Log 004

Dear Internet,

                So, I've covered art assets enough for now.  And I have covered the difficulties of converting a short story into a visual novel as well as the difficulties of thinking in script when writing.  So, what comes next?  Well, there is the audio aspect obviously.

                Audio for a visual novel can be divided into two types quickly and three if you have an unlimited budget.  The first two are music and sound effects.  The third is voice acting or spoken dialog.  Concerning music, it is perhaps one of the quickest means of setting the emotional pace of a scene.  Want to make the scene somber?  Throw in some violin.  Want to get the reader as pumped up as the main character?  Get some electric guitars in there and maybe a few drums.  Want some romance in that out on the town scene?  Parisian accordion music will do the trick.  Music has a way of quickly energizing a scene for an audience.  The reading speed of the audience varies drastically from one end of the audience spectrum to the other.  One person may end up turning the text display speed all the way up since they can read the text near instantly while another will be perfectly alright with a slow speed reveal so that they do not feel rushed in their reading.  This causes the visual novel to unfold at different speeds for different people.  The best way to overcome this, as far as I can tell, is to properly allow a certain amount of text to appear on-screen at a certain time.  Short groupings of dialog will cause the pace to pick up while longer groupings will slow it down.  This will in turn affect the pace of the scene.  Music, however, can do this by use of tempo and rhythm.

                But music does more than just set the tempo.  As I said, it can instantly change the mood since it gives auditory indications, which happen at the same time for everyone.  We all hear in the same time, as compared to our reading speeds.  A visual novel's music can help set the mood through a certain collection of shared understandings that a community understands together.  I think I just pulled a finger trying to type that, and I am sure I owe a good explanation.  The musical language is one that does not always translate well between people of different communities.  Few people will listen to Aaron Copland's "Hoe-Down" now-a-days and not wonder what's for dinner.  People fifty years ago would probably think of the ballet it came from if they heard the song.  This is a temporal displacement between the two groups.  An easier example of this type of difference can be seen when examining the music people listen to from one generation to the next.  As Marty McFly put it, "Your kids are going to love it."  Spatial differences in musical languages can be found in something like bagpipes, an instrument that is either loved or hated it seems.  To one group, it is a sound of a time long ago or a reminiscing to a specific place.  To others, it is a means of auditory torture.  The point is that as long as the music that is being used it being targeted correctly to the audience, it can be used with the best possible effect.

                Then there are sound effects.  Oh, what fun we have with sound effects.  From horns to flutes, from barks to brakes, from claps to chips, from thunder to twinkling, sound effects can bring such wonder to a work.  In visual novels, they can be particularly useful because they, like music, are experienced in real-time.  Both the reader and the main character/narrator can jump at the same noise.  The clanging of a bell or a roar of a lion can make the reader instantly feel the effects of what the character is feeling.  They can be just as surprised as the character hearing the door lock behind them.  And they can feel the same tension as the murderer's footsteps creep by as the character hides in a closet.  However, there is also the question of just how much sound effects does the visual novel need.  If two people are walking down a street, do their footsteps need to be heard on an endless loop, making an irritating sounds, or would it be better to only have footsteps heard when they transition from one location to another?  Do we need to hear the pencil movement over paper?  Would it be alright if there are no sound effects at all but instead onomatopoeia used instead?  Each of these depends on what the visual novel wishes to convey.  If it were better to quite out the sounds gradually to make the eventual scream all that more blood curdling, then it needs to do that instead of something else.

                Voiceovers and voice acting?  Well , let's leave that off for next week.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Current Assets

Writing: ~530 lines

Coding: ~35 lines

Art: 0%

Audio: 0%

It was a slow and busy week.

Entry 134: "Nier" Pt. 2

Dear Internet,

                "Nier" continues to amaze me with its soundtrack.  The blend of fantastic lyrics and orchestral melody work well to add atmosphere to the post-apocalyptic world and create a unique musical identity for the game.  Everything else that the game has to offer, on the other hand, makes me want to gloss over the game.

                Let me start off with the graphics and aesthetics.  The game "Nier" has an interesting landscape to itself.  Rusting raised-railroad platforms dot the landscape, missing entire segments that have fallen away.  Stone villages carved out of desert rock that house masked people, dominated more by their law system than by the raging sandstorms just outside.  An automated factory houses numerous robots that at a moment's notice will evict or kill any intruding outsider.  So on and so on, the game makes use of its visuals to create a world that is able to convey the story along.  The problem is that the game has a few hiccups so far.  The most obvious one is the excessive use of bloom.  Bloom is a visual mechanic that games and films have started to use in excess in recent years.  It is a lighting effect that is meant to replicate the way that the human body manages light entering the eye.  If a person in real life enters a bright room or goes outside on a bright day after being in a low-lit location, the surrounding area then appears very bright until the eye is able to focus and adjust to the new light situation.  Bloom attempts to replicate this by illuminating the screen every time the camera goes from dark to bright, when the camera is looking at a light source, or when an abundance of light is refracting off a surface.  "Nier" does all three with the final effect being an excessively lit up screen that is irritating to the eyes.  Sometimes the game forces the bloom to activate on a hair trigger, instantly lighting up the surrounding so quickly that I have to stop moving for a few second just so I can let the game auto-focus.  I can understand that the developers wanted to replicate real-world mechanics to make a slightly more realistic image, but when it gets to the point that the player has to actually stop playing for a few seconds this interrupts and flow that the game has built up.

