pose characters, customize characters?

[similarly]

All the videos I've seen show the same exact characters in the same exact poses. I see you can change facial expressions, and can animate the characters to a small extent, but:

1. Are there different poses for the character?
2. Can you change the clothes or hairstyle?

Many years ago, I bought enterbrain's 恋愛シミュレーションツクール, and it had different poses for each character, and you could change the outfit, and there was limited customization of clothing colors and hair colors (not so different from Comipo's Manga Maker, actually.

If Visual Novel Maker doesn't have these features, I'd like to suggest to the devs to strongly consider it.

I'd even suggest a character generator so you have a lot of flexibility on clothing, clothing layers, and clothing colors, matching different faces to bodies, having different hairstyles, maybe even a slider system to create unique characters (not unlike some rpg games, or Reallusion's iClone Character Creator).

For posing, I'd settle for preset poses, but I think it would be MUCH cooler to be able to completely pose the arms, legs and head like a model, maybe even animate it with preset poses or animations.

[Dirak2012]

No, there are no such things. If you want different poses, you have to draw them yourself or get someone to draw them for you.

[Rebecca Kalista]

I'd argue that's not really in the realm of VNM's part. The fact that VNM comes with premade art is better thought of as a bonus than a central feature - the central feature of VNM is handling the engine part of creating a visual novel, and it does that reasonably well.

The problem with providing (extended) assets is twofold.

First, unless you provide an extremely large collection of assets (the likes of which is practically impossible to provide for any reasonable asking price, as these all need to be made by paid artists), you're locking the users into a specific art style (or set of art styles). This is fine if the user likes the style, useless otherwise.

In most circumstances, it's better to provide assets as a "demo" of sorts, and let creators look for art that actually fits their specifications (i.e. look for artists capable of fulfilling their specific needs, and paying them for art - or making the art themselves). Most professional visual novels will use original assets anyway.

The other problem (re: posing) is adding poses takes a lot of effort (you need to track the artists down and pay them for additional pieces) and is not particularly useful (because, again, most pro visual novels will use original assets anyway). Live2D models can be made to be poseable, for what it's worth, but there aren't nearly as many artists capable of doing that satisfyingly well.

[similarly]

Most Enterbrain products (such as the RPG maker line) are not really for "professionals". They're for hobbyists and amateurs, hence drag and drop systems that don't require coding. I mean, if we're talking about "professionals" who make all their own assets, why wouldn't we also be talking about professionals who could code their own game, or hire a partner to code it?

No. I disagree. This is not something for "professionals", even if some people have used it to create games that they sell.

Most other Enterbrain products come with extensive assets included. Even, as I mentioned, 恋愛シミュレーションツクール, which came out in 2001, and which I'd use if my knowledge of Japanese were slightly higher.

So considering Enterbrain's other products, and considering who this product is made for, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest character creation as a feature.

[Rebecca Kalista]

To the first question: because hand-coding a visual novel engine fit for HTML5 distribution is straight suicide unless you're very competent with JavaScript (and I don't mean "competent enough to code most sites"). If you're that competent (or capable of hiring a coder competent enough), by all means do it yourself, but one of the good things about visual novels is the fact that they're cheap to produce so you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot here.

If you wanna work without VNM and make a good visual novel without hand-coding everything, you're pretty much stuck with Unity or Ren'Py - Unity is extremely tough (and in fact you'll be hand coding), and Ren'Py can't export to HTML5 (but is fine for local play). And either way, you're gonna have to pay all these coders (or be these coders).

Meanwhile VNM actually does the job so I'm like, sure, you may not see it being used by professionals, but there aren't many features a professional would lack in VNM and it's already being used for pro game dev. Drag and drop is not the privileged way of working in VNM either once you're proficient in it (typing is).

The remaining arguments I've already answered above. If you want a character creator, use one (nobody said you had to do everything in VNM itself), but that's not VNM's job (at least not yet), and fixing bugs / improving the engine and soft come much higher in the priority list. Implementing a character creation system demands too much effort for a comparatively risible reward, considering nearly no pro worth their salt would use it - and pros are the main target here.

[korytoombs]

1) The default assets have only 1 pose.
2) Yes, you need an image editing program to change these. I suggest Gimp.

I don't know if I'd be willing to pay extra for a feature to geneate default characters. I make commercial games, so I already pay an artist extra to make CGs.

What this engine really needs to do is make sure everything works and everything is as easy as possible to use.