
Several frameworks exist for creating visual novels. Highway Blossoms by Alienworks, programmed in Ren’Py A couple of frameworks have sprung up over the years to assist with creating visual novels as there is a large interest in developing self-published titles, often referred to as dōjinor doujin. Traditionally, the visual novel uses the art style closely associated to manga, so expect a lot of wide-eyed, sharply drawn characters.ĭue to popularity of manga and anime in the western world, the visual novel has found its way here as well, though the market is relatively small compared to Japan. 19 Some titles incorporate game elements, like puzzle solving, or character statistics (tracking the protagonist’s morality or the disposition of other characters towards the protagonist), blurring the line between novel and game. Publications offering no narrative or gameplay choices are often referred to as kinetic novels.

Notable examples include the Ace Attorney and Zero Escape series, or standalone titles like Symphonic Rain.Ī lot of visual novels require user interaction and have branching narratives dependent on those choices. It’s a brand of interactive fiction employing a literary narrative style combined with imagery, sound and sometimes animation.


The visual novel ( bijuaru noberu) is a type of publication that’s very popular in Japan and covers a wide range of literary genres, from romance to science-fiction to erotica. Interface of Symphonic Rain by Kogado Studio Rags, 17 a commercial package is a little different, as it supports the same textual interface, but combines this with images and a visual interface roughly comparable to the verb-object interface present in the SCUMM adventure game engine used by LucasArts and others in the eighties and nineties. A notable feature of Quest is that it can be used online, while ADRIFT offers a visual story overview similar to Storyspace and Twine. Quest 15 and ADRIFT 16 are GUI applications, as opposed to frameworks, but produce similar results like the frameworks mentioned above. While Tads is mainly used for the creation of text adventures on various operating systems, 14 it also supports the inclusion of images, audio and video Tale also specifically supports MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), allowing multiple players to interact in the same narrative universe. Tale 12 and Tads 13 are two frameworks allowing you to create text adventures in the vein of Zork or Planetfall. Writing interactive or branching fiction is an undertaking not to be underestimated, as the narrative structure rapidly evolves into something very complex. While Colossal Cave Adventure was written by one man, Will Crowther, text adventures were often designed and written by larger teams. The history of branching, non-linear digital narratives goes even further back, starting with the text adventures in the late 1970s, titles include classics like Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure.
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The Elder Scrolls series is a notable example, as is The Witcher trilogy of games or the output of Black Isle Games ( Planescape: Torment, Fallout) in the second half of the 1990s. There’s a long tradition of epic roleplaying games offering multiple, branching story paths to the player. There’s no denying that interactive fiction is popular in the western world, but mostly when it crosses the line and transforms into a game. Player choices influence Planescape: Torment’s narrative

The original version of well-known adventure game Myst was created in HyperCard, 7 and is a good example of interactive, non-linear media. After its initial release, HyperCard was used for all kinds of purposes including prototyping, games and interactive fiction. The application offered a drag-and-drop interface allowing users to create interlinked, scriptable cards which could contain text, images and other media. One of the more successful hypermedia authoring tools was HyperCard 6 released by Apple in 1987. The long-running Project Xanadu by Ted Nelson is another theoretical application from the 1960s 4 which was finally released in 2014 as OpenXanadu. 2 The concept of hypertext is actually older and broader in scope 3 and not confined to the web at all, though it’s arguably the most popular implementation. Nowadays, hypertext is commonly associated with the World Wide Web, as webpages are written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), coined by Tim Berners-Lee and others in 1991.
