G'day y'all
I'm here today to announce the opening of the First VNDS Community Collaboration Project.
This is for anyone who wishes to try their hands at creating a Visual Novel for the DS. Whether you are a passionate story teller, amateur artist, or just enjoy creating something new, you are all welcome to try your hand. The guidelines are:

• 5-10 minute novel, can be kinetic or have decisions, sprites or no sprites, sound or no sound. its up to you!
• 'Family Friendly' content. You are free to deal with 'difficult' topics, such as sexuality, death, etc, but please do not include explicit images/content, excessive profanities, or smut.
• The total size of your project (including Images, text, sound, etc) is not to exceed 30mb.
• Final Submission date is the 30th of November, 2009. After this date I will collect all submissions, put them all together, and release them all as one pack to to rest of the community and world!

So if you're interested, here what you need to do:

• Let us know you're interested, by posting in this thread. You can also use these forums to ask questions at any stage if you get stuck.

Continued (got cut off for some reason)

So if you're interested, here what you need to do:

• Let us know you're interested, by posting in this thread. You can also use these forums to ask questions at any stage if you get stuck.
• Download a Copy of VNDS here: http://digital-haze.net/vnds.php
• Read up on how to create a Visual Novel using the simple coding language here: http://www.digital-haze.net/vndswiki/index.php?title=Category:Tutorials
• Create your Novel however you wish. A tip to create backgrounds, for those without drawing capabilities (i.e. myself), is to take a picture with your camera, then add blur or other effects using an image program.
• Upload the novel to a file sharing site (mediafire is the most popular), and post the link in this thread.
• At then end of the submission period I will collect all submissions, and post the collaboration On these forums, and On the VNDS Wiki, and anywhere else I can that's applicable

So far a have Rai, ShinseiTom, an Anon, and myself down, but by all means join, and get others to join!

Post here if you have any questions/queries/quails. Seriously, if you have a quail, I want to know. Those things are epic.

Sounds like a great idea. I still got some semi finished stories somewhere, time to get them out and done. Not sure if I get the time to start anytime soon ... But count me in anyway.

You love those acronyms don't you?
I've finished up about 2 character sprites, 4 in progress. As I said in the previous thread, it's going to be a "side story" to the main VN I'm making since it can only be 5-10 minutes.

Ah, if we're doing this again next month, we gotta make it Christmas/Holiday-themed.

Well, this is cool. I wasn't expecting it to be picked up this fast! That means I now have incentive to edit and tidy up my stories to find one that fits most.

Awesome.

I like this idea, enough to break my random lurker cover for the second time in the last while. Unfortunately I can't do much more than thumbs up at people at the moment since I'm still looking at the code and trying to figure out just how to do stuff. As if I need another project when I've had a book in the works for the last few years >.<;

I wouldn't mind giving it a shot but I'm not sure I can get this done in such a short time. Also, just how long is a "5-10 minute novel"?

Ehhhh, 5-10 minutes? Sorry, couldn't help it :)

Enough time to fill in a coffee break, I guess. Different people read at different speeds, but if everyone here is into reading (like you kinda need to be to read a visual novel), however long it takes you to completely read it is probably how long it will take someone else.

Ahhh here's a good website for background pictures that you can blur and won't get sued for: http://morguefile.com/
I also have a good royalty free music website, but I'm not allowed to distribute it according to my school. (Being in a TV production class let's me access it.)

Awesome respone!

>>True Neutral

hm, perhaps a good example would be double the length of The Best Eroge Ever...maybe...
As long as it doesn't take an hour to go through, and keeps to the file size limit, I'm easy.

And sorry everyone for the short time limit, but I wanted to set this up before interest wains.

>>Rai

Awesome site, thanks!

And yet still no quail..

>>11
Uh, I actually have never read that. I was looking for more of a word-count or something.

Any chance of doing this again with less restrictions? I usually work slow and I don't have any ideas at the moment so I'm not sure if I'll have anything finished by November 30.

And how would I go about (attempting) to make my own music?

I feel so proud of myself for managing to make this thing display a bg image and a line of text. >.<; This means I need to locate my camera and drive around town for some interesting locales. :D I'm going to try to ignore the character art thing as long as possible.

As for music, what you'd use to make it is entirely dependent on what kind of music you want to try to make.

>>12
TBEE was just the first one that came to mind, but the idea that it's fine as long as its under an hour and sticks to the size limit, still stands.

