I've spend the last couple of weeks making a visual novel. I decided to give Ren'Py a go (and no, that's not some weird nickname Yoshizawa has for Joker). Adapting one of my existing stories seemed like the ideal test for it, so I chose The Lovers' Awakening.
At first, the plan was to just adapt the first couple of scenes as a sort of preview. Then, half of Chapter 1. Then all of Chapter 1. Then the entire thing. And now I'm thinking about adding some original extra chapters to it down the line, exclusively for the VN.
Persona 3 is kind of the perfect source material for a first time VN, since P3 Portable already adapted the game into a visual novel format for its cutscenes, so every location and character has art assets available, and most of those have been ripped and made available on the Spriters Resource... except the dorm and school. You know, only the two most visited locations in the game... So, there are a few spots where I had to take shortcuts, be it using screenshots with HUD elements, other locations or even screenshots of SFM ports of the P3D versions of the locations, or loading them up in XNALara and screenshotting them myself. Hopefully, the upcoming PC port will lead to full asset rips in higher resolution so I can replace the existing assets without having to manually resize them all myself.
Luckily, finding voice clips to liven things up was a breeze, thanks to The Sounds Resource, which has all the story and battle dialogue from P3 (but not the S-Links), and this transcript someone uploaded in 2007 of the entire game's script, making finding certain words and phrases, as well as their in-game dates, a trivial matter.
For now, this visual novel covers the entire main story and is available to download via the Google Drive link below. Please check it out and let me know what you think of both the story and the visual novel itself.
Just be sure to lower the music volume to around 75%, though, since it can overpower the voices and sound effects otherwise and I'm still new to this.
itchio Link: the4thsnake. itch. io/the-lovers-awakening
