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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  9hr ago (text post)   110 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for May 12th, 2026

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I've lately been working on a project around converting public domain novels into visual novels, unabridged. (Website: https://publicdomainpulp.com)

It's an idea I've had for a while, but it's only recently that image generator technology has gotten good enough to make the project viable. Viable, but not yet easy. At the start, I thought it would be easy, but there's a real scaling challenge in maintaining consistency when it comes to generating the hundreds of images a single book's visual novel needs.

Across the book, the style needs to be kept consistent. And the colors need to be consistent. And the image quality needs to be consistent. And the physical settings need to be consistent. And all this while being accurate to the details of the book, stated and implied, including period-accuracy. And of course: the images should be pleasant to look at.

None of these constraints on their own is super difficult to get right, but all of them together? That's when you start getting a lot of mistakes and having to do a lot of reprompting.

Not that I can blame all the mistakes of the image generator. Many of the screw-ups are fully mine: getting background details wrong, getting character details wrong, screwing up character expressions, screwing up relative resolutions, screwing up background framing, failing to make characters look unique, making characters look too unique, and so on.

The result being, the first three visual novels (Cup of Gold, The 39 Steps, and Pudd'nhead Wilson) I would describe as terrible, the next three (The Sun Also Rises, Jekyll and Hyde, and The Great Gatsby) as merely mostly terrible, the next two (The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Secret Garden) as only just bad, and the