Hiya, here’s a short Visual Novel with too long of a title, set in a fantasy world.
Length ~20m.
Smooth weight gain progression, now up to ssbbw category.
2 proper endings, both with multiple variations.
Some girly love.
Characters and most of the backgrounds are made with AI Stable Diffusion - using a custom model merged from CetusMix + AnythingV5 with ObeseGirls Lora.
Available on Web, Windows, Linux, Mac*, and Android.
*Mac is still the only one I still can’t test, so please let me know if it works.
Tell me which parts sucked, and which were neat.
it’ll help me to add more polish, and to make better games in the future.
For a VN of that length, I think you did a pretty good job with pacing. If you try a more ambitious project, I think it’d do well to maintain this frequency of impactful choices within the narrative.
There’s some mistakes (spelling, grammar) and the story does feel a bit generic here and there but it doesn’t overstay its welcome or get bogged down by introducing more characters or concepts than it has time for or otherwise getting sidetracked. The AI art does its job and isn’t too off-putting, but it would’ve been nice to have a few larger, detailed images to help establish the scene right at the beginning and ease the burden on the narration. Assuming you have the processing power for that of course.
One tip I have is to make it clear when the MC is thinking versus speaking, so it doesn’t feel like we’re talking to ourselves… unless that’s the intent lol. You could do this by using an italic font and/or defocusing the scene (if they’re somewhat lost in their own thoughts). There are all sorts of little hints like that in professional VNs and it’s the sort of small coding exercise that can help if you’re new to Ren’Py.
This game, for what it sets out to do, is really great. It’s simple, but not so simple that it hurts the experience. I already enjoyed Helpful Roommate, but that one was perhaps a bit too simple. I think that this is a solid progression of the whole “short VN” thing, as it offers enough variety of choices over a long enough time that it really feels like the player’s actions have impact.
Another thing I liked was the art. I think a fair few games make AI art look kinda crap since many of their images don’t really use the right models or loras and/or totally lack any sort inpainting or image editing in order to clean their pictures up, so this game really goes to show how good AI art can be.
Overall, really great game considering how short it is, and I’m excited to see if any more of these “short visual novels” will be made in the future.
@cheddar@Curves_Conniseur
Thank you for insights!
I think I just used too much inner thoughts during dialogue, I’ll try to make it clearer though.
Grammar is like this because internally I’m a medieval peasant when I’m trying to sound like different characters, but I’ll see to it, maybe read a book or two.
AI model I’m currently using is even more unhinged when it comes to anything but characters, and I almost used stock photos because of it - I’ll need to search for a better model for the backgrounds.
Hopefully there will be more short ones coming! I surprised that I managed to finish this one, my millennial ass never get projects longer than a few days.
AI is like a child that just requires a lot of babysitting, but with enough patience it can make some neat graphics.
Also every choice does come back in the endings, just it’s subtle ; )
I agree with what others have said. You provided a good variety of choices in a short story that made it worthwhile to play through a few times. I actually really liked the art. I’m not generally an AI art person, but I really liked it in this story. I think the biggest stumbling block was the dialogue for me. It felt very mechanical and abrupt, making the story not flow as well as I would have preferred. But it was an enjoyable play through for sure.
Do you plan to publish the AI model you used for this project? It seems very capable of generating amazing visuals, and I may want to make a project of my own with it.
Well, you can ‘make’ one yourself!
Did you dabble with stablediffusion already?
If so, then launch stablediffusion website and select Checkpoint Merger tab.
I put Cetus as Primary Model A, Anything as Secondary Model B and default multiplayer at 0.3 and clicked Merge. That’s it.
But you can really mess with the settings, pick any model(s) you want, even use VAE to alter the style more, go crazy and keep me updated I’m curious how it’ll end up ^^.
