Lab 11: Visual Novel
Materials
For this week’s lab, download and install the latest version of
Ren’Py.
Overview
Our goal in this lab is to create a
visual novel,
a creative work that integrates text, music, and images.
As the term “novel” suggests, a visual novel tells a story primarily by means
of text, with images and music as supplemental story elements. The reader of
the visual novel typically has opportunities to make choices that affect the
story outcome.
You may develop your visual novel on your own, or you are welcome to work as
part of a team of up to three people producing a single visual novel.
The content of the visual novel should be “family-friendly”.
Design Document
Before you begin programming, write a design document consisting of the
following:
- A one-paragraph overview of the novel, describing the protagonist, the
protagonist’s goals, and the general themes of the novel.
- A description of every possible ending of the novel. There should be at
least one ending where the protagonist succeeds and a different ending
where the protagonist fails.
- A description of a challenge the protagonist must overcome.
- A listing and brief description of each character in the novel. There
should be at least two distinct characters in addition to the protagonist.
- A description of each anticipated decision point in the novel. It should
have at least four distinct decision points, and there should be at least
one ending which is reached by making at least two distinct decisions.
The Visual Novel
Create your visual novel using Ren’Py. It should
match the story requirements given in the design document above. As you work
on it, you are welcome to diverge from the original ideas expressed in the
design document, as long as it still meets the given requirements.
To get familiar with how Ren’Py works, I highly recommend reading carefully
through the included example The Question. There is also a lot of
valuable material in the included Tutorial.
I have also created a
short visual novel as a
demonstration.
Images and Music
The story should be enhanced with images and music as follows:
- Each character should have at least one image.
- You may have more than one image per character if you wish to reflect
different moods.
- The story should have at least two background images reflecting different
scenes.
- There should be at least two musical loops to accompany scenes from the
novel. Each musical loop should somehow enhance or reinforce the general
mood of the scenes it accompanies.
- It is perfectly fine for images and musical loops to be used in more than
one scene.
- Images and music must be original creations.
- Images may be photographs, original drawings/paintings that are scanned,
sketches from a drawing program, created by a generative AI, or anything
else workable.
- Music may be composed and exported from Sonic Pi, or performed,
recorded, and included from any other suitable source, again
including a generative AI.
- If you use a generative AI, supply your prompts and a link to the generative
AI you employed as part of your submission.
If you use the Record function in Sonic Pi, it generates a .wav file,
which is a format that Ren’Py doesn’t support. The following code (using
the pydub library, preinstalled in Kaggle) will
convert a file named scene1.wav file to an .mp3 file named scene1.mp3:
from pydub import AudioSegment
song = AudioSegment.from_wav("../input/wav-files-to-convert/scene1.wav")
song.export("scene1.mp3", format="mp3")
To Submit via Teams
- By Wednesday, April 3, at 10:10 am:
- A PDF of your design document
- Bring a printed copy to class that day
- By Wednesday, April 10, at 10:10 am:
- A Zip file of your completed visual novel