In my last post, I talked a bit about how we decided to give visual novels a try since the more text-heavy approach provided us with a chance to tell more story than we’d be able to in other media. But even with the focus on more written story, we still want to make the visual part of the visual novel as interesting as possible.
Something I noticed in a lot of the visual novels I’ve seen, is that they tend to stick with a very specific layout for their entirety. It’s usually something along the lines of this:
A background that fits the screen, a medium shot of a character (or two) in the center, the text box and…well, that’s pretty much it. This approach struck me as a little boring, and given the flexibility provided by the RenPy engine, completely unnecessary.
Errant Heart Dev Blog 