Traditional cutscenes have always been too far beyond my budget to be seriously considered. Instead my original plan was to create a sort of radio drama, but this hasn’t gone as smoothly as I would have hoped. I’m not ready to give up on it, but even if it pans out it’s still an enormous investment of time to create something half-decent. The game needs something, so I decided to hedge my bets with something easier to create.
Of course, calling the above a graphic novel is a bit pretentious. Currently it’s nothing more than a novel with an unchanging, and totally unrelated image on the side, a far cry from a real visual novel, which requires a ton of composition.
From the great (and forgotten) Siege of Avalon
Nevertheless, there are many benefits even beyond ease of creation. I can put pretty much whatever images I want in the other panel. Unlike radio drops, I have a massive image library, and any additional images can be supplemented with machine learning (AI) software, as that’s the kind of workload that they excel in.
Text on screen also allows the user to enjoy the story at their pace, even going backwards if they so desire. In contrast, it’s impossible to tune video or audio content to the right speed for everyone, and Unity’s realtime playback speed manipulation leaves a lot to be desired. The game will get ported over to Godot, but I highly doubt their tools are any better.
There’s a reason why pretty much everyone with the budget to make nice looking videos goes in that direction, but we have to make do with what we have.
