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Adventure Creator - Visual Novel

Hi all!

I recently bought AC and just joined a forum. Currently, I don't know how to work with AC atm (I know what is it for and wanted to bought it for some time) and I can't wait to start learning! I really really really want to become good with AC. I am not new to UNITY and from what I have seen so far AC is great and everything I want! :)

So here is a question.

I am currently working with an indie team on a Visual Novel. Currently we are searching for the best tool. I was thinking AC could be great! 

I was thinking combining AC with Dialog System to create VN.

So, is AC good option for VN? Is it possible (and not difficult) to create VN with AC?

THX

Comments

  • edited December 2017
    Welcome to the community, @Azmek.

    I'm admittedly not overly familiar with the mechanics of VN games, so I invite anyone with more experience to chime in.

    While AC is certainly geared towards more traditional "puzzle"-based adventures, I can be used for games that have a larger focus on dialogue and choices over e.g. pathfinding, inventory etc.  The subtitles Menu can be extended to incorporate portrait graphics (see this tutorial), and these can be animated as well.

    Dialogue System has a very good integration with AC, and also brings the ability to incorporate articy:draft, which DS supports.  It would be worth getting in touch with the author of that asset as well for tips on his end on how DS might aid such a game as well.

    I would, however, recommend first getting to grips with AC and Unity with the video tutorials - since it's always easier to branch out if you have a solid understanding of how AC is primarily intended to be used.
  • edited December 2017
    I am new to Unity and have been using AC for a few weeks. In my opinion, AC is amazing and may be all you need.  It has lots and lots of features, is neatly organised, well documented with a detailed manual and video and text tutorials and has a great community. Save/load is also included . I think the great thing about AC is that it has the features required to make  a VN, but also the many features required to make an adventure game , so that you can if you choose to at any stage, also incorporate some adventure game elements into your VN. And localisation / translation is also supported.

    For your VN, presumably you have branching choices. With AC you can make them in a number of ways.  For example , you can of course do this the usual way , say have five options presented as five different clickable lines  like most VNs. But you could also do this in different styles. 
    Let's say you have five options
    1. Open the door
    2. Answer the phone
    3. Cut the call
    4. Hide the paper in your pocket (if the player has found a piece of paper in say an earlier scene)
    5. Note the contents of the paper in your phone and destroy the paper

    You can present these in different ways.

    As a simple list of options.

    As a single line , example a character says , I  was wondering if should  hide the paper before answering the door . Maybe copying the contents into my phone and destroying the paper would be safer.  Just then the phone started ringing, I didn't know who it was or if to answer it or cut it. Maybe if I let it ring, they would assume I'm not at home. 

    And then instead of selecting from the options, the player can actually choose to click on the picture of the door in your background art , to select this option . 
    You can also have a hotspot on the image of the phone which you can assign different options to. So that when you click on the telephone there are say two icons, a red phone and a green phone. So if the player clicks on the red phone, it means he is choosing to cut the call, if he clicks on the green phone icon, he is choosing to answer the call. You can also have the phone have a ringing sound at the start of the scene, so that when you answer it or cut the call, this sound stops, or that it stops anyways after some specified time, like a phone would.
     Or if the player chooses to hide the paper, you can have that on clicking on the paper, the paper disappears. 
     If he chooses to copy the contents into his phone, you can have the paper disappear and have the torn pieces appear in a bin. You can also have that player chooses to encrypt the contents of the paper in his phone with a password , of say maximum 6 characters that he has to set himself. At this stage you can zoom into the phone screen , and open up the keyboard. You can have it that whatever the player types in as password is stored as a variable. Many scenes later , you can have an option where the player needs to open this file in the phone and to do so needs to put in the password he himself had chosen earlier. If this input does not match the variable, you can have that the player cannot access the file. 

    Or you could write these options in different text boxes and place them all over your background image.
    So over the phone there will be a text which says answer the phone , another which says cut the phone,
    over the door there will be a text which says open the door etc. After phone stops ringing you can have the text over the phone which said answer the phone / cut the phone disappear since this is no longer an option.


    The great thing is all of the above can be set using a node based system so it is easy to visualise. 


    You can also set up different kinds of conditions easily, like show choice 2, only if choice 1 is already seen , or turn off choice 1 once seen, or set up a list of responses to be shown from randomly. 

    Also, you can have that the dialogue lines appear above the speaking character. Also you can assign different colours to different speakers' lines. You can have the characters have animations while saying these lines, you can have the camera zoom in on them or on anything else too. You can also have timed choices,  use local and global variables. Can also set it so that the inventory items can be used during conversations.  


    I am new to AC so no doubt there will be many more options and ways of doing things I am not aware of. 

    Also I love how neat and organised AC is. . Also, you can use Action List Parameters to save a lot of time. https://adventurecreator.org/tutorials/introduction-parameters

  • Thank you guys for your replys. I was hoping that threr will bem more replys but it seams noone is using AC for Visual Novel style game and I think thats odd.


    If any of you can give some more help I will appreciate it!
  • A Visual Novel is an adventure game without puzzles, so yes Adventure Creator would do a great job of making Visual Novels.
  • AC can do visual novels, since it's mostly dialogue, handling some sprites, saves and variables but if you are only looking to do a VN have you thought of using Ren' py ?? It's a fairly straight forward engine dedicated to do VNs and it has created a lot of visual novels.


    There's also a free asset for unity called Fungus
    But I have no experience with it.

    I think the best tool would be Ren'Py if you are ONLY thinking of making a VN, if you are looking to integrate other type of gameplay, AC is a great start, and will get you into making a game and not only thinking in circles.
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