At least I am not on fire, lady.

                On the note of the game's flow, "Nier" moves like a lemon of a car.  It chugs forward intensely for a few feet before giving up and going back to a crawl.  The first segment of the game has the main character collecting various Sealed Verses which act as spells that the player can use.  A small pattern begins to develop of the player getting a Sealed Verse with every boss that is defeated.  Then the game changes shift radically to a text simulator for one "dungeon," if you want to call it that.  The game's pace slows to a crawl while the player has to read a bunch of text that in the end has no point other than to cause the player to slow down.  Worse yet is a labyrinth in text format that can cause the player to have to reload back to a save point because there are no indications as to what the right answer is.  The game just throws out the central game mechanics for a required reading list that does absolutely nothing to add world building or character development.  "Lost Odyssey" had segments of pure text stories interjected into the game, but those were not necessary to read and were implemented to add depth to the characters while making a more fleshed out world.  When "Nier" tries this, the effect is a jerk in a direction that only serves to remind the player that the game has one more hobbled together homage to another game or genre.

                "Nier" has many references to other games and dips its toes into many genres.  One moment, the camera is free control over the character's shoulder, and the next moment, it is locked in a top-down 2D angle.  In one moment, the player is fighting enemies while having free roam movement, and in the next moment, the player has to deal with a bullet-hell styled fighting segment.  One level is designed in a classic "Resident Evil" look, all the way down to the horrible locked cameras that will inevitably lead to cussing players who get sideswiped by an unseen enemy while trying to go around a corner.  There is even a "Legend of Zelda" reference sneaked in if you look quick enough.  This is all well and dandy but it just highlights one of the game's problems.  It is often too busy trying to make a reference or homage to another game that "Nier" itself is unable to make its own identity.  The central gameplay mechanics are constantly being focused through these various lenses of other games that it becomes difficult to say what exactly is supposed to be the norm.  If I want to play a game that pulls from various genres and references, I would rather play "Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door," which does not abandon the core game mechanics set down in the beginning.  One could argue that the over the shoulder, free movement fighting gameplay is the most often gameplay of "Nier," but that would most likely only be the case if the player spends the time to do the various side-quests.

                The sidequests of "Nier" are bland.  They boil down to just a few types of quests.  There is the delivery quest and the collection quest.  Either you are going to go out and find a bunch of normally useless items or carry a package to someone.  This by itself is not all that bad.  Most games boil down to "go here" and "get me this."  The trick is to make it an enjoyable experience by making more than just simple chores.  The first problem is that there are only about five characters that give quests that are named.  Everyone else that hand out jobs is given names like "Villager" or "Merchant."  The game makes no attempt to differentiate between the quest givers.  At first, the game highlights the NPC, via a mini-map and glowing icon over the characters head, when they have a quest to give, but often do not give any indication as to which NPC you must report back to when the job it completed.  This leads to confusion since unless the player memorizes who gave the quest they will have to talk to every person they meet.  On top of that, the quests are rarely given any sort of mask to hide the fact that they are tedious time-wasters that do not even give out worthwhile rewards.  Sure, the player can do them for the cash, but there is nothing that the player needs to buy since health items drop like flies and all the good weapons are practically handed out free while exploring dungeons.  Doing the quests for non-cash rewards usually just end up with rewards that have to be used in other quests.  The never ending spiral continues.  

                It does not help that the game's bosses are just as boring.  Either the player has to bash away with attacks, dodging the attacks that can be seen coming a mile away, or they have to do precision attacking that requires no real thinking to figure out.  One boss is as close to a carbon copy of Gohdan from "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker" that can be done without leaning to copyright infringement, which ties more into the homage problem than the game's rote gameplay.  Various times, the game tries to add another tutorial, explaining a new move to the player, but when the first strategies end up working the best for so long, why learn the new moves?  A considerable amount of the game can be easily overcome by lining up the enemies in a row and spamming one of the two projectile magic spells.  I was able to beat one dungeon by just standing still and shooting down the corridor.  It was like "Metroid: Other M" all over again.

This is like trying to feel clever when being told there will be cake.

                I have not even touched farming, fishing, the main quest's tediousness, or even the plot problems yet.  But with multiple endings in store, that last part might have to wait a while.   

