VN Unity [VNGINE] - Need any VN Creator feedback! What features are you missing?

Aesouh

Master Chief VNGineer
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Sep 16, 2017
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Hello!

I've been working on and off (and now recently more actively) on my VN Engine in Unity, called VNGINE,

The idea behind it is to provide a flexible platform and collaborate with artists to get their VN's out pretty much as close to as how they want them, within reason, without them having to do any development work. The idea is to be able to push out content as fast as you provide artistic content & story without much hassle of integrating it.

Of course, using unity, this means that there is an excellent support of various types of mini-games within the VN itself.

I am asking you guys, from whatever is on my list below, is something missing that you really would like to see being easily set up or accessible in a VN system.

Features will include, but not forced or limited to
- Simple configuration process to cater for your needs.
- Sandbox Style gameplay
- Branching stories
- Character stats and improvements
- Relationship stats
- Various types of minigames
- Shop, inventory and item interaction.
- Wardrobe choice system,
- Money system
- Map and travel system
- "Phone" menu system / fake messaging system
- Replay scenes
- Picture archive
- Achievement system
- Progress tracking
- Save and Load system,
- Multiple language support system,
- Sound support
- Video playback support
- 3d environments,
- Full seamless save conversion from older version to newer.

Thanks in advance for your interest in my project, and to your contributions in moving the project further.

/Aesouh
 

9thCrux

--Waifu maker--
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Oct 22, 2017
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I'm not sure if its already included in your plans but what about a time tracker?
A regular clock to schedule events and progress during the day (in game) with maybe a clock look or interface we could customize. In many cases a clock serves as a backbone for progress oriented games. ^^
 

Aesouh

Master Chief VNGineer
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Sep 16, 2017
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I'm not sure if its already included in your plans but what about a time tracker?
A regular clock to schedule events and progress during the day (in game) with maybe a clock look or interface we could customize. In many cases a clock serves as a backbone for progress oriented games. ^^
Yes of course! And skipping time and all that jazz too. Basically, is there anything that isnt out there that people are missing from these types of games? As i understand it a lot of people are trying to make their own vn's from scratch because they do feel like something is missing from what's out there today.

Could definitely make the clock customization as well to some extent. Like , alarm-tones, fonts, am/pm or 24hour. etc
 

gamersglory

Xpression Games
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Aug 23, 2017
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Support for .webp and .flif to minamize size
 

Aesouh

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Support for .webp and .flif to minamize size
Yeah those are obviously limited by the unity engine, i mean flif is as fresh as it gets, it's going to take a while to get that mainstream and into unity by standard, and even .webp requires some special plugins today. As far as I know unity does some own compression as well within its archives, so while its convenient to have smaller images while developing, unity would fundamentally have to change their image compression during compilation...
 

Ghostrun

Newbie
Jun 2, 2017
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My question would be, what are you going to do with your engine, or what is it going to offer that differentiates itself from Fungus, keeping in mind if you're planning on selling this, that Fungus is free.

Fungus lacks video support which you've noted, that's a plus for me, since it's why when I was considering engines to use I discounted it .

My main problem from a single person trying to make a game is this: I have a story, and I have art. Now I need to storyboard it, figure out where I want to branch and come up with variables to dictate those branches. Right now I'm sort of using Twine to story board, without pictures, and then I've got to go and create files for each character, or branch or however I decided to do it, and then get into variables from there. I sort of have to decide a structure, that won't be easy to change once I get deeper into it. I don't have ideas on how to make that easier, but it's certainly something I would look for in an engine.

Right now Ren'py is the most versatile because it's all code. So while it's versatile and can do basically anything you would want in the genre it requires a lot of knowledge. Tyranobuilder is on the opposite end, but it's buggy as hell, and unusable in it's current state outside of making a very basic linear story where you don't fuck with it's gui or anything beyond it's drag and drop nature, because the software is just buggy. Fungus is nice, but variables still require coding knowledge, it lacks certain tools like video, requiring you to meld Unity features with it, which requires knowledge of that system and so if you want to do anything with it that is outside the confines of the plug in you're sort of back at square one.

