Walking Sims vs Visual Novels
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- Опубликовано: 25 янв 2022
- I think people get scared away from even trying to make 3D narrative adventure games because they think it's hard.
Well, I mean, it is, but no more than 2D. Let's talk about it. 
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Character animation is a huge undertaking and the reason why they don't do full 3D.
I think that people prefer making VN instead of Wallking Sims because it's a genre with a narration that usually revolves around characters. And yes, even though you can find 3D characters assets and animations, static 2D characters will always be more convincing than cheap 3D characters and animation. That and you're basically trading having to code scene transitions and GUI with anim blueprints and AI. Which don't need to be complex, I agree, but what I mean is that it's not just about dragging in some assets and posing them.
IMO it's no wonder why the vast majority of 3D walking sims don't have characters in it. Either that or they do have characters but are highly stylized, which is a commitment you cannot get away with store assets.
I don't disagree, but I also think 3D characters in a 3D world is worth the effort.
I really do think it boils down to "3D = scary" because I assume most people are introduced first with the 2D side of things and assume that transitioning to 3D involves having to learn a completely new set of things (which you do to some extent, like animations or whatever) when in reality you're basically doing the same sorts of things but with different considerations in mind
I’m one of these game designers you’re talking about. I have almost gone to Visual Novels many times when code got too complicated, and yes you still need a lot of code to even make a bunch of things to click on. Especially with Dialogue.
Would love to have you walk through creating a bare bones version of this kind of game.
I think it's a good idea, there seem to be a lot of misconceptions.
I had the same thoughts a few months ago and started to move from 2D stills rendered in DAZ to realtime 3D in Unreal. But I'm still not there and don't know if I ever will be. Why...? Because of characters! Everything else (landscapes, static assets, game mechanics, etc) is quite streamlined in Unreal and there are lots of good tutorials available on YT.
But when it comes to characters, things get incredibly hard.
In a 2D render I only need a pose and a facial expression that looks believable from one single angle, but in 3D I need a body and face animation that is at least somewhat realistic from all angles and most of the time. Nearly everything I created so far looked somewhat "off" and uncanny. Transferring all parts of a char (body mesh, clothes, materials, hair, face and body animations, morphs, joint corrective morphs, cloth / hair physics...) from DAZ to Unreal is also not exactly easy and lossless even using the DAZ to Unreal bridge.
If someone knows a good up-to-date tutorial series about how to effectively use DAZ characters in UE5, I'd be super grateful for a link :)
Try using metahumans from Unreal Engine.
@@hector3devYeah, I already tried Metahumans, their degree of realism is amazing! Some basic clothes for them are already available on the marketplace. If that keeps expanding to a universe of assets similar to the DAZ store, I might switch over from DAZ for good!
It's really funny because I had to downgraded my game to "cinematic VN" and all it entails was having camera jumping around my static character poses, and people think I'm innovating the genre -_-'
Tangent:
Originally I wanted to make an open world zelda like game BUT the core of what I wanted was a Caribbean game, so focus on identity, therefore story and character representations, given than story is basically, from a production perspective, the asset list, starting a game where it's the focus without knowing the story (the process of finding the meaning) in advance is asking for distress, because changing the story mean changing the asset.
A 3D VN make more sense then, it's much better to do something safe first to figure out and isolate the risky uncertain bit, as it turns out, what makes project takes time isn't just the actual executive complexity, the creative difficulty is probably a bigger factor, especially when shooting for coherence and "fitness of meaning". Also because one the big challenge is to tackle and try to innovate, at my level, on dark skin character with real time afro textured hair, which is undocumented, which mean it's probably easier to make a clone of gta 4 on my own since there is nothing new to make.
There are some fun combo VN/walking sim games out there. Necrobarista, for example! The boundaries don't have to be so sharp, do what you can.