       

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Log 003

Dear Internet,

                Where was I in my last letter?  Let me see… Ah, the differences between writing linear text stories and kinetic visual novels with a stressing upon the balance between visual art and the displayed text.  I think I will continue off of that, but not for very long today.  I am a bit pressed for time.

                Previously, I told about how the art that is displayed needs to line up with the nature of the text.  Otherwise, you will have a very confused audience.  What is being talked about needs to be what is being shown.  If the characters are commenting on a work of art while being at a museum, there is not much sense in showing a pizza hanging from a nail in a warehouse.  Well, you might, but that would be one amazing explanation.  At the same time, if two people are visiting various stores along a strip mall, it is not very smart to keep showing the image of a pet shop while they have moved to two other types of stores since the scene started.  Another example is if those two people are in the same store but begin to look at at a different item then what they were looking at at the beginning of the scene.  This can lead to a situation where the character comments on the fur of the rabbit while at the same time shown to be looking at a ferret.  This mistake can be a sign of laziness, lack of a budget, or poor planning that can lead to such mishaps.  

                But what about the character sprites?  Visual novels are not just static backgrounds and odd special images that include the cast as well.  Quite a number of the art assets are just characters by themselves that are positioned on top of the background.  Each character that is going to be displayed gets an image.  But that is only the starting point.  Each character that gets displayed has to most likely get an image that displays them in a range of emotions.  So, let's say you get a standard character with a standard array of emotions.  Quickly off the top of my head, you have happy, sad, excited, unsure, hesitant, mad, and worried.  That is seven easily, and that's just for a standard non-existent character.  Truth be told, a well developed character is going to have much more emotions than just seven and is most likely not going to have these seven.  And that is not even counting a default or normal face.  A well made character is going to have emotional representations that correspond to that character.  The military leader that has to put on a brave face before an overwhelming enemy might not have a face of worry.  If he does, he will no doubt express it very differently than the lowly private who is in his first real battle.

                So, the character sprites have to rely on the characters that are developed by the writer, character manager, or whoever has to do it.  It would be silly to have a staff member create a character sprite that does not line up with the character's personality.  But the limit of possible and needed character sprites can go further down once the script is examined.  In actuality, the amount of character sprites that are needed are the ones that the game or story calls for.  The story may only explore a very limited amount of emotions for that character.  If the script calls for an image of a store clerk that only makes one appearance for the whole story, and she keeps a deadpan demeanor, then only one single image needs to be created.  The workload of the art assets is dependent primarily, and in many cases solely, on the script, which calls forth exactly what is needed.

                Now, there is of course a middle road that often gets taken due to real life restrictions.  If the visual novel has a strict deadline and a concrete budget, then the issue of getting it done on time with change to spare becomes a thought at the front of the mind of the directors and managers.  The easiest thing to do at the starting point is to examine the script and alter it in a way that would allow certain elements to be cut.  This is could be thought as the pre-production cutting room floor.  It is not as bad as the post-production cutting room floor since the blood, sweat, and tears have yet to be shed.  However, it is a realistic and prudent practice to examine what can be done within real world limits against what one wants to be done.  Like an architect planning out a building down to the cost of the wires, it is better to see what is feasible than to start laying the foundation and learn the budget is already tapped out.  This situation is not as rare as one might think.  In a similar way even for a small visual novel, I have to examine what I can do against what I want to do.  The project that I am undertaking now was not my first choice, but I realized that the story that I wanted to tell would have been too extensive to jump right into with little to no experience in making a visual novel.  I may still yet be biting off more than I can chew, right now, but I cannot back down now that I have started.

                There are about one or two more things that can cause the character art assets to explode extensively, specifically something that I plan on doing.  It is something that I am hesitant to mention just yet, especially considering that I have yet to finish the script, and I am going at a snail's pace.  I may be shooting myself in the foot by choosing this specific art direction, but I would not have it any other way.  That is a topic for another month.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Current Assets

Writing: ~450 lines

Coding: ~35 lines

Art: 0%

Audio: 0%

Entry 133: "Nier" Pt. 1

Dear Internet,

                "Nier" has been on my backlog for a little while now, and I was happy to finally get to it.  While I do my best to be as unknowledgeable as possible in regards to the various medias I want to consume (so as to prevent any sort of spoilers for myself), I knew one thing for certain about this game.  It had fantastic music throughout the game.  From one forum to another, "Nier" would almost be guaranteed a mention for having one of the most beautiful soundtracks in the last/current generation of games.  Beyond that, I knew just about next to nothing.  In fact, I had believed that the game was more of an RPG than anything else.  But I am getting ahead of myself.