As for making your own music, you can either use free music available (as weird as this sounds, newgrounds' music portal has some surprisingly interesting sounds), or you could use a program such as Mixcraft or Garage band, and put together some loops to suit your needs.

As for restrictions, what would you like to change? the due date is 100% completely flexible. Hell, if everyone wants, we can change it to end of the year, give everyone more time.

As this is the first time I've done anything like this, I'm open to all suggestions on how to improve this

I'm thinking we should keep the due date since we all have like 20 days to type up a story while the rest of it is fairly simple to put together and it allows us to have a holiday themed CCP for next month.

I think the due-date is perfect. It gives people enough time to get something done, but not too much time to where they put it off or lose interest.

But obviously I'm fine with any change that is made. I've got plenty of time on this end.

Also, as for free music/SFX's, I've found a few sites. Here are a few:
--http://www.freesound.org/ -- SFX
--http://www.ccmixter.org/ -- Remixes
--http://www.netlabels.org/ -- Music
--http://www.mikseri.net/artists/?id=48147 -- Music

That last one actually links to various other free albums too. I actually like nearly all of their stuff, and listen to it regularly once I cycle back around to it.

I agree the due date is fine. Even if you don't make it's not like you can't turn it into it's own project. And since we seem to be posting helpful links, how about something to a sprite aking resource. :p I'm not even sure they exist... though I can think of a couple game sprite archives I came across on one of many rpgmaker kicks. >.>

Also, how often should I be starting a new 'text' command. presumably I have as many lines as it takes to fill the screen, but I'm not sure how many that is.

For the text function, its best just to use it for every sentence. It will automatically push up the older text so it can be a continuous stream even.

My bad, huge posting mistake. Does anyone know an easy way to crop out images (I'd say batch crop, but is that possible?)? I created all of my sprites on a huge page each. Converting isn't the hard part, cropping all of them to be close to each size as possible is.

Deleted above post because I found a converter.
However when I try to do a test run my sfx play really slow... anyone one know why?

>>22
Your sound effects are probably playing slow because the sample rate is low. Just make the sample rate higher. (44000Hz, 41000Hz, etc.)

What would I use to change that? The couple programs I've tried didn't make any notable changes.

Whatever converter you're using should have that option, if not, try to find one that will.
Personally, I use Super for most conversions, but, that's just me.

Well... that hasn't seemed to solve my problem. Either they still play slow or if I try a few other settings I get nothing but silence. >.<;

>>26
Maybe you can try out the new VNDS tools that was released...yesterday it seems. I just tried it on a file that was giving me trouble (same problem as yours maybe?). Anyways, its at the weeaboo.nl site. Just click on one of the Project links and it will take you to the downloads page.
I think the problem is because vnds reads it with 22050 Hz or something, so if the sampling rate is high, then it either won't play or just plays horribly slow. Hopefully, the vnds tools from weeaboo.nl will fix up your problem though.

Yeah that worked out for me. Thanks. Now I just need to figure out how to make my clips louder than they are. Which is probably really easy, but I'm too tired to bother right now.

So is there going to be a collaboration project or is this just a competition between individual authors?

>>29

For now, I think it's basically a collection of us different authors with our own stories.
Who knows, maybe if someone's novel is really good, a collaboration project might launch. (That'd help out a lot, since I still don't have a clue yet about scripting since I haven't tried it yet)

I think that was the general idea originally xD, but it's always possible that the person that has a good visual novel might not want help.

I think that was the general idea originally xD, but it's always possible that the person that has a good visual novel might not want help.

>>32
I see that as highly possible. It'd depend on the person entirely. I definitely don't want anyone changing my story or even my art (Even though my art sucks) =P. We don't exactly need 10 people working with scripting either.
Plus I'd rather mystify readers than revealing everything and let them help creating it.

I could see this leading to future collaboration projects between members as a possibilty. But, as Rai mentioned, most of us probably wouldn't be comfortable letting other people take over our storylines.

On the other hand (you have different fingers) if we were to go with the originally pitched idea of a set cast of characters and we each script our own arc involving them I don't see why it wouldn't work out. At least I'd be willing to try that out. But I also like this idea so I'd like to stick with it. Sort of a Readers Digest style of project.

>>34
If you think about it that way, then we can actually use this project to nail out who're the workers and who're the slackers.

That, or we can just create 1 major event, with each person making their own perspective from their own character(s). (Higurashi anyone?) So that eliminates a single author's storyline being taken over, but still a collaborative story together.
Just that if we do do that, we need to get some Anons some names.

