V.A.S.T. fire: A non-linear storyboarding tool for visual novels

• Main Authors: Apostol, Rey Angelo C., Chan Li, Kevin T., Chua, Charwin Dale L.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2010
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/10963
• Institution: De La Salle University

Visual novels are a form of interactive storytelling comprised of various kinds of media. A visual novel is subdivided into scenes which may consist of text, backgrounds, music, and images. Scenes may progress linearly or nonlinearly depending on the choices of the player which affect the flow of the plot. Current visual novel development tools do not visually represent the inter-scene and intra-scene flow. This would create a hard time for tracing and debugging and would not be practical for the tools desired audience, especially non-programmers. A way to address this problem is by integrating a storyboard to a development tool as its means of visually representing plot floes and scene transitions. A storyboard, usually used in cinematography and animation, is a visual layout of plot flow and direction which serves as the basic structure of the story or film. By integrating a storyboard into the development process of a visual novel, the developers can focus more on the content and can easily map out the plot flow allowing source code. A visual novel development tool will be developed using Ren'Py as its core engine the tool would allow the users to create and storyboard a visual novel without any programming involved.