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One of the things I think is a helpful recommendation for folks who want to shoot for animated or film like presentations is to look at things like storyboards and animatics for inspiration.

I think a lot of people are missing out on the potential of visual novels as near-cinematic experiences because they look at other productions with significantly more support and finances, and then just decide that visual novels couldn't ever do that or get close to it.

Animatics are animated or sequenced storyboards.  These have obviously had a lot of work done to them but you can see in their frames where the overlaps are.  Here, they trade fidelity and definition for movement, but what if we adjust the knob slightly back the other direction and pick up more definition at the cost of having less movement? Say we fill in the characters and the outfits with color and detail, but have less frames of movement?

That's essentially what visual novels are in varying degrees.  I wonder how much we can adjust the knob in the format to get what we're looking for?

I'm glad you like my assets and resources!  I think about visual novels far too much and it's nice that it's appreciated.

I'm convinced folks who hate visual novels just haven't seen the one that'll convert them yet.  I often wonder if other mediums faced this type of rejection as they popularized.

Thanks!

Awesome!  Welcome~ A lot of people come to visual novels from comics!  

One of the things I hear folks gushing about is being able to reuse assets instead of having to draw ever panel.  There's a lot of effort/time saving methods you can employ in comics but the conventions in visual novels let you get away with a fair bit more since you can construct sprite expressions.

Honestly, I'm partial to comic and manga panel aesthetics in VNs.  If you're just starting out and like the idea of bringing comic elements into VNs, you should check out Dead End Junction.  It's a pretty basic example compared to what you might see in physical media comics, but it demonstrates just enough to show what's possible without setting the standard.  Many visual novel engines, including RenPy and Naninovel, have the ability to use text bubbles.  They can be a bit tedious to map, but worth it if you're about it!

The Visual Novel Developer Network is conducting 2 team building Meet & Greets for Cute Girls Doing Cool Things!

The Meet & Greets are happening tomorrow, May 9th, and again on May 23rd at 2 PM Eastern!

Come hang out with us in voice and text to meet other developers, find teammates, recruit team members, share project ideas, and get ready for CGDCT! These Meet & Greets are the best time to connect with people before the jam really gets rolling.

Voice participation is encouraged, but absolutely not required. You can participate entirely through text chat if that’s more comfortable for you!

Meet & Greet #1: https://discord.gg/VabcAmJGVB?event=1489277234098213099

Meet & Greet #2: https://discord.gg/VabcAmJGVB?event=1489277236430504116

Whether you're a writer, artist, musician, programmer, UI designer, or just curious about joining the jam, come stop by and say hi!

It can be applied to an entire scene and all of its contents by applying it to a layer or camera, or you can apply it to individual elements like just a character sprite or a background or screen by assigning the transforms to them.

You can get more details about transforms over in the official RenPy docs if you have questions:

https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/transforms.html

Oh, this is sick.  Is there a way to style and group different types of footnotes?  Like say if I wanted to pop a tool tip up that's a different color/style in the text box for things like People, Places and Events?

The theme is open to interpretation and is not meant to be restrictive.  You can build something based off of the literal meaning of one or both words, or the combined meaning of the words.

Yes, you can have multiple languages in your game.

Alright, thanks for confirming.  I'll try to spin up my test project and test and debug soon.

I'd need to take a look to know for certain but my initial thought is your perspective being disabled.  Is your perspective enabled on your camera? 

The calculations are balanced with perspective in mind, but if that isn't on then the front and back wouldn't actually change the distancing and the offsets would shoot them in whichever direction if you tried to use them.

My second thought is I goofed up the transforms somewhere.   It's entirely possible that I goofed up one of the transform coordinates and no ones ever caught it.

Yep, super heroes fit into both supernatural and fantasy, depending.

We'll be hosting a live team building event called Meet & Greet in our Discord on the 20th at 8 AM Eastern!  If you are looking for a team or team mates, be sure to join us.  Voice participation is encouraged, but not required.  These events are the best way to quickly find a team or additional team members, so don't miss out!

You can join our discord here!

Dug into it.  So either your fonts folder is empty or doesn't exist.

If you unzip the fonts zip into your \game\fonts folder, it should fix that, alternatively if you put your preferred fonts into that folder, it should work too.  It just needs something there to display.

Take your time, I'll see if I can just grab the latest one and test it against it in the mean time.   Feel free to hit me up on our Discord too if you want more real time back and forth troubleshooting.

Sorry for the delay on getting back to you, can you tell me which version of RenPy you're using so I can try to reproduce it?

Generally we prefer submissions that were made explicitly for the competition, but as long as it fits the themes and otherwise follows the rules, it's fine.

As long as your submission follows the rules and is within the ballpark of a visual novel or other narrative game, it's fine.

If you open up MVNActionFXTemplates.rpy, you'll see a list of transform definitions. 

https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/transforms.html#transforms

I your script, you can apply these transforms to various displayable and images in your scene to produce the effects. The guide on the page here should help you figure out how to set each one up. 

If you know which effect you'd like to use, I can give more specific instructions on how to use them, too, just hollar and let me know.

Yep.  If you're going into it from a completely fresh project, redownload the MVNBubbleControls.rpy and try again.

I missed a bit during testing where if the bubble.json file doesn't exist or the ID is completely unassigned, it would throw an error.  That should be fixed now.  My B.

Thanks!  Could you tell me which of the glow shaders it was?  I actually addressed that exact issue in a previous update and I thought I pushed the update for them all.

So using the smart barks pack, I associated all of the bubble's speakers with the pop sound effect, and made the matching keyword and empty string, eg: ""  

So every time any of them would speak, it would play the pop sound effect.

This is how the definitions are laid out in MVNSmartBarks.rpy:

character_voice_lines = {
    "Anonymous User": {
        "": ["sfx/pop.ogg"]
    },
     "PurplePyroGirl": {
        "": ["sfx/pop.ogg"]
    },
    "Sparkle69": {
        "": ["sfx/pop.ogg"]
    },
    "Licklad": {
        "": ["sfx/pop.ogg"]
    },
    "Fan": {
        "": ["sfx/pop.ogg"]
    },
    "": {
        "": ["sfx/pop.ogg"]
    }

Web builds should be fine-- the majority of the issues with WebGL stem from WebGL not liking variable loops or implicit casting.  I used the burning text effect on my web build of Mint Condition over here: https://makevisualnovels.itch.io/mint-condition

I don't have specific issue reports from Android builds.  If you run into any issues with an Android build, feel free to reply here or find me in Discord and show me the error and I should be able to resolve it.  I'd be surprised if they run into significant performance issues on Android, but there are likely some optimizations I could do for the platform or alternative methods I could recommend failing that.

Attribution isn't required but is appreciated.   The best way to do is include either...

• Stella @ Make Visual Novels! 
• Remort Studios, LLC

Followed by a link to the asset you used: e.g:

Stella @ Make Visual Novels! Text & Shader Effects Pack: https://makevisualnovels.itch.io/text-pack 

If you use more than one of my packs, you can just link my main itch.io page like this rather than credit each one:

Stella @ Make Visual Novels! Assets:  https://makevisualnovels.itch.io/

Support is available through comments here, or you can reach out to me via the DevTalk discord here: https://discord.gg/devtalk

💖💖💖💖💖

I just hit the old record store with Penny, really digging it thus far.   It's given me some ideas, even.

Ayy came here to see T4T and saw you got use out of my stuff, lets f'n goooo

Sorry for the wait, I figured out what was going on.  

Early on when I started working on this pack, Bokeh originally was only going to move in one dimension, so speed was expressed as a float originally.  Before I released, I made speed an expression of vec2 so that it could have two dimensional speed.  I completely forgot that I did that, so I even included in the instructions to make it a float.

I've updated the templates to use the correct ones.  You can replace your MVNRomFXTemplates.rpy and it should straighten it out.

Perfect.  I'll get to work on it and have it sorted soon.

Thanks for the error report, I'll dig into it and figure out what's going on.  Someone in the Discord was also talking about it and I think something goofy might be happening with it.  I might have used an older version of my test code for it instead of the tested one I had ready.  I gotta look at it to be sure.

Do you happen to know which version of RenPy this was in?  I doubt it's an issue with RenPy, but it helps me reproduce it.

I'd let it through.

It would most certainly count as separate assets, as you'd need to render it closed and open.  Depending on what you have on the pages themselves, that could also constitute multiple assets.

This would probably violate the bit about composite backgrounds not having multiple overlapping elements, sorry.

Live2D should be fine, just try to avoid anything that would significantly alter the pose.  Head shifts/turns, eye movement, tils and such of body parts are fine, but if you need to replace body parts(e.g, swapping arms) in order to create a pose you wish to use, it would likely violate the one asset rule.

Use your best judgement on non-human characters.  I won't likely be overly critical as long as the spirit of the jam was attempted.     

Hey there!  The ability to use shaders on text wasn't put into RenPy until 8.3, I believe.  If you move your project to the latest version, that part should start working.

For displayables in the UI, you can apply these to them.  For text itself, no, but I have another pack that works with text.

https://makevisualnovels.itch.io/text-pack

The reason it's cut off on the edges like that is because the shader can only draw within the rendered area.  If you want to get effects like that, you're better off compositing a screen together to include elements that could exist behind the text.  Since the parameters are tooled so high, there isn't much reason to make it adhere directly to the text displayable area.

Also I have a sprite/entity version that's in the works.  Vimi's been working on something that's got me working towards another pack released, and these type of effects for characters would be included.

If you're curious, the reason this is happening is because I forgot to re-add a .a on a line at some point during testing.  The original intent for the effect was, when it got dark, was this, with proper alpha sampling vs entire color sampling:

And I missed it because my test area was using white text. Whoops.

The method you posted uses Mix to completely strip the effect off of where the text is visible, using the original text's alpha value as the blending value.  I had intended to come back to the pack for content update in a few months, which was going to include a hollow version of this one, as well as a mix version like the one you posted. 

The transforms in MVNRomFXTemplates are intended to be copied and changed to customize the effects without having to dive into the shader code itself.

Here's a few quick ones I did, but you can tool with the numbers yourself and produce whatever variations you'd like:

transform MVNVignettePink:
    mesh True
    shader "MakeVisualNovels.LPVingette"
    u_vin_radius (0.5)
    u_vin_softness (0.3)
    u_vin_strength (0.5)
    u_vin_center (0.5, 0.5)
    u_vin_tint (1.0, 0.4, 0.6)

transform MVNVignetteWarm:
    mesh True
    shader "MakeVisualNovels.LPVingette"
    u_vin_radius (0.5)
    u_vin_softness (0.3)
    u_vin_strength (0.5)
    u_vin_center (0.5, 0.5)
    u_vin_tint (1.0, 0.3, 0.0)
transform MVNVignetteCool:
    mesh True
    shader "MakeVisualNovels.LPVingette"
    u_vin_radius (0.5)
    u_vin_softness (0.3)
    u_vin_strength (0.5)
    u_vin_center (0.5, 0.5)
    u_vin_tint (0.2, 0.4, 1.0)
transform MVNVignetteDream:
    mesh True
    shader "MakeVisualNovels.LPVingette"
    u_vin_radius (0.5)
    u_vin_softness (0.3)
    u_vin_strength (0.5)
    u_vin_center (0.5, 0.5)
    u_vin_tint (0.2, 0.9, 0.4)

Nah, I think I found it.  The fact that it was still there after you grabbed it told me what I needed to know. I'll have a correction out for it in a bit.