WHen I began my project, I was thinking a VN would just need good writing, appealing art and discret programming (and soundtrack as bonus)… A writer, an artist and a programmer meet together, talk, work and BAM !… Success !…
I WAS SO WRONG ! As our project of VN was becoming more and more a reality, it appeared than “WIngs of Justice” needed much more works preparation than I was expecting !
Here a little list of the things you have to think about, and all the tasks to be done, for making a succesfull Visual Novel PRE-PRODUCTION :
- Creating : Do the inceptions of the project. Create characters, places, events, plots, gameplay and provide comprenhensive descriptions of these for the future.
- Planning : Dialogues, sprites, backgrounds, musics, animation FX, gameplay elements… Figure the needs of the project in terms of task, manpower, money, time…
- program designing : evaluate how the gameplay, interaction, GUI will be done.
- Graphic designing : establish a graphic chart for sprites pose, body, clothes GUI, background…
- Sound/music designing : music, FX
- Script designing : determine text, sound, animation and sprites successions for the more complex scene.
- Recruiting : look for talents and convince then to join your team.
- Funding…
- Managing : manage the team, do planning, take descision, allocate tasks and duties, evaluate the final work and start again that process if the results are not satisfying.
- Advertising : create the base of your communication plan… What ? You don’t have a communication plan, yet ?
When you have checked everything in this list you may be already very close from a solid demo or a convincing proof of concept…
Don’t get me wrong ! It’s not a list of thing you have to do before all ! Sometimes you may wait to recruit a background artist to define with him your overall graphic chart, especially if your team lack expertise in a specific domain.
It’s more like a list of what you should expect to do as a VN maker and you may feel helpless if you didn’t think about these in certain situation, like recruiting team mate before defining a clear profile of the art you are looking to finaly found it’s out of his range of skill, or advertising, recruiting for your project when you didn’t pass the creative phase yet…
Anyway with luck, meetings, and hardships, you may still successfully reaching the production phase where everyone is working on the project proeficiently !
BunnyBunny !