"White Room Journal" is a short 5 minutes Visual Novel about a girl in a hospital and her weekly meetings with the player character. I developed this project to practice making a visual novel with Ren'py.
Play Links:
- "White Room Journal" on Itch.io
Story:
This story is about a girl who likes reading and her time in the hospital, waiting for your weekly visits.
Goals:
To develop a complete short experience that allows me to practice everything I need to make a longer one.
The project should be a "Kinetic Novel" so I won't have to think of alternatives options/routes while writing, which will make the story easier to write & folllow.
The project should be easy to port. I wanted to write a visual novel that I could use to learn a new game development engine without worrying about coming up with a new script.
The project should be visually appealing. I'm not a great artist, but I'm confident of my art's uniqueness. I choose monochrome coloring since it's easier to let the details stick out this way.
I managed to fulfill all of these goals with this pilot version, and my next goal would be to make it more interesting to read/play.
Devlog
I wanted to write a visual novel like this for a while, but I wasn't confident I could write a short story, but when I finally started writing the story, it basically write itself.
The main prompt is "short meetings once a week," I wrote things for prompts like that before, including the short story "SAYA Is Offline" but it's the first time I wrote it from one character's perspective, I imagine the other character to be the player, but you can think of it as you want.
After writing the story, I decided on an engine. Between Construct 3, Twine, Ren'py I settled on the latter. (I tried Rakugo too, but I went back to Ren'py.) The language of this Renpy is easy to learn. I also didn't need to look hard to find out how to use Text Tags & Transforms. I used both heavily in "White Room."
I drew the art myself using my tablet, that includes the background and the character and her various portrait shots. I drew using tablet before, but this project is the time I finally started thinking, I'm getting used to it.
As for the audio, I didn't do any sound-design in this project. This is a completely silent Visual Novel.
All-in-all, I'm proud of this pilot version of this VN, and I'll edit it some more. Maybe add another twist or two if I had time.
Pieces of Feedback
Before publishing the game, I gave it to a few people to play, including my brother and the Hive user @ditoferrer. I got some nice feedback about this pilot version, but other than a few typos, I won't mention them in this post to encourage you to give me your own feedback.
Please tell me your opinion if you played this project.
- This devlog is also on Read.cash.
I'll go check it out!
I've personally looked at both Twine and Ren'py before but haven't delved into either. I like the idea of using it for a short story!
Thanks for checking it out... If you're a beginner, I suggest using Twine first, and don't try to make it look fancy, just use it to learn the interactive story logic for you first attempt.
Ren'py can make more powerful games but it's more work, so unless your project can't be done with text only and you're willing to spend a lot of time learning, I suggest not starting with it.
Definitely is worth playing it/reading it! I think the drawing is in tune with the intimacy of the story. Simplicity is not a bad thing, on the contrary, it's the right way to touch the soul. This project opens my mind to search for new ways of storytelling.
Thanks for the mention, brother, I hope in the future we can make something together, I don't know, maybe I spice it up with some sound design lol
!LUV
!PIZZA
Thanks for playing, I'm too on the camp of "Simplicity enhances the experience" and one of my favorite visual novels "Narcissu" started as an experiment on minimalism.
I'm flattered for this, but every time I collaborated on something I felt too much stress, so I rahter work solo unless necessary.
Dont worry about it lol. it's hard to cooperate sometimes. You're doing a great work.
!PIZZA
I'm a little confused about your name. It seems that you have two users.
@ditoferrer(1/1) gave you LUV.
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