Secondly, there are many renders that I'll call "transition" renders where you use them to move characters around the scene that look pretty bad or are useless. It's very hard to make good looking transition renders because the more body parts that are moving, the more you have to fiddle with to make it look smooth. There are more cost efficient ways to move characters on the screen that'll look better. An example is the scene meeting with the two nuns. Having the nuns move about in the store conveys no important information to the audience, instead you can first show the nuns arriving in the store, then show one of the nuns take a seat with the MC, then focus on the MC's face who turns to look at the other nun approach the counter. He can refocus on the nun in front of him as she starts talking to him, then look to his left as the other nun sits next to him. This saves you the trouble of having to painfully pose every movement by the nun to the counter and back but still conveying the same information.
Sorry for butchering the quote just... yeah want to keep it tidy. And disclaimer: I woke up recently, and my brain is overworking things. I didn't take this as an attack nor I'm upset, I just tend to be blunt when I respond which can be seen as hostility which isn't intended at all.
I'm aware of the transition renders, and it is something I've had issues going back when I was making TRS. During TRS there were scenes that I redid way many times because I wasn't happy with them. Same thing in here, the nun scene for example is pretty much accurate with the original text, and I had three different versions of it under testing, blurring, different angles, focuses and so on, and what is in was the only one I was happy with in the end.
And that is partially the problem, if I'm not happy with it I can't move on and if I try to change it too drastically at once I'll probably quit. And then I'm getting depressed that I didn't finish what I started, and to get out of the depression I return to do what I did and the cycle continues.
So I appreciate feedback, and I'll take it, adapt to it, but the change will not be fast as I need to keep myself happy with what I do. So unfortunately if it takes some pointless and not so great transitioning scenes to keep my brain happy so be it, and all I can do is to try to improve it overtime. And I've already cut the number of "empty" transitional frames down by few so it could be worse.
And the transitioning effects itself, again I play around with them, I test them and they are something that are easy to fix once I find something I'm happy with, right now it isn't on top of the priority list as despite having one VN completed I'm still learning a lot, and once I get my brain to accept them I'll change them. It will take time but, maybe next version is different, maybe one after that? We see how it goes.
As an short example from TSR, I played around with transition effects already but I couldn't see a bloody difference in there, now when I'm doing this one I'm starting to see the difference they make when right one is used in the right spot. But I need to adjust my stupid over active brain to accept them and not to nag subconsciously that the previous way was better.
If I had to guess, what you're going for, for an experience as a whole, is to deemphasize the "novel" part of visual novel and emphasize the "visual" part, am I right? I feel this is what you're trying to do by how your dialogue is written and the render to lines of dialogue ratio. The dialogue is concise yet still has depth and personality and the renders tell as much of the story as the dialogue accomplishes.
Yeah that sounds about correct. And a lot of other irritations to pile on it so... But in my opinion the visual aspect is under used, there is potential for so much more than what is currently being utilized. And this isn't to criticize what others are doing, there are absolute gems out there that I enjoy for various reasons.
And one picture is worth of a thousand words, so why write it when you can show it? Well not always that greatly but one has to try. Of course this will increase the amount needed renders by a quite large margin.