                "Nier" follows around the titular character, who can also be named whatever you want.  Nier is a middle aged man with a daughter named Yonah.  His daughter is sick and dying from a mysterious magical ailment, called the Black Scrawl, which manifests itself in black runes that appear over her body, giving her pain among other things.  The setting is a futuristic dystopia that has more in common with the middle ages than a science fiction epic.  The biggest threat to the people of this world is the Shades, a kind of monster that seems to be born from darkness.  They are slowly encroaching upon the various villages, terrorizing and killing the people of the land.  One day, Yonah attempts to obtain a flower from outside the village.  Nier followers her in pursuit, only to find her passed out and surrounded by Shades.  There, he finds the talking book Grimoire Weiss, an ancient tomb that has many magical abilities that are slowly unlocked.  After saving his daughter, Nier plans on taking on the Shades and unlocking Grimoire Weiss's verses in hopes of curing his daughter.

Shades readying an attack.

                So far, the plot is fairly straightforward and sounds like many other games that have come out from Japan in the last fifteen or more years.  The biggest notable change is that the player is controlling a father character as compared to a teenage angst ridden desperado.  It is a change of pace that I wish the game would place more emphasis on.  There is very limited interaction that the player has with the daughter, only being able to take on an extra side quest or two.  On top of that, the main character does not seem to take a more personal role with Yonah.  Sure, he provides for her by doing a number of odd jobs for the various villagers in order that she has food and medicine, but there is something of a gaping hole that forms because he is more concerned with her physical well-being than all her other needs.  This of course stems from the fact that she is dying from an unknown disease.  The game is somewhat aware of this gap and highlights it to the player, so it is not as if the game itself was unaware.  The father/daughter interaction is one that few games go near and rarely from the perspective of the father.  "Lost Odyssey" had it briefly, only to snatch it away just as quick.  The "God of War" franchise has a bit, but in those games the daughter is more a goal than a fleshed out character.  Then again, the Japanese versions of "Nier" had two different formats, one with Nier as the father and the other with Nier as Yonah's brother.  Keeping this in mind, the various themes that appear might only be there through the injection of the audience rather than the creators.  If the main character can just as easily be Yonah's father or brother for the purpose of the story of the game, he might as well be her cousin, mailman, or pet hamster. 

                The gameplay is not as RPG as I thought it was.  In fact, it is more action-adventure like a beat-em-up game.  You control Nier in a third-person perspective that occasionally goes side-scroller or top-down.  Jumping, attacking, evading, and combo-ing are very much like games such as "Bayonetta" but is probably more like "God of War."  I say that because the combos are less string based than "Bayonetta," which uses at least one more attack button, and combat in "Nier" is more reliant upon learning the various enemies' patterns than juggling them in the air.  There is also a little magic thrown in for good measure, but so far, the magic is limited to use in only two buttons that are player-designated spells.  The player can hold the attack button or spell button for a harder attack, but the stronger attack charge is usually rather long, which can slow down combat or create too wide of an opening.  The magic charged attack is a little more creative with some spells just being powered versions up while other spells being altered to the point of having an added effect.  Evading feels a bit sluggish at times, but it is balanced out by being able to avoid most attacks.  

                Enemies are categorized into two groups.  There are the passive ones and the aggressive ones.  Passive ones, like sheep and goats will not normally attack unless provoked.  These types of enemies are almost guaranteed to be harvestable for materials that are used for side-quests and money making plans.  The aggressive ones, such as Shades and bats, will attack on sight (or when within earshot).  These are usually better hunted for Exp than for materials, although the bat can be harvested upon victory.  Most of the time, Shades drop nothing, but occasionally they drop medicine and more importantly tutorials and "Words".  The tutorials are really strangely scattered around.  Sometimes I found myself amidst a group of enemies that I was attacking, only to be told I found a tutorial somewhere in the battle that tells me how to plant crops.  But what is more valuable are the Words.

Sometimes, tutorials are hidden in boxes around town.

                There are 120 Words within the game.  I know this because that's what the back of the game box says.  It also says that there are 30 weapons and 8 spells.  This is most likely why I thought the game was more RPG than anything else.  Words are used to alter weapons, spells, and attacks.  These effects can raise damage output, spell cost, item drop chance, and so forth.  The effects are minor so early in the game, which mean that there is no real strategy at this point.  Until the Words have effects that at least alter stats by double digit percentages, Words can be largely ignored.  It is rather strange that the game's back cover could only think about boasting about these three things.  The only other thing it says is that there are a lot of side quests and multiple endings.  Bragging about the Words , weapons, and spells makes the game feel like the game is scraping the bottom of the barrel.  It would be like Bethesda Game Studios bragging about the number of different NPCs its game has.  Sure, there are a lot of them, but after a while you realize that they are not that different and they sort of look alike.  Having only 8 spells loses its appeal when just in the prologue you get to use about half of them.

                I'll end here and carry on next time.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop