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Visual Novel Survey to help out two game devs :)

A topic by exe.quimini created Nov 21, 2022 Views: 386 Replies: 5

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Hey there!
I, Ellen from Team exe:quimini, want to develop a Visual Novel Game with a further friend and Game Design Student from Germany.

If you are interested in VNs, please take the time to complete this survey so that we can develop a game that doesn't repeat bad choices or - instead - does eveything right, you as a player wish for in a VN. (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfGWnC4rhaYaaMQ30I_otwSEFfXHBdhvoukf2AB..., estimated ~10 mins.)

It will help a lot! 😊
Kindly, Ellen and Svenja

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PurplePanties2 years ago

Any chance you'll be sharing the results? Some of those questions are one's I'd like to ask...

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exe.quimini2 years ago

Since we are still students time is limited, but if we can, we will post a summary of the results. Thank you for your interest! :)

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Qory2 years ago

The question of "You would still play a VN if it had ________ but the rest was only meh." not having an option for "Characters with a rich personality" but going out of its way to have multiple options for "diversity" got me thinking.

I want to write a visual novel with no racial/gender diversity.

At all.

I want to write a visual novel about a guy dealing with the existential dread of living in some closed-off laboratory where the only other people he is aware of (over the course of the story) are other genetic clones from the same incubator sharing his genetics, and he starts to go crazy after hearing legends that some people are born with a slightly different hair color than him.

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exe.quimini2 years ago

Hey Qory,

thanks for your reply.

The question you're mentioning should have an option to put your own individual answer, if you feel it's missing. :)

Please keep in mind that we are just two students. We don't make surveys peofessionally and just wanted to get a bit of an understanding what opinions about VNs are out there. It is highly likely that answers that many people would share are not there as a pre-typed option. We are humans, there is no way that we could pre-type every possible opinion out there. We just put what was at the head of our minds (wich included answers about diversity, since we, personally, care about it).

If it is your choice not to include a diverse cast in your VN that is entirely valid too, your idea sounds cool and we wish you the best of luck with your project :)

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PurplePanties2 years ago(+1)

Actually, I think diversity is pretty good to focus on. If the bulk of your players (I suspect they are mostly male and mostly straight/lesbian) are not comfortable with their avatar character, or the NPCs they are given the option of interacting with, then your audience for the novel immediately drops and, if you didn't warn them, you may attract negative reviews and ratings. So an important question to research is just how open minded your audience is.

There are also technical reasons why racial diversity is important. Sometimes skin tone is the only way you can work out which bits belong to which character... ;-)

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