fernfmp2019

[fernfmp2019]

Building the visual novel

I organised them by chapters. If the chapter held the interaction unlocked by making a choice, I found it easier to name it the choice, as to be able to link them easier. I couldn't make the chapters too long, or I would need to scroll far whenever I wanted to add something, so I did my best to organise them well as to not lose track. I found it easy to keep track of the chapters and pages, splitting them up on choices and scene changes.

This is how I coded the dialogue and everything that makes it up. As you can see, it was easy to set up, only needing to set a font up on each page to show the dialogue. This meant I didn't have to code it in every time, simply clicking 'add dialogue ' and typing what I needed. I did have to play it by eye, though; if I wrote too much, it just went off the page, rather than move onto another. This also shows how I set up the choices. I would write out the two choices I wanted to give the player, and then pick which page I wanted each choice to take them to. Once the choice dialogue had played out, I would send both choices to the same page, to continue the visual novel. This doesn't show how I set up the sprites. First, I had to import the image. Then, I had to resize it exactly the same as the other sprites, and make sure it set on the page right. Once it was right, I could add it to the sprite list, and simply make it enter the scene from then on.

This shows a shot of during the visual novel. As you can see, the text appears with a black lining, to make it easier to read. The sprite sits on the screen as it should, not overlapping or looking too small, looking quite nice as it is. The words and sprite move on top of the background, which the game made easy to import and set.

[fernfmp2019]

Give yourself goosebumps

Give yourself goosebumps was a series of choose your own adventure books, with weird and creepy twist, just like in the usual goosebumps books. They all have wildly different plotlines, and very different endings. I like how unpredictable they are, never able to guess the next twist and change of pace.

I like the idea of offering wildly different endings and twists, but visual novels tend to focus on little choices rather than changing the whole plot like in a choose your own adventure novel. I also like the scary vibes these books have despite being aimed at children, using fantasy and the unusual and twisting them just right.

[fernfmp2019]

World building

Next, I needed to build the world in which it was being set: I knew that I wanted to do the human realm section at Ringshall Church. I’m able to access it easily, and I know it and its history well. It fit well with the theme of my visual novel, in the middle of nowhere and set on a hill with a graveyard, hardly used nowadays. It has an eiree feel to it, and has woods surrounding it, which I wanted for the first section of my visual novel.

For the fairy realm, it was a little trickier. I had more free reign over this, to make it weird and eiree. Since I had estabished a royal character, it only made sense for their to be a palace, where MC finds her. So, it also made sense for there to be a city attached, so I looked at some fantasy cities in various medias.

First was this city from Lord of the rings. It looks cold and closed off, very uniform yet run down at the same time, like there’s a large number of controlled people inside. I like the idea of it rising up, although the houses all look very uniform. The tall tower of the castle at the very centre looks nice, although that feels like the only way to tell where the palace it, which I don’t like.

Next, I looked at the city map for The Arcana. The city is set on a slope, leading up to the palace, at the very top of it all. I like this, the idea of the palace looking down at the city, establishing a difference. In game, the palace is very bright and elegant, while the rest of the city varies between busy and run down. Due to the city walls and woods surrounding it, it clearly seperates the city from everywhere else, which I like the idea of. 

Lastly, I looked at the city from Disenchanted. I like how messy the city looks, each house looking different with the palace up above everyone. I like how different the houses look while still looking messy and city-like, with various styles of roof, colour, and sizing. 

In the end, I set the palace in my city on a hill above everyone, in a style much like the palace from The Arcana. I created the city to be rather messy and put-together, with different styles of houses and winding streets, filled with mystical creatures.

[fernfmp2019]

Plot- getting MC to the fairy realm

After doing some research into fairy folklore, and the general ‘rules’ of it all, I knew that I wanted to do an eiree plot, with the general theme of the MC getting trapped in the fairy realm. This is because I could then get the character to work towards an end goal of escaping, and it’s an easy plot to keep things moving and it works well with the folklore, as a lot of it revolves around people getting trapped and/or getting punished for doing the wrong thing.

From there, I needed to work out how MC was going to get trapped. Several fairy options I had were:

- Eating food

This one was obvious, and I liked the idea of bringing in a tea-party sort of thing to it, but I realized that this might not fit the horror/creepy theme I wanted to aim for. It would also involve a character needing to trick MC into eating, which I wasn’t sure if I could write or not.

- Dancing with them

This often relates to the fairy circle thing- often, fairies would dance in a fairy ring of mushrooms, and if you stepped in and danced with them, you’d never be able to stop. I liked the idea of this: I could turn the ring of mushrooms into a sort of portal, MC dancing and dancing until they arrived in the realm. I liked it, but the player would be likely to decline a dance, and that would be that. I would need to put a choice in at that part, or it would feel strange, like it’s obvious I didn’t think it through.

