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.