Ultimately when I decided on Ren'py it wasn't because I wanted to use it sho much as I didn't want to paint myself into a corner. Both Fungus and Tyranobuilder which toute themselves as simple to use GUI focused VN makers are ultimately no more simple to use than the basic Ren'py script so long as you're fine with it's GUI, writing a linear story doesn't require much or any knowledge of code in ren'py. While I could see a game made in Fungus working , if I changed my mind and wanted to add one little thing to it, that went beyond it's capability, I was screwed.

So at the very least, if what you're doing isn't as capable as Ren'py I wouldn't use it for fear of reaching a point where it couldn't do something without scabbing code in from something else. This is probably why we're not seeing a ton of games from these other VN engines, they seem to only do enough to get something basic, and assume that's all you would need, they are entirely focused on Visual Novel, not game. If all your engine is going to offer is another way to make a Visual Novel, I think there is already enough tools out there to do that. The next step is built in tools.

A built in trainer system, a built in stats system that works together with jumps and branches that just requires entering in +1 for doing this -1 for doing this and so forth, because I think what people are looking for is a way to deal with the code, that they can just drop their story and art into.
 
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Aesouh

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My question would be...
Thank you Ghostrun for taking the time to write this post! I really appreciate it.

So I didn't have a plan on selling it as a product and then just unleash the krakken upon way too many people that I wouldn't be able to support it. I want to offer a quality VN engine to cater for some few exclusive projects, and work more in the terms of a partnership than just offering a product and then let artists use it in that sense. So you could just see it as getting your game development done through my service. At least that's the initial idea, that I would provide the development part of the VN making and meet your expectations of quality, stability and features. And to be able to add new features without breaking everything else.

You can clearly see this as well in the way that many games don't let you load up old version saves. Because they fundamentally restructure the save component and don't bother converting it to the new format, causing a player frustration from losing all their progress. This is quite frustrating when some content creators just launch out minimal content and force you to play through everything again. Obviously some more linear games offer you to skip straight to the new content, however this is not exactly easy with branching stories.

I have been working on coding projects for long enough in my life, both professionally and as a hobby, working with a wide range of people with different skill levels and skill sets. I feel like a lot of artists aren't sure what they are getting themselves into when they want to realize their projects, even so novice/junior developers. A lot of people try to patch together free assets from left and right, in unity i have seen people just throw in random free assets. As you mentioned, if you want to modify anything, either you have to dig so deep it's not worth the hassle, or it will break everything.

I want to make a modular system were the components can be loaded into your project depending on your needs in that specific project. Each module will be independent in the way that it wouldn't break other modules but at the same time they'd be seamlessly working together to add functionality without the cost of stability on short notice.

Personally I want to put the focus on functionality, stability and quality, remove any frustrations of introducing game breaking bugs or the code to get out of hand and overwhelming. I want to deliver modules in a more agile fashion and allow for the product to just get better and better with time.

I want to make something that I can be proud of, and I want to make something that people can truly appreciate.

Also, in regards to story board. I will eventually look at either ways of exporting and importing from other story/branch tools, or make my own that will output to the format that the engine supports.

/A
 

OvidiusLian

Member
Jan 28, 2018
120
130
But it`s kind of yet another of VN*drag`n`drop development framework, will fail where all others VN*drag`n`drop fail, easy to start making something, limited by default.

The success of ren'py it's free and open source, cross platform, with it's own script language dedicated to VN, on top of Python and it's ecosystem, imagination it's your limit, you could make a ren'py visual novel with a deep neural network AI behind generating images for your story or creating new stories.
  1. public github repro and open source it.
  2. a plugin system kind of wordpress/drupal to allow developers to expand your dnd editor.
PS: Don't forget to support linux.
(ps i realy hate worpress, but there is a plugin for that to)
 

Aesouh

Master Chief VNGineer
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But it`s kind of yet another of VN*drag`n`drop development framework, will fail where all others VN*drag`n`drop fail, easy to start making something, limited by default.