...I've scrapped my original story twice for this project already.

Haha, I'm still trying to choose which story I want to use, or if I want to write and use one of my other ideas that haven't already been written fully, or start something entirely new. Which isn't bad, I still have almost three weeks to figure it out and write it.

Plus, with school....... well, I might have time to work on it this weekend, assuming no new homework.

I have a question. Though I assume most will create something original (as I am expecting mine to be), would using characters and situations from other stories be acceptable? Such as a kind of... fan.... made....

Actually, all of the sudden I want to make a Higurashi or Umineko short story, since that stuff is completely open to fan story creators. Except the music of course.

As for a collaborative story, well I'm not against it, but also not exactly for it. I have basically the same feelings as Rai. I'm not sure about my work ethic in a group though. I'm way more of a burst/slow/burst worker than a steady milestone worker.

You could also call my style of work as "procrastination."
:)

>>36
I dunno if we can make fanfic visual novels, you'll have to wait for Hogan to answer that.
Surprisingly, school is the only time I'm in the mood to write, so I don't pay attention during most of my classes.
I work mostly the same way too XD.

Btw, anyone know what effect can make a real picture background look more "anime"-ish, besides just Gauss blurring? I'm thinking of posterizing, but is there something better?
I really don't want to draw/trace backgrounds.

I've finally deciding on a story, except like with Type-Moon works, they all link to my other ones somewhat. (Ex. In Kara No Kyoukai and Tsukihime, both have Mystic Eyes Of Death Perception mentioned, as well as the Aozaki sisters referencing each other).
I'll be adding choices that won't affect the story but will affect the links between my other ones that have yet to be made.

>>38
You could try using oil painting? (dunno what you use, but for GIMP it's oilify) I just mingled around with oilify, gaussian blur, posterize, motion blur, and contrast (when I feel like it).

The image I played with:
http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/4637/dsc04455b.jpg

Original:
http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/9642/dsc04455d.jpg

Ah, thanks, that might work.
I was using Manga Studio EX 4. But it lacks the oilfy function, I'll use GIMP since I got it recently for cropping anyways. Thanks again.

I've always liked Photoshop's smartblur

Even after testing a few effects of GIMP, I still can't seem to get the kind of background I need, I inserted my sprite and the background is just too realistic even with blurs and such.
I might have to resort to drawing after all...
Or I'll try one more thing...

Well, if anyone comes up with something, hopefully they will share it xD. Good luck finding an alternative to drawing.

I've been using photoshop 7 and adding a bit of gauss blur and then using it's sumi-e filter. Which I've always liked but never get a chance to use.

>>38
I know all about works tying into other works. I'm currently using a starter that's been sitting idle with five pages and ties into the main story I've used as the base for my book. >.<;

As of right now, I have....
Whoa... 16 different stories that are subdivided into 6 different worlds. 6 are in the middle of being written, 6 are finished (in some form or fashion), and 4 haven't been started.
So I have plenty to choose from. My most populous world has 8 different stories right now. Which is probably the one I'll choose my VN story from.

At least now I know I'm not the only one with a completely custom designed locale. Now, if you've made languages for all the respective peoples of your worlds, then I won't feel like such a nerd. :p

...... well, I haven't gone THAT far, yet. A couple of my stories could use different languages. That's actually a good idea for when I get more comfortable with writing, huh... Thanks for the idea.

Hey y'all, sorry, had a few "finish at 9pm, start 7am next morning"s, so I've been away for a bit:

>>36
The point of this was to see the type of stories, characters, and worlds that this community could come up with, so while you could do a story 'in the same vein' as your favourite VN, It'd be great if you could create your own characters, etc.

and personally I'm finding GIMP is the best free tool for changing images to be used as backgrounds. Just use some of the awesome idea's being thrown around here.

On that note, If you ask a question about an audio converter (or any other tool), and you find a solution, post it up! this way, everyone can benefit from your research. Don't worry, we won't ask if you bought it or not ^^

Keep up the good work everyone!!

Yeah, I figured, but I decided to check anyway. It would have helped ease the worries over art, but oh well. Not like I was going to anyway.
So now I'm a little stuck. Do I take new pictures (with my nonexistent camera), find some free stuff online, or remake and reuse the ones I used a while ago in my first VN? Choices, choices...

Seriously... The more I work on this, the longer it gets.
My story went from a simple 10 minute story to a freakin' 20 minute one.