- Giving them your name

I think this was my favourite choice on how to transport MC to the fairy realm. As I was using Novelty, I was struggling to find a way for someone to input their name, and while I wanted MC to speak, I felt that not everyone would want to bother putting their name in. So, the idea of them losing their name fit well, as I could work the no-name part into the plot.

[fernfmp2019]

Working towards the final cg

After I picked a concept for the cg, I then adding some mock shading onto the sketch, to see where the most dramatic shadows would be from the lighting I had planned. I then did the lineart and used her colours from her sprite to do flat colours, before beginning shading and, eventually, blue-white moon lighting.

[fernfmp2019]

To start concepting for costume design, I looked particularly at a midsummer’s night dream. They tend to have very strange outfits, with a mixture of nature-related colours (brown, green, cream), and the occasional flash of colour, to make the characters pop out on stage. I love how their clothes look, all formless and unusual, helping the audience understand that this isn’t set in our world, as such. I like her long, slightly green dress, with lots of lace and details, obviously a main character by the way her clothes seem that much nicer and simpler, less put-together.

This dress is from Lord of the rings. I like the vibrant green, and the way it falls on her body, not too poofed out but also not clinging to her legs. It seemed easy to walk in, as long dresses go. I also like the long sleeves, covering her hands, creating a nice feel to it. The colours on the end of the sleeves also appear at the end of the skirts and at the neck of the dress, which I like- it keeps it from being bland, and gives the dress a nice, balanced feel. 

From the Labrynth. Although the actual dress is far too detailed and big for a visual novel, especially when I’m going for a more simple, toned-down feel on the clothes. However, I like the poofy sleeves, and the way her exposed shoulders bring a nice look to the dress. On Queen’s dress, I intend to give her a high-necked dress, as that often shows in royalty outfits, and I think showing her shoulders will keep a nice balance to the dress to avoid it looking too blank. I also like the idea of taking the sleeves from this dress, with how they droop down her arms, and moving it to Green. They’re intended to look more natural and like they’ve lived in nature for a long time, and I think it’ll work well.

[fernfmp2019]

Audience

The intended audience for most choose your own adventures tend to be for younger children, prominant in childrens books mostly. However as games are becoming easier to make and share, there are more digital versions, aimed at people of all ages. The ones with heavy text and detail are aimed at adults who can understand it easier, and those with more images are more likely to be aimed at a younger generation.

When written up as visual novels rather than choose your own adventures, they’re often aimed at young adults, with the primary genre in visual novels being dating sims and general romance. 

I plan for my visual novel to be aimed at young adults, with a good mixture of fantasy and horror to make it interesting, along with my cartoon-sort of style on the sprites. 

[fernfmp2019]

A very very VERY scary house

This is a choose your own adventure game in which you’re a young child, exploring a haunted house with your friend. You make lots of little choices to build up the fun adventure, cheerful, despite it’s horror undertones. I like how they keep an consistant narative vibe to it, with the whole thing feeling like a neverending adventure, with a million options and no particularity right choices.

On a moonlit night in late Spooktober, your worst best friend Jeanine Janeeny decides that the two of you are going to investigate the scariest house you've ever seen. Maybe you'll finally get to the bottom of that case that's been puzzling the Boro Groves Junior Detective Agency for so long!

This spooky twine game features 58 unique endings and hundreds of branches! Will you tell a joke to a skeleton? Discover the secret lab? Learn the secret of the crystal city? Watch a ritual in a cemetery? Outwit the sphinx? What will be the fate of our intrepid adventurers?

[fernfmp2019]

Shiver

Shiver is a very short, text-based horror game, based around the player waking up to find someone had snuck into the house. You need to do a certain order of things to not die, the wording of the eiree atmosphere and scenarios leaving the player on edge the entire time. I like how it’s short and simple, clearly intended to just be a quick play.

[fernfmp2019]

Moon Dreams

Moon Dreams is a choose your own adventure game, based around the life of a wizard. They’re planning to go to another realm (being one of the few people who can visit it) to steal an artifact for your wedding. It’s a very fast paced adventure, with large chunks of descriptive writing rather than images, but with lots of little choices to make to decide where the adventure turns.

I like the mystical feel it has, and the way the player is unable to guess what could happen next, due to the fact that everything works differently in the other realm. I also like how, before you play the game, you can read what has happened so far in the story for some background on the plot and characters, and to help you understand what the final goal is without delaying the game with hints of what to do.

[fernfmp2019]

Evermore

Evermore is a choose your own adventure game, inspired by Edgar Alen Poe. It’s written in his long and slightly confusing style. In the theme of the author, who was known for writing a lot of words for very little things, it doesn’t have many images, and the entire thing is very descriptive. It’s set in his era, with the  general feel of being out on the streets, dealing with all the dirty business: among many issues, it describes: grave robbery, black market of body parts, and pick pocketing. 

I like the casually dark themes of this game, and how it goes into detail, the whole vibe very creepy and leaving the player feeling like it could go wrong with one wrong choice: which it can. 