@@CraigPerko yeah but avoiding walking was also a conscious decision with the shift. Most game use walking as glorified but cumbersome menu. There is value when traversal IS the gameplay, but it distract from the narrative, there is also a case for museum aesthetics of traversal as immersion (hi Janet Murray) but that has pacing issues. Basically the idea is to delineate the difference of narrative composition from movie and game, movie use editing by stringing highly intentional framed shot to convey meaning, in game we have system as framing, in which not only meaning is conveyed, but also affordances. Take old jrpg for example, you are either on town map, field map, dungeon map and the overworld map, they all have specific camera but also button have different function in their specific context, dialogue system shift how camera frame a scene a signal change in what button do, A swing the sword in the field, but select the dialog options when dealing with a town npc. The idea is to generalize this observation to all actions in a game using the VN format, ie each actions is framed in specific way and offer affordances in a more granular level than game usually do.
@@NeoShameMan Hmm. I more or less disagree. The experience of moving through a map is a big part of the experience. Simplifying it away removes too much for my taste.
@@CraigPerko I don't deny it, but we need to explore alternative and we can't keep dong it the same thing forever. And the walking is true mostly for good that do it RIGHT anyway, if we pit the best vs the new, it's an unfavorable bias to maintain the statu quo.
@@NeoShameMan ... Are you claiming that VNs are the "new"?!
2d you can draw and it's done, but 3d you have to build each thing one by one and then put them together
Sort of, sure. If you're already comfortable in 2D, it would definitely be easier to do something in 2D than learn 3D.
What free asset from the marketplace is that?
It's been quite a while, to the extent that the shop has had a complete renovation. It may not even be available any more.
Funny how this is exactly the path i took from being a daz user, staring to make a visual novel and finally just using unreal instead.
Do you need to learn alot? Yes. But visual novels are frankly boring 9/10 times and there are great assets for the complex stuff in unreal, like combat, quests, inventory etc. Sure you will need to understand them to customize them but thats just another great way to learn.
One thing that came to my mind (being not a great player of either) is that in a visual novel, the player probably relies on GUI buttons to tell them what they can do and what they cannot, where they can go and what is just visual decoration. In a 3d environment, I imagine this is much more the player bringing an expectation of what they should be able to do or quickly building it in the first few minutes of playing the game. Suddenly things like level design matter, because the player gets irritated if they constantly get lost or run against invisible walls. I can imagine that being a real added skill/complexity/player experience issue which would suggest using the visual novel format, because it doesn't exist there
Oh, they're absolutely different genres that are good at different things. For sure!
Interesting perspective. I haven't made a 2D VN, but I unless your 3D walking sim takes place in an empty world like Myst, I think NPCs will be a major additional hurdle over a 2D VN. Maybe if you just place them in fixed spots and let them play a single looping animation it's not that bad, but if they move around and act/react to the environment and each other and to you, the logic and animations and animation transitions of all this is a whole can of worms that you wouldn't have to deal with in a 2D VN. I do think that we will have good tools one day that will make this a whole lot easier (probably heavily based on AI), just as we don't have to hand-code physics today and just use a physics engine, but that is years away.
I think you're coming up with an astonishingly complicated solution for something that's really not so hard. Walking and talking animations are included. Pathing is included.
You do need characters, but you'd need them for background shots in a 2D novel anyway.
We're not talking about an immersive sim, here. We're just talking about a game that might have some background characters chatting with each other in a corner. You don't need AI or anything.
Most AAA games doesn't have NPC's that are that versatile, not sure if anyone expect it from an Indie game.
@@CraigPerko Yeah maybe. I just feel the medium is very different. VNs often take place in busy locations like classrooms or shopping malls. In a VN you show a picture of the outside of a shop and the brain fills in the rest of the busy mall, with all the people humming around. If you have to actually show the entire mall in a 3D game even though you only use one or two small parts of it for the story, that's a big additional effort. In the pedestrian city area you use in the video, you would have to add a lot of NPCs everywhere the player can go to not make it feel empty. 3D needs a similar mechanism to this "the brain fills in the gaps" thing of VNs. Maybe Paradise Killer does something along these lines?
@@krawlak Paradise Killer takes place after the island is abandoned. However, "brain filling in the gaps" is the key: you design the player experience so that simple tricks are effective. It sounds like you've already grasped some of the techniques of doing it in 2D. 3D isn't so different, it's just that the camera can move around a bit.
If you do like Adventure games genre, what do you think about one of the recent ones, called The Last Stop. (If you played, if not I recommend it) I think the game was pretty mediocre, but the cinematics and screenplay they had was pretty good for game standards. I would almost say I never seen such scene transitions in another game. There was a section where they were making a Oceans 12 style blitz play thing. That was specifically interesting.
