The World After: the visual novel prototype

Before we started anything, we had to make The World After into a visual novel prototype. We arleady made a proof of concept, but we had to go further to organize properly everything. Guillaume and I have known each other for more than 15 years, and we worked together ever since. We had no idea how to make an FMV game, but we sure knew how to make a movie. So first thing we did after Guillaume wrote the script was to transform this script into something interactive so we can evaluate what works, what doesn’t, and make sure that all the scenes we had to shoot were listed correctly.

Preparing the shooting

The problem with making an FMV game is that you cannot really make a demo or a prototype before you shoot, and once you started shooting you’d better shoot everything you need. Filmmaking is super expensive compared to a regular point and click game, so you have to lock everything down before you start.

So we took the script and open a new Unity project, and using the Fungus plug-in we transformed it into a Visual Novel. That’s roughly the Visual Novel you can play now inside the actual game (with new graphics, of course).

Everything was now in place to start the shooting. We did the math: the shooting would roughly take 8 to 9 complete days. So I convinced everyone to book 15 days, and if it is too much then we’ll have a good time in the countryside. Oh boy, was I right.