It's really hard to read book length texts I often feel.
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Sitting here reading a visual novel "game" I'm reminded of this. And wonder if classic literature could be converted to this genre?
There's so many awesome books out there. That I want to read, and more people in general should read. But instead I spend all my time just reading tiny chunks of text on a screen, whether in games or websites.
Could we use this genre to make books more easily accessible?
Has anyone done this? Which classic books should be visual noveled?
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@forteller Don Quixote! Dekameron! Greek mythologies!
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The oldest of classical literature is out of copyright – anyone can do anything they want with it. More books enters this public domain every year.
And people do cool things with it all the time, or just make them available as ebooks trough Project Gutenberg or https://standardebooks.org/
So how about splitting a book into short chunks, illustrating some of them (VNs show you don't need new illustrations for each chunk), drawing the characters, and publishing it as a VN game?
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@majatomic I've never read any of this! The mythologies, though, I started reading a retelling of, and yeah, I got trough some of it, but not much. I'm sure there are great ways of illustrating those, and splitting them up into manageable sizes, which would've made it much easier for me!
Don Quixote, though, wouldn't that just be one illustration, of him and his helper in front of a windmill?
Nah, I don't know anything about that book, really -
I actually started a project back on Twitter to publish the whole of A demon haunted world – Science as a candle in the dark, verbatim, one tweet at a time. It was a bit of work to get the splits between all the chunks to be in the best spots, but it did work out quite well, I thought. Unfortunately I didn't get many followers, and so I gave it up after two or three chapters.
Anyways, the point is I know it's possible, and it's a lot less work than writing a book that stands the test of time
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@forteller I always loved when books had maps in them! Either in the first or last pages. Some books had huge maps, others had maps spread over several pages (one for each region). Helps with visualizing the story and provides an extra element to the story. Miss those books.
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@forteller My only frustration is VNs are slow for me. The overhead of flipping from page to page leaves me just tapping the next button because I want to get to the meaty content.
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@Luuni Ah, yes! That is fantastic stuff! When my dad and I read Lord of the rings we actually bought a whole separate book with maps just to follow along easier
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@dmoonfire Agreed. The animations of showing the next text and the next picture often are annoyingly slow. There should always be settings to turn off animations or even to change the speed. But regardless, VNs are very popular, AFAIK, and could be a way to introduce some great works to a wider audience.
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@forteller That's like a movie or comic adaptation? I don't know any VN being a direct adaptation and I'm not sure how the differences in presentation would affect if usual novel writing works there.
Personally, I can read some books more easily than most VNs, but that would be very cool.
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@mtjm Sure, it could be an adaptation. But my thought was just to straight up take the text and split it up and add some illustrations and UI. Not changing any of the text.
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I downloaded Ren'Py to see how hard it would be to make a visual novel, and it comes with a "game" which confirms that yes, it is a book!
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It Came From Planet X!replied to Bø!rge last edited by
@forteller holy shit, that's a good idea
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Bø!rgereplied to It Came From Planet X! last edited by
@coeurl Thank you! Appreciate it! I actually find it a bit strange that I can't find anyone have done something like this before
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I'm noticing that maybe the main problem with this idea is that many out of copyright texts are written in a way that can be hard to parse.
I had to read the first few lines of Lysistrata many times, and in two different translations, before I now finally feel kinda confident that I actually understand it.
Sure, there are often more modern translations, or updated language versions, of classics. But most of those are most likely still copyrighted!
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So I guess what should happen here is not that some game maker (or just a random guy like me) makes a visual novel of a public domain text, but rather that a publisher should make their books into visual novels. Either books they've already translated/published, or even new translations of classical literature. Since they are public domain, no publishing house has any monopoly on them and can stop any publisher who wants from making a new translation or a visual novel.
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@forteller there's a mobile app that delivers books into parts of 20 minutes of reading a day #PublicDomain
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(Tried it and liked it)
https://www.serialreader.org/ -
@paulasimoes Oh, hey, that's really cool! Thanks!