I've decided to just make a prologue that leads into the real story and has minor links to the other 2 in progress.

>>50

that's coo', but I hope that what you relaease is still complete enough to be enjoyed on it's own, and not a simple 'welp, guess I'll cut the story off here' scenario.

But I have a high regard of everyone on here, so I'm sure everyone's going to do a great job.

Friendly tip, whilst using the sound encoder included with the VNDS make absolutely sure the only files in the directory you're encoding in are sound files. Otherwise those other files go poof gone.

Luckily the files weren't terribly important and I still have the ink and paper versions of what I'd typed up. >.> Maybe this was all in a readme I didn't bother reading >.< (I'd moved the files out of the sound folder to convert them elsewhere as I wanted backup.wav files to tool with if I needed to.)

I wonder,anyone want to porting school days?it quite old skool but it worth to play. . .

>>53

Wrong topic.
Personally I don't even want to touch School Days. Too many yandere for my taste.

>>51
It's not... But I'll make it so it is.

I have a question. Is there a comment symbol?

I do believe # before any line makes it a comment.

xD I have the greatest idea I've ever had for a visual novel so far! It almost makes me want to show it before I'm even past the beginning xD. Its going to be the strangest kinetic novel EVER (although it might have a ton of bugs because I've never done something like this before).

Haven't been making much progress. Dead tired from playing PS0 yesterday, and it's my birthday today, gotta do stuff.
I'll have to do 100% devotion next week...

I have a criminal justice paper and a programming project both due at the end of the month. One on Nov. 30th and the other on Dec 2nd. Both are kinda eating into my "messing around" time. I'm starting to have doubts that I'll finish this in lieu of my homework.

But hopefully I'll have something done. Even if all I do is port my old Ren'Py VN to the VNDS engine.

Argh...homework has been busted on me too now xD. I've got a speech, an essay, and a test (main things, no one cares about the little stuff xD). I probably won't finish at the deadline (curses me for starting to late...) but I'll submit it when I'm done...

Maybe, just maybe, I could finish it this weekend before I lay in to my homework? Hmmm, that sounds like it could work.

I'm tempted to try my hand and this... maybe if I'm lucky I'll be able to pull something off in time.

My current mental state is very unstable... I had one hell of a weekend that made me both happy and feeling like a complete jerk.
In other words, I'm not sure if I can finish, or I will, just without sprites like I've been wanting to do.

I think I'll finish since I won't be using sprites. I already have my background images, music and story chosen, so now I just have to script it all together.
Which should hopefully not take any longer than a few hours to a day.

Yeah no sprites here either. BG music but no sound effects because imho I wasted far too much time trying to get that working as it is. And I'm still not satisfied with my results so screw it. I'll work it out with my second project. :p
So now the only hassle is trying to calculate how long it'll take to read x amount of text.

Everybody (or at least somebody) ready for the big day?

Anybody?

Ok, well, I should have it ready by way later today (it's 12:11AM right now) or the 1st at the latest (due to this paper I'm writing). If that's too late, sorry.

Its probably not going to be late, I don't even think I can give mine in today (I still haven't been able to work on it, too much going on at the moment).

Probably not going to make it either. But I was only halfway aiming for the deadline anyway. :p

Heh, well, I'm still going to try for the Nov. 30th deadline. I managed to get most of the text in about an hour. Now I just need to put in the other stuff.

I'm dropping out. Too much real life stuff happened during the break.
Maybe another time.

Mine unfortunately won't be done until later too. But hopefully not too late. I guess Hogan will have to push back the due-date. Oh well, more time to work on homework.

I can probably get back to working on mine in like two weeks (finals are coming up for me), although how long mine will take I have no idea.

Hey y'all,

Yep, It seems this time of year was most likely the worst time of year for everyone, myself included.

However, I'd still like to see something come out of this project by the end of this year.

How does everyone feel about extending the 'turning in' period till later in the month, so as to give people time to finish something that, which perhaps not their 100% best, is still something they'd be proud to claim as their own?

I'm fine with that. Due to other homework, I only just now completely finished typing in the text of the story. Don't even have the other stuff like music and "special effects" added in yet.

Are we talking New Year's Eve, the 30th, or possibly a week before Christmas? The 18th or 20th? I'm up for anything as long as it's past the 15th, which is the last day of finals for me.

Well, since there hasn't been post at all for a week, I'll put up a small update on my progress since I'm working on it in the lull between the last day of class and my first finals.