I want to draw a genre line between narrative adventure games and puzzle adventure games. I overlooked Last Stop because I thought it was the latter, which I have no interest in. But I think it's not, now that I look again.
The same techniques are used to create both kinds of games, but I don't have much interest in the games where the point is to read the dev's mind and glue cat hair to your comb or whatever.
@@CraigPerko Ah yeah, I dont like puzzle adventure games either. Last Stop was almost pure narrative and pretty linear without much of a gameplay.
I think only puzzle adventure stuff I like is when it is mixed with survival horror. Even then awkward puzzles still dont cut it. Silent Hill 2 for example had the most idiotic ways to get a coin from the sewer. RE1 Remake had these weird colored pool ball numbers puzzle etc. Those are really disconnecting. When its done right(contextual and real-lifey puzzles) and mixed with another genre, they can be fun.
@@themerpheus Yeah. As mentioned, I like being a specific person in a specific place. Lightweight puzzles that make me feel more like that person in that place are great. Goofy nonsense puzzles where I have to stop being that person to go read a walkthrough? Less great.
I would love to make a game in one specific urban environment, the problem is, I have no idea what the game should be about. This video gave me an idea to make it a walking sim... The problem is, I'm not into walking sims, so it could be an issue.
I would like to ask you, whether you have anything to say to people like me, who want to make a solo game project but they are interested in environment but not much anything else.
Well, there's nothing wrong with creating a level without any gameplay at all. However, I always think it's important to have points of interest that a player can at least theoretically care about, in order to give the level decent flow.
@@CraigPerko Thank you for your answer.
Your have reminded me that "ШХД: Зима/It's Winter" game, where you just roam an empty post-soviet neighbourhood. Maybe there's something about it. Hmm, "My Summer Car", there's also no particular goal, am I wrong?
What's your opinion on such goal-less games?
In the perfect case I would make a game where you just roam a town in Czech Republic in summer 2002, being able to visit your grandparents, buy an ice cream, explore some backyards... I like such idea but I still find it quite pointless, not lasting more than 2 hours of fun.
Maybe, for example, adding some secret stories to uncover? There's the Epsilon myth in GTA San Andreas on my mind, people are trying to follow some steps in a hope to uncover it.
Hmm, playing as a kid. Roaming around the town, exploring places by crawling through holes and such, playing with other kids (for example hide and seek), maybe troll pedestrians and such.
@@Vikom07 There are no rules about what makes a game. In any case, even if it's never a smash hit, making something is how you learn and proves you can create.
imagine you go to make a VN, and every time you have a scene transition you actually code a whole new way to to do it XD. Yeah no, the coding itself only happens the once for a VN same as for the 3D walking sim. The annoying bit for a VN is dropping in all the GUI, and depending on your engine that can be VERY annoying. Unity, for example, is notorious for having a really unintuitive and annoying system for setting up GUI...
That and, when it comes to progressing through story elements you'll still be working with a branching tree in a walking sim same as with a VN, so you don't lose much complexity there either...
? In a Ren'Py VN every location needs to have custom code for where it connects to what. Sure, you don't have to code what it means for the player to click, but you do have to manually connect every screen and manually create every map with manual coordinates for every manual hotspot.
You don't "do it once in a VN". You do it for every location. And frequently, you'll have many versions of the same location, and you have to be careful to link to the correct version of that location along the chain of manually scripted locations. The alternative is to have each location have a branching implementation that detects which of many flag variables are set to determine which script segment is required - and that's sure not any simpler.
That's what I was trying to say.
@@CraigPerko if we're talking explicitly about Ren'Py then sure, though even then I'd say that telling an amateur or beginner developer that the "coding" is the difficult task there is misleading, you're more or less performing the same function over and over...
Though when your game is primarily just images you really have a lot of options, since you can worry much less about overhead and beyond the obvious revenue concerns there's not much reason a beginner wouldn't try with Unity and C# or something.
None of that detracts from your main point in the video of course, making a 3D game isn't some insurmountable task or even difficult compared to 2D, but there are effective tools for both.