The success of ren'py it's free and open source, cross platform, with it's own script language dedicated to VN, on top of Python and it's ecosystem, imagination it's your limit, you could make a ren'py visual novel with a deep neural network AI behind generating images for your story or creating new stories.
  1. public github repro and open source it.
  2. a plugin system kind of wordpress/drupal to allow developers to expand your dnd editor.
PS: Don't forget to support linux.
(ps i realy hate worpress, but there is a plugin for that to)
Thanks for your input, I can refer you to my latest reply to above comment that might give you a bit of clarity on my idea. I don't question the excellence of renpy, but its also utilized by so many without knowing what they get themselves into, and its easy for the project to get out of hand. At least I will also have full knowledge of all the modules to the core, something which people wouldn't usually meddle with in ren'py.

It will eventually support all big platforms as well. I can't test on mac personally, but Unity already allows for compilations to each system. I have done Linux and android unity projects before and it did not require much extra work. Mainly though for a start, it will be a focus on the desktop environments.
 

OvidiusLian

Member
Jan 28, 2018
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130
As a side note, i'm a full stack developer, most of my time i'm writing python or javascript code, i'm really surprised with a non existing ren'py version written in javascript, with react and jss, hot loaders.
If I was to develop an VN game, most likely would try javascript. As there is no good VN developing tool, no good editor, some work creating an visual editor (open source it).
Being javascipt you can publish the game online, or in case of react there is also native ios and android build, sharing a good portion of the code.
In terms of monetizing, service for creators to publish the VN online, technical support, services...

Did you know that Tyranobuilder uses jQuery, that is so 2013!!!
 

Droid Productions

[Love of Magic]
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Dec 30, 2017
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I suspect something you need to front-load in terms of features is making the save/load system fully re-entrant, so you can save/load from anywhere. Since most of these games are done in RenPy, people have the expectation that all games should save like RenPy, where you can stop/save in mid-sentence.
 

Aesouh

Master Chief VNGineer
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Sep 16, 2017
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I suspect something you need to front-load in terms of features is making the save/load system fully re-entrant, so you can save/load from anywhere. Since most of these games are done in RenPy, people have the expectation that all games should save like RenPy, where you can stop/save in mid-sentence.
Yes, but i have a pretty good idea how i will solve this as well :)
 

Droid Productions

[Love of Magic]
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That depends quite a lot on what you're doing, I guess. 20k lines of code is.. pretty low for any sizeable project; our last codebase was 500k (though that was C++, not unity/c#). AAA games often hit 10M+ in just internal code (start adding things like Boost and you're quickly growing out of control).
 

Aesouh

Master Chief VNGineer
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That depends quite a lot on what you're doing, I guess. 20k lines of code is.. pretty low for any sizeable project; our last codebase was 500k (though that was C++, not unity/c#). AAA games often hit 10M+ in just internal code (start adding things like Boost and you're quickly growing out of control).
If you are making a whole engine from scratch, and in C++, and all the physics and rendering and everything, then yes thats quite possible, but if you end up with 20k lines in unity with c# ... thats another story
 

Droid Productions

[Love of Magic]
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Dec 30, 2017
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I guess we'll see once your VN engine is complete ;) Anyway; interesting project, and good luck.
 

Aesouh

Master Chief VNGineer
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Sep 16, 2017
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I guess we'll see once your VN engine is complete ;) Anyway; interesting project, and good luck.
Thank you! Looking forward to the first release at some point :) and taking in feedback from that and improving. I might have one potential partnership in the pipeline as well so we shall see what goes of if.
 

Studio Errilhl

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Oct 16, 2017
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Uhm... okay, I get that a pure VN, using a ready-made engine like Ren'Py might not need those amounts of code. However, 20k lines of code isn't that much. I have an Alpha-release going on , and it's 8k lines of code (including dialogue and stuff, of course, I haven't done a pure code-test). But the dialogue isn't that extensive yet. It's using Ren'py, but it's not a VN, so that can probably account for some.
 

Aesouh

Master Chief VNGineer
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Sep 16, 2017
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I have to ask what that code looks like, because its easy to write in quantity, but its about quality in the end. The more code you have the more you have to maintain. Dialogues shouldn't even be in your code base. 20k lines of code is massive for what it is you are doing. I checked out your game, is this the VN you are mentioning? As you counted in dialogue in your code line number it leads me to believe you are not that experienced, and more of a beginner / hobby developer. Which could result in less optimized code, which means more code in general... We all have started somewhere, but as a coder there is a lot of emphasis on do more with less.