Amazingly, I've finished the text, converted all my images into workable small .png's, converted my two current BGMs to 96kbps so they play, added in all the normal backgrounds, and only have the adding of the music and a few background "special effect" timings to get down.

Which won't take more than a little while to finish. I might actually have my VN finished by mid-Wednesday. Anybody else working on theirs in their spare time?

xD I'm just working on passing my finals, so I haven't gotten anywhere unfortunately.

Well, since I didn't have much else to do and I was almost done, I have my first release of my story. The only thing I really need to do (that I can see) is add in the accreditation for the music in a little credits page at the end or something.

Here's the download: http://www.mediafire.com/?5dqott2umtd
Addendum - 6MB
Hope people enjoy!

Oh, and I created a Notepad++ custom language real quick while I was at it.

http://www.mediafire.com/?1ymqunlouzd

Colors most things correctly and makes it a little easier to read than regular text or a random non-related language.

Nice job with the visual novel although there are some parts that seem to have strange text breaks (pausing for dramatic effect would work better if vnds supported delay during lines, but as it is, I think it would look slightly awkward on a DS unless you kept up with the picture text for all of those pauses xD, but that probably wouldn't help since most of the other pauses aren't quite that significant as the ones you already portrayed).

It took me a little bit longer to finish it (since my DS is still a pile of broken circuitry) so I was using notepad++, windows media player, and the image viewer to read it xD.

Yeah.... I wish it had in-line text breaks. But oh well. I'll probably go back through, change a few of the more awkward breaks, fix the images (some are 256x191, which I think creates a weird line of pixels at the bottom), and maybe a few other changes.

Anyway, glad you liked it. Looking forward to seeing some from the others too!

Oh yeah, you said you were using Notepad++. Did you try out my custom language?

Yeah I did and works pretty well (some of the regular "if"s in the actual text get highlighted) and I'm pretty sure it helped me read the visual novel since I don't think I was too distracted while reading it (apart from swapping images and the music every so often xD)

Yeah... I just set it up to recognize words or symbols, which could also happen in regular text. I don't know how to make it... I don't know.... only look at the beginning of a line for a certain group of keywords.

Good though. Now we just need some other VNs.

So, how are people doing on their finals? Wrapping it all up just fine?

Christmas is coming up. Anybody else going to have anything before the end of the year? Or am I the only one who is going to have a submission?
(Ironic, considering how much of a procrastinator I am.)

xD I'm guessing there are people that are worse procrastinators than you are.

I know, which is actually scary. I honestly didn't believe it was possible. It was a sort of... pride, you know.
:D

:(
Well, it's not even the same year anymore. I guess this is dead and/or dying then, since not even Hogan has responded back in quite a while.

If anyone cares to still finish and release whatever they might have worked on, I'll take up the small role of packaging everything together into one FVNDSCCP .novel for release to the world. If nobody else responds with an affirmative after this though I'll just consider this completely dead and release a fixed up and final version of my VN.

Well, if it helps, I'm still semi-working on mine (though I have no idea when its going to be done, xD I'm putting it off for other things most of the time).

That's fine. At least somebody responded. All the others who were here in the beginning haven't shown up in a long time. Kinda sucks. I was hoping that with the fairly low entry-point Hogan set up it would work even with the usual internet disappearances.

Anyway, glad to hear it. Can't wait to read it whenever you finish!

xD its not quite the usual visual novel and it may very likely be a failed attempt (I don't vouch for my creative writing skills xD). Hopefully, it will all make sense (I think it is sort of scatterbrained when I read it) in the end.

You can pretty much tell I gave up. The only reason I wanted to do the project was because I was bored, and was expecting to be bored the whole break.
Buuut something came up and it's been one hell of a break, sorry guys XD.

Yeah I'm nowhere near finished but in my defense not only did I quite recently start up some correspondence stuff I also got a PS3 around christmas time. >.> So I have no time for anything anymore. :p

Hey, it's just nice to have some responses. I don't hold it against anybody if they lost interest of stuff came up. I just wanted to know... I guess just so I'd know what was going on.

Hogan, you here anymore?

So, any progress with anybody who is still messing around?

I guess I'll ask once more since it's now February. CXBlackCatXD, you still working? And how are you doing Anonymoose, if you're still here?

-_-" Well, as of right now, I'm not really doing anything on my visual novel, but for right now, I think I'm just calling out for any lurking hackers to hack and fry this creep's >>98 computer. One less waste of space in the world.