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| From The Adventures of Prince Ivan |
As an author, I saw Visual Novels as a fantastic new way to tell a story. I was already creating worlds with words alone. The idea of adding images, music and sound effects to a story fascinated me.
What was the last thing you worked on?
The Walk, a Psychoanalysis Game. It's actually more of a Quiz game than a Visual Novel. Truthfully though, I was testing some coding just to see if I could do it.
Working on anything right now?
I'm in the planning (plotting) stage of a couple of new ideas, but I'm either missing needed assets to complete it, or the idea is just to big for me to accomplish by myself.
What are a few of your inspirations (artistic, literary, games)?
My core inspiration for making visual novels is an older game called "Ballad of an Evening Butterfly" (link), one of the VN's translated by DejaVu. With only a handful of choices available, it was far more Story than Game. I played it and pretty much thought, "Hey, I can do that!" However, several years passed before I found the RenPy VN Engine and started making my own VNs.
I have two other sources of inspiration: The old "Choose Your own Adventure" books and Fairy Tales. Many of the older Fairy Tales actually have riddles and puzzles in them, so they work well as VNs, but studying the style of story branching CYOA books use is where I got my first ideas on how multi-path stories should work.
Other interests?
Photoshop. I became an addict after working with a couple of scanlation groups that translate manga from Japanese to English. I adore experimenting with ways to take photos and make them look like paintings.
After too many years of experimentation I finally figured out how to make VN character sprites. However, the 'paperdoll' technique I use is not a popular style. Unfortunately, I just don't have the drawing skills needed to make each character an individual work of arte, so I make-do with the limited skills I do have.
Plant, animal or mineral?
Animal!
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