"White Room Journal" is a short 5 minutes Visual Novel about a girl in a hospital and her weekly meetings with the player character. I developed this project to practice making a visual novel with Ren'py.
Play Links:
- "White Room Journal" on Itch.io
Story:
This story is about a girl who likes reading and her time in the hospital, waiting for your weekly visits.
Goals:
To develop a complete short experience that allows me to practice everything I need to make a longer one.
The project should be a "Kinetic Novel" so I won't have to think of alternatives options/routes while writing, which will make the story easier to write & folllow.
The project should be easy to port. I wanted to write a visual novel that I could use to learn a new game development engine without worrying about coming up with a new script.
The project should be visually appealing. I'm not a great artist, but I'm confident of my art's uniqueness. I choose monochrome coloring since it's easier to let the details stick out this way.
I managed to fulfill all of these goals with this pilot version, and my next goal would be to make it more interesting to read/play.
Devlog
I wanted to write a visual novel like this for a while, but I wasn't confident I could write a short story, but when I finally started writing the story, it basically write itself.
The main prompt is "short meetings once a week," I wrote things for prompts like that before, including the short story "SAYA Is Offline" but it's the first time I wrote it from one character's perspective, I imagine the other character to be the player, but you can think of it as you want.
After writing the story, I decided on an engine. Between Construct 3, Twine, Ren'py I settled on the latter. (I tried Rakugo too, but I went back to Ren'py.) The language of this Renpy is easy to learn. I also didn't need to look hard to find out how to use Text Tags & Transforms. I used both heavily in "White Room."
I drew the art myself using my tablet, that includes the background and the character and her various portrait shots. I drew using tablet before, but this project is the time I finally started thinking, I'm getting used to it.
As for the audio, I didn't do any sound-design in this project. This is a completely silent Visual Novel.
All-in-all, I'm proud of this pilot version of this VN, and I'll edit it some more. Maybe add another twist or two if I had time.
Pieces of Feedback
Before publishing the game, I gave it to a few people to play, including my brother and the Hive user @ditoferrer. I got some nice feedback about this pilot version, but other than a few typos, I won't mention them in this post to encourage you to give me your own feedback.
Please tell me your opinion if you played this project.
- This devlog is also on Read.cash.