Being a huge visual novel nerd, I always wanted to make my own.
While working on experimental novels, all I can say is this, "art - write - break - occasional code - break - edit - write - art - break - I don't like this. (repeat from the very start)"
As I know this should be expected in any game making genre really, it's just amazing how much resources and effort is required from one person (that you can't help but just get team members if you could) and the massive amount of time that is needed alongside with hellish college of doom.
There's also the amount of researching that you need to do and reference...lots...and...lots of reference, to get the mood and the setting that you want to portray in the novel. Which comes into mind, I want a setting based on my hometown because there isn't much novels or literary works that focus around it.
So I thought, hey how would this work? I remember going batsh*t crazy with New York pictures (even hounding Ocean's Dream for some pictures) for a project called Eternal Circle (that I lost anyway because of HD crash *weeps*) and I certainly don't have the patience or free time to do something like that again. So I thought, what if I'm buying a house? If these characters were to live somewhere in this place, what kind of house would be available and what will they get? After asking a very informative contact, I got into a site called AyosDito and went crazy with looking for houses.
It wasn't as easy as I thought though, at first I was getting 3D models and this...
At first I was like, what the hell man? The first few pages showed very small promise for my dream setting for Anagram/Future works that needed this setting. I was actually GETTING WORRIED about it hahaha. Then I came across...some really nice houses like these:
This reminds me of that small village that always have these kind of houses lined up when I go out to do grocery shopping. Then there's also these nice houses:
Which screams very Filipino to me (or should it be Spanish?) The best thing is that they also offer inner pictures so I guess that's a nice way to find more references :3
One thing I wish though, if only I did this earlier, researching areas and stuff wouldn't have been so hard ;_;
Here's one of the results of stalking the site and getting the feeling:
I guess I should also stalk Spanish/Chinese home selling sites too since we have a lot of those hybrid houses here. And here I'll leave some art:
Man I wish I scanned some of my drawings for expressions, I'll do it in the next blog post then!