[fernfmp2019]

Novelty

Using Novelty worked well for me. It was easy to use, and didn’t require any coding, and it was very easy to organise and keep track of. It was very good with keeping the sprites and words consistent sizes. It made branching off with choices much easier than in Fungus, and the buttons were very easy and simple to work with.

The downsides begin with the fact that it won’t export a mac-runnable game, being a windows-only application. This meant that I couldn’t run it at college, and caused quite a few issues, as it only exports to an .exe file. Another downside is that it made it hard to do long chapters without having to scroll for several minutes, meaning I had to cut a few scenes short to avoid filling it up.

[fernfmp2019]

A maypole is a tall wooden pole erected as a part of various European folk festivals, around which a maypole dance often takes place.

The festivals may occur on May Day (May 1) or Pentecost (Whitsun), although in some countries it is instead erected at Midsummer. In some cases the maypole is a permanent feature that is only utilised during the festival, although in other cases it is erected specifically for the purpose before being taken down again.

Primarily found within the nations of Germanic Europe and the neighbouring areas which they have influenced, its origins remain unknown. It has often been speculated that the maypole originally had some importance in the Germanic paganism of Iron Age and early Medieval cultures, and that the tradition survived Christianisation, albeit losing any original meaning that it had; however, more recent scholarship has found that the custom of the maypole arose in the context of medieval Christian Europe. It has been a recorded practice in many parts of Europe throughout the Medieval and Early Modern periods, although it became less popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. Today, the tradition is still observed in some parts of Europe and among European communities in the Americas.

[fernfmp2019]

A wicker man was a large wicker statue reportedly used by the ancient Druids (priests of Celtic paganism) for sacrifice by burning it in effigy.

The main evidence for this practice is one sentence in Julius Caesar's Commentary on the Gallic war, which modern scholarship has linked to an earlier writer, Poseidonius.

Modern archaeological research has not yielded much evidence of human sacrifice among the Celts, and the ancient Greco-Roman sources are now regarded somewhat skeptically, especially considering the likelihood that Greeks and Romans "were eager to transmit any bizarre and negative information" about the Celts at a time when the latter were feared and disdained.

However, archaeological evidence from Ireland does indicate that human sacrifice was practised in times pre-dating contact with Rome. Human remains have been found at the foundations of structures dating from the Neolithic period to the Roman era, with injuries and in positions that argue for their being foundation sacrifices.

In modern times, the wicker man has been symbolically referenced as a part of some neopagan-themed ceremonies, without the human sacrifice. Effigies of this kind have also been used as elements in performance art, as display features at rock music festivals, and as thematic material in songs (such as Iron Maiden's song, "The Wicker Man"). A wicker man is featured in a pivotal scene of the cult British horror film The Wicker Man, and much of the prominence of the wicker man in modern popular culture and the wide general awareness of the wicker man as structure and concept is probably attributable to this film.

[fernfmp2019]

A Green Man is a sculpture or other representation of a face surrounded by or made from leaves. Branches or vines may sprout from the mouth, nostrils, or other parts of the face and these shoots may bear flowers or fruit. Commonly used as a decorative architectural ornament, Green Men are frequently found in carvings on both secular and ecclesiastical buildings. "The Green Man" is also a popular name for English public houses and various interpretations of the name appear on inn signs, which sometimes show a full figure rather than just the head.

The Green Man motif has many variations. Found in many cultures from many ages around the world, the Green Man is often related to natural vegetative deities. It is primarily interpreted as a symbol of rebirth, representing the cycle of growth each spring. Some speculate that the mythology of the Green Man developed independently in the traditions of separate ancient cultures and evolved into the wide variety of examples found throughout history.

[fernfmp2019]

The moss people or moss folk (German: Moosleute, "moss folk", wilde Leute, "wild folk"), also referred to as the wood people or wood folk (Holzleute, "wood folk") or forest folk(Waldleute, "forest-folk"), are a class of fairy folk, variously compared to dwarves, elves, or spirits, described in the folklore of Germany as having an intimate connection to trees and the forest. In German the words Schrat and Waldschrat are also used for a moss person. (Compare Old Norse skratti, "goblin".) The diminutive Schrätlein also serves as synonym for a nightmare creature.

They are sometimes described as similar to dwarves, being the same size as children, but "grey and old-looking, hairy, and clad in moss." Sometimes, Moss folk are also bigger. In other descriptions they are said to be pretty.

They were said to borrow items or ask for help, and would pay them back in bread or good advice. However, it was easy to insult the moss folk, by declining their gifts or by offering them caraway bread. There are also myths where they would ask humans for breast milk, and where they would steal human children (linked to changelings.)

Moss folk, especially females, were said to be able to send a plague upon the land, but could also heal victims of the plague. During boughts of plague, some moss folk would appear to share herbs which could ward plague off.

They’ve been described as being attached to trees, stories of moss folk dying due to damage to a tree being told.

[fernfmp2019]

Hand drawings

I drew a few hands in various poses, to practice how they move and how fingers work for poses.