jennypng

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generation ship visual novel game

4 min read

Short visual novel story about one day in the life of a resident on a generation ship; the ship travels through space with the last pocket of humanity, in search of a new home

motivation

Themes

implementation

writing

lore research

code

Stack:
Things I’ve never done before this:
  • independently create and deploy a game
  • make a visual novel
  • make game music
resources

art

music

dev log

7/11/25 (i started ideating this project months ago, but this is the day i start committing to seeing this project through & starting my dev log)

I started working through make visual novel system from scratch youtube series at the start of this year, and got to episode 8 out of a hundred something LOL - it’s a really good tutorial and I learned some software design patterns too - the code is very well written - but…now that I’ve lost the flow of it I don’t want to get back into it LOL esp coz it’s overkill for this current project scope

I decided to commit to using inkle, which I knew of previously but didn’t look into until now

it has fairly thorough documentation, supports interactive branching stories, variables, and functions, as well as a unity package and runtime

it seems pretty simple to use with a reasonable learning curve

starting to work on the script in ink! learning how to best organize the writing

ink suggests writing custom parsing logic unity-side for certain things so that’s an aspect i need to design as well

Unknowns so far

  • game state logic, saving game state, etc.

Challenges so far

  • what game state to store in ink vs. unity
  • how to trigger story sections based on non-narrative point-and-click game element status
  • organizing dialogue
  • writing a compelling story lmao

Implementation

  • ink has tags per line that the game can access
    • custom tag design:
      • wait_for_click:scene
        • this will happen a lot - probably useful to identify the action required
      • sound:name
      • art
  • originally i wanted to finish writing most of the script before coding, but i think a lot of what i write in ink is going to depend on how i custom parse information on the game-side, so I have to do both in parallel

7/13

  • working on ink script
  • realizing ink still doesn’t enable a large portion of logic needed for a visual novel…may have to revisit that 100 episode tutorial after all lol
    • honestly, the tutorial is really good…teaches good code style, organization, and software design patterns
    • need stuff like dialoguemanagers, saving and loading story progress, input management, etc.
    • ink just replaces the need to write dialogue script parsing from scratch lol…

7/17

  • passively moodboarding for the art
    • made a pinterest board for the ideal character art style
      • debating painterly textured muted color style, or traditional ink black and white style
    • was struggling to find non ai slop references of spaceships, did some moodboarding on arena instead
  • started reading Aurora - Kim Stanley Robinson for more in-depth research - it has a very interesting design of a generation ship, I may end up taking many elements from this
    • the dialogue i’ve written so far definitely does not have that many science-heavy portions, but I want enough feasible detail to make the story feel polished and immersive

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