ComicToVisualNovel

This is the Linux distribution of a RenPy game that displays The Best We Could Do as a visual novel.

What is This??

This was an attempt to show how the comic book medium could interact with the visual novel medium for thje class Graphic Asia. Being someone who is curious about the interaction of CS and the humanities, I wanted to find a way to use code to generate visual novels on the fly without heavy customization.

Visual novels are a really interesting in the ways they work upon the manga/comic/graphic novel genre by adding user interaction, visual effects, and more features to tell stories. Look up some YouTube videos to better understand what a visual novel is.

I originally tried to make a game that lets you input a manga/comic/graphic novel that you want to convert to a visual novel with a click of a button, but it was an absolute mess dealing with all the packages, new libraries, and Ren'Py, so I scrapped all of that and just made this simpler example.

If a significant more amount of time is placed into the development of this, you could hypothetically extract the text from each panel, and have it overlayed upon the comic as you read and interact with the material. You could determine the positive/negative sentiment of the text you extract, and change the color of the background which could add more mood to the scene. I'm not someone who has messed with sound a lot, but something could be done with the images to overlay sound. The possibilities are limitless.

To Run

./ComicToVisualNovel.sh

Code Description

I used https://github.com/Xonshiz/comic-dl to download the first thirty-ish pages of The Best We Could Do from online.

Then, I used an algorithm as feature here: https://github.com/mozillamonks/comicstrip which does its best to split a comic page into multiple dfferent panels. You can see the code which does this reproduced below

import os

for file in os.listdir("./source"):
	os.system('python comicstrip.py -f ./source/{} --min-width=300 --min-height=300 --prefix=./output/{}'.format(file, file.split(".")[0],))

Then, I wrote some code which generates a script for the game which you can find in game/scipt_generator.py. It is also reproduced below

import os
from PIL import Image

base = """

define gui.textbox_height = 10

label start:

  scene black 

"""


for file in sorted(os.listdir("./images")):
	image = Image.open("./images/" + file)
	width, height = image.size
	
	#print "{} {} {}".format(file, width, height)


	if height > 800:
		base += """show {}:
    subpixel True
    yalign 0.0
    linear 10.0 yalign 1.0\n""\n\nhide {} \n\n""".format(file.split(".")[0], file.split(".")[0])
	else:
		base += "show {} at top\n\"\"\nhide {} \n\n".format(file.split(".")[0], file.split(".")[0])

script = open("script.rpy", "w")
script.write(base)
script.close()

Simply put, it's a slightly more interactive slideshow of images. For images that are larger than the game window, the code will add a panning effect to the images.