Hi, Flyer33 here. I’ve been an author of WG stories over at Curvage for quite a few years, and more recently I’ve been trying some 3D rendering. You can see some of my art over on my DA at https://www.deviantart.com/flyer33 . (I’m gradually uploading my story catalogue there too.) I thought it’d be cool to put some story writing and art together in a visual novel (probably Ren’Py)… And then I came up with an over-ambitious plan… But instead of trying to start with that, I thought I’d start with a really simple visual novel, based on a short episode from the background of one of my story heroines: Kyra Shah, the most talented but also most gluttonous bellydancer in the exotic, desert-clad city of Fatgrabah.
The plot is pretty simple. The Sultan of Fatgrabah is hosting a bellydancing competition to entertain a wealthy visiting prince. But the city’s bellydancers are terribly out of shape after a season of partying! Kyra’s greedy family, eager to win the cash prize, have put her on a diet. But Kyra enlists your aid in sneaking her the rich food her gluttonous cravings demand…
Here’s a piece of concept art I made. (No, it’s not perfect, but I’m very pleased with it.)
If I go for 1920 by 1080 resolution for scenes, which I think looks good, will the game file end up too big for convenient downloads. Also, am I setting myself up for too much rendering effort?
How much “game” content or puzzles should I mix into the story so it’s not just clicking through? I was thinking of some sort of score that you learn about at the end of the story (for score, read “calories gluttonously consumed by Kyra”), and maybe a bonus scene at the end if you achieve the maximum.
What do people do when they want a scene with some random audience of people in a room? I can’t do detailed renders for all of them, and I don’t really want to have to pose them for rendering at all… Just leave it to the player’s imagination? Seems a bit lazy to have a caption saying “the audience of dozens of wealthy merchants applauds, in between eating and burping from an excess of fried snacks.” I’ve no idea.
I can only think of an Idea for the 3 point. You can do certain tricks and ways to make the scene feel like it has an audience and writing that “the audience does x thing” ain’t bad, specially since you’re doing it with 3D renders which I imagine is way harder. Sometimes filling the blanks with the reader/viewer imagination can be good or even better than directly showing, because they can on their own minds think how the audience in this case is doing the actions described.
You could also make the render only show the important characters and the background be darkened or blurred. Another idea would to put dummy/blank characters on the background since they aren’t relevant.
For the file size, make sure to convert all the images to .webp, it’s a way more storage efficient file format than .png even with a lossless conversion. With a 90% lossy conversion (meaning 90% of the original image is preserved) you can cut the file size by ~90% (those numbers lining up is just a coincidence lol). The lossy conversion is also basically impossible to tell the difference between unless you’re really looking for it and you have the original to compare against, so image quality isn’t a concern here.
Ditto what @Wulf_Diomhaireachd said, and a request: If you do that and the game is still over… I don’t know, 500 MB, please make a “compressed” version with images downscaled to 1280x1440 or so and compressed until you just start to notice artifacts, then back a couple %. Some of us are misers with our disk space and not too picky about image quality!
Yeah, maybe the wiki needs a guide about image compression, it’s crazy how large some of these games are because of raw image size or not separating out backgrounds and characters and such. No need for these games to be 1GB+ all the time. At least RenPy I think is working to load 3D models directly in the future which may help for some styles of renders…
Story idea seems interesting though, you could twist it to be about the competitors sabotaging each other instead for the growth.
If you haven’t seen the The Sultans Harem, then just be sure to differentiate yourself a bit too.
I do enjoy some level of choice or other mechanic to keep from just being a straight-story. It could be about learning her likes/dislikes of food and working towards feeding her only things she likes by the end for something lightweight at minimum.
It doesn’t matter too much to me I think, especially if you imply they’re onlooking as it’s kind of like we’re part of the audience seeing the scene before us anyway.
Thanks for the advice on webp and maybe downscaling, @Wulf_Diomhaireachd and @BadIdea4. For the initial demo version, I will try webp, but I don’t think the initial game be long enough to need downscaling. I agree the multi GB size of some Ren’Py games sometime feels unduly large.
And thanks, @drxprime I do like the Sultan’s Harem, but the story I have in mind for The Bulging Bellydancer is a different type. I intend it to be a story taking place over a defined amount of time (say a month), in a number of Acts. Maybe with Act 1 as a demo to see if I can get to grips with the game and renders, and Act 2+ I may see if there’s support for a patreon to add some more 3D assets. Act 1 will maybe have a straightforward beginning and end, but with a bit of puzzle gaming in the middle to see how much Kyra gets to gorge herself.
As an aside, although it’s not at all important, I even believe I posted my first chapter of 1001 Desert Nights on Curvage, featuring Kyra Shah and her greedy family, some time before the Sultan’s Harem came out (https://curvage.org/forum/index.php?/forums/topic/58884-1001-desert-nights/ )! But at the time I hadn’t thought about making a game.
