each of them.
- "The Haus", where our protagonist and the other characters (how many? we don't know yet!) will live, is part of the Hingston Hall student dorms, located nearby the Loyola campus. However, the "Haus" isn't actually an official part of those dorms and most students don't even know it exists / can't find it even when given directions.
- Due to its unofficial nature, the Haus is a very homey, self-made type of space that may seem cramped at times but makes for surprisingly good living conditions for the different personalities inhabiting it.
- In general, it would be nice if our writers could do a fair amount of research on the Concordia University and Montreal in general. The setting doesn't need to be 1:1 compared to reality, of course, but a certain sense of "believability" would be very nice (this thread can also be used as an info exchange hub regarding this).
Characters
- Due to the limited scope of the project, we'll try to keep the number of visually appearing characters relatively small. Including side chars and whatnot, we should probably not aim for a number above 25.
- Regarding the MC, we're taking requests as to what she's supposed to be studying. I haven't been able to come up with anything witty or particularly good myself yet, so I'd be delighted to hear what ideas you guys might have regarding this!
- Very very very very very alpha-stage character descriptions can be found here.
I probably forgot a million things in this post, but I kinda wanna get this out there now and it's late and I'm literally falling asleep as I'm writing this. Expect some updates with this post soon-ish. Until then, feel free to ask about stuff or request info to be added, bring your own ideas in, etc!