The SoG Visual Novel Update #1: Why a Visual Novel?

So, you’ve heard that I’m going to make a Visual Novel spinoff for Secrets of Grindea. ‘Why in the world?’, you might ask. A Visual Novel is, after all, quite a leap from an action RPG!

What is a Visual Novel?

If you’re unfamiliar with the genre, a Visual Novel is a game genre where most of the story is told through text or dialogue and where the player’s main interaction is choosing what to say or do in certain situations. In doing so, the player transforms the story and the fate of those involved in it depending on their choices.

A lot of Visual Novels involve romance, but not all.

Aviary Attorney, a visual novel and one of the best games in existence, if you ask me.

While it’s true that our main focus within Pixel Ferrets has been (and probably still will be) top-down Pixel Art games, this as of yet untitled Visual Novel won’t exactly be a Pixel Ferret game. In fact, that’s the reason why I’m making this – I’ve more or less finished all there is for me to do on Secrets of Grindea save bug testing and updating already existent graphic assets. Fred and Teddy, on the other hand, still have a number of things they need to finish and this leaves me with with quite a bit of time before we can start discussing our next project together.

And so, we’ve decided that instead of twiddling my thumbs I’ll start making this visual novel and we’ll see how far along I can come before they’re done. If I manage to finish it before we start the next project, it’ll be released as a companion piece to the Secrets of Grindea world, and if not, I’ll continue working on it on my free time until it is completed.

I picked the Visual Novel genre because it’s very heavily reliant on graphics and writing, which happen to be what I enjoy the most. It also doesn’t need as much programming knowledge as the more technically complex action RPG genre, and as such, I should be able to make most of this game on my own while Teddy and Fred finish up SoG.

Some More Visual Novel Inspiration

I’m actually super excited to get started on this for real. That feeling when you start a new project is exhilarating to say the least; all those opportunities of where to go and what to do within each new story!

Well, what would you guys like to see from a Secrets of Grindea Visual Novel?

2 thoughts on “The SoG Visual Novel Update #1: Why a Visual Novel?

  1. My personal thoughts on a Secrets of Grindea VN:
    1. Stories of what Luke got up to before becoming a collector maybe? Maybe Luke’s family even? What kind of interesting characters would they be?
    2. Bag in the past
    3. Tales of old collectors
    4. Past of some of the artifacts
    5. Future events in the universe? What happens to some of the side characters/main characters descendants after the story?
    6. Maybe a story about another location in the universe we didn’t get to see (if you want to start with different characters and lore completely)

    All of these ideas are interesting to me personally, some more than others, but all of them have the potential to be amazing if executed well. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, comes of your project.

    -Hawke

    1. Thank you, those are some very cool ideas!
      I’m crossing my fingers I’ll be able to execute whichever one we end up going for well enough – right now we’re leaning towards focusing on a few different sentient artifacts in one way or another 🙂

      Gotta say I’m super glad to hear from another VN fan 😀 Underappreciated genre, IMO.

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