Calling on Writers!

Heyo! Kevin here, calling on writers, with an in-depth explanation on what Project VeN is all about.

Demo video

Project Ven

What is Project Ven? We like to call it "a visual novel on crack" (You can see that we're not very good with words - probably why we need a writer).
Our goal is to make a visual novel that demonstrates the capabilities of the medium to a mainstream audience, while remaining relevant to existing fans of the genre.

Examples of some of the elements we are exploring:

• Player agency and its role in dictating narrative pacing and content
• Usage of textual and visual assets in complementary ways
• Page/link system ala Twine
• Kinetic typography
• Experimental rendering systems to simulate 2d "hand-drawn" animations
• Exploration of space as a narrative device

While it's still too early to spill the beans on all the stuff we have planned (nCart rendering system I'm looking at you), suffice to say we have a lot of exciting stuff coming - all of which you can follow throughout the coming months on this blog.

Our studio: Title pending

The team behind it all.

In the latter half of 2014, a group of nerds got together and asked themselves the question: why haven't visual novels grown as a medium since its 2000s heydays? Compared to other "niche" genres such as voxel games, rogue-likes and simulators, the genre hasn't seemed to have progressed as much, and still remains a budding industry in the West. While we salute the folks at Dischan Media, Freebird Games, and Sekai Project - examples of companies that have made great strides in furthering the genre - we remain deeply dissatisfied at the state of the medium, for we know that it's true potential has barely been touched.

So we decided to do it ourselves, and that is how Project Ven came to be.

Overtime, we have formulated the following Manifesto:

1. Expand and evolve Visual Novels as a medium for a universal audience.
2. Explore new ways in which Visual Novels can be used as a story-telling medium.
3. Raise the quality bar for Visual Novels not only in the West, but worldwide.

Though our team is localized in Melbourne, Australia, we welcome people from any part of the globe.

We need a Writer!

We have the technical know-how. We have the visuals down-pat. We have the programmer, the designer, the artist, the animator…but we're still missing one crucial element - the writer.

This is why we have created this "tech demo": not only to show what we want to do, but to show what we can do - the capabilities of the team and the quality we are aiming for.

So if you're a writer interested in creating a high-quality, "next-gen" visual novel, please apply!

What we are looking for:

• Fast and loose writing: Due to the nature of our game, you will be expected to create a large number of text assets - however, you will also be given a large amount of creative freedom in what you write: as can be seen in our demo, we have anything from poems, jokes, anecdotes, screenplays, to recipes.
• Collaboration: As fellow creatives we understand the pain of having to compromise your vision. That being said, a few of us on the team are also quite keen on the world-building and character design aspects of the game, so be ready for some collaboration! That being said, for our project the story trumps all, so don't be afraid of having to compromise due to artistic or technical constraints - it will be our job to match the story.
• Volume: We must once again stress the importance of speed: specifically, we're looking at around 180 pages of work (100 pages for the main script, 80 for all the side stories/objects) in 4 months, leaving 2 months for polish/QA. Going with the industry standard of roughly 250 words/page.

Setting

Though the plot and setting of the game has not yet been finalized, we are currently leaning towards magic realism as the genre. We are also steering away from romance; this is due to a variety of reasons, but mainly due to oversaturation from existing works.

Scope

We wish to start off by testing the grounds with a smaller project: our goal is to release a ~1 hour long novelette within 6 months. The system and pipeline has already been set up for easy integration with text assets - the bulk of the work will not be integration but creation and editing. By aiming for a smaller release we can also focus on quality of execution and polish. The fast release will also let us know on how to progress with the eventual "larger" game, depending on how the initial release goes.

Finances

We are working with a revenue share model. (Most of us are just students or recent graduates). That being said, we plan to apply for various funding bodies such as the Indiefund & Film Victoria - if any funding is successful, all members of the team will immediately get a share of the funding.

For anyone interested in the position, please include an example of previous work you have done.

As we are on an extremely tight schedule, please contact us by the 23rd of March.

Look forward to the demo, which should be up by this Thursday (polishing it up for Freeplay - which if you live in Melbourne, you should totally check out).

Feel free to contact us about if you have any questions!
You can contact us via email projectven.games@gmail.com or this website!