This is a write-up for my Visual;Conference 2023 talk on polish: UX and accessibility.

I will discuss quality-of-life features and accessible design with engine-agnostic tips for implementation, walking you through case studies of existing visual novels.

This talk will guide you to answer the question: How do I give my players an improved user experience?

To create a polished visual novel is to deliver your game with both style and usability.

This talk focused on the aspect of usability and accessibility in your visual novel. How can you give your players a better user experience in terms of the following?

1. Core Visual Novel Experience
2. Accessibility
3. Extra QoL Features

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I. Core Visual Novel Experience

You want your player to be able to read your narrative as conveniently for them as possible. Interactive components in your game application should mostly be there to enhance the player experience whether it is part of your narrative or there to give players more control.

I briefly touched on some common components/screens found in just about every visual novel.

Quick Menu

1. Be easy to click and inobtrusive
2. Be easy to understand
3. Convince your players that it actually works by providing feedback to button clicks

ALT

Text based quick menus are easy to understand, but take up lots of space. Icon based quick menus can be very abstract (what do the icons mean even if seemingly “obvious?”)

You may want to consider a combination of both, but if using icon based quick menus, be sure to clarify the icons such as via tooltips.

ALT

Provide feedback when the quick menu items are clicked. Most actions just bring up a screen (obvious feedback). Skip will cause rapid movement of text on screen (easy). Auto is more subtle.

What can you do?

• Change the auto button to an active state vs. idle state on press
• Hide the CTC and/or quick menu on auto
• Change the CTC to an “auto-mode activated” CTC
• Etc.

History

1. Provide long enough history to backread
2. Provide utilities (e.g., if voice acting in game, allow voice replay)
3. Remember that rollback and history are two different things

Save/Load

1. Provide context of when and where
2. Provide sufficient slots for all choices without requiring player overwrite (visual novel players SAVE EVERY CHOICE)
3. Consider feature to indicate newest save, file deletion button, save file locking

ALT

To provide context, have a visual and timestamp, but also try providing chapter names or scene descriptions.

Configs

1. Provide reasonable default settings (e.g., audio at 70%)
2. Avoid overwhelming users by categorizing options and providing reasonable support (e.g., slider vs radio)
3. Provide previews

Single pagers and multi-pagers are both good. Make it easy for the player to get in, change the settings to their preferred values, and get back to the game.

ALT

ALT

Additional recommendations:

• CTC icons
• System sound
• Splash screens (especially first time setting initializations)

II. Accessibility

Stating the obvious: start with good design :)

Make accessibility features easily accessed and support them:

1. Put it into your configs screen even if it’s built in if you want to support it
2. Test and check that it works correctly (e.g., self voicing pronunciation, text size overflow)

Provide a reasonable number of options per feature. Whatever options you explicitly provide, you should actually be supporting them.

No one’s coming after you if the built in Ren’Py accessibility toggles overflow your textbox, but it sure will be a problem if the font sizes you’re explicitly providing are broken because that’s just a bug.

Recommended accessibility features: (italics talked about in presentation explicitly)

• Self voicing
• Image descriptions
• Text options
• Photosensitivity
• Screenshake
• Audio captions
• Graphic images filter

III. Extra QoL Features

Not all features are great for all games, but some quality of life features can be very useful depending on your game. Therefore, you should know your game to know how to make the player experience better.

1. What’s the genre?
2. How long is it?
3. What’s the branching structure (if any) like?
4. Gameplay?

In this section, I briefly tackled exploring Aoishiro (highly recommend this game, by the way) and how some of its quality of life features are useful due to the type of game it is.

Genre?

occult fantasy, Japanese mythology

ALT

Having a glossary (with “new” indicator and alphabetization to make it usable) is very useful in game genres with lots of terms!

Length?

30+ hours (according to vndb. I took way longer, so pretty long)

ALT

Fourth item down in the first box is a togglable alarm for when skip ends! (Vibration mode, sound mode, both, or silent) Longer visual novels with large trunk portions of shared text that might get new unlocked text often need lots of skipping.

Branching?

56 endings, route unlocking mechanics

ALT

Aoishiro provides a spoiler option that lets you “mark unread content as read,” unlocking content that you may not have actually been able to play through, whether it’s due to difficulty or just laziness.

(This is also useful for remasters or sequels that contain previous game content but are not backward compatible save file wise.)

Conclusions

Make life more convenient for your players by keeping in mind UX heuristics such as:

1. Providing feedback & status
2. Error prevention & control
3. Recognition over recall
4. Consistency & standards

To polish your release, you want to make its features usable, accessible, and useful for your players!

• Make baseline features with usability and accessibility.
• Add additional QoL features depending on your game.

I hope this talk helps you make your visual novel a better experience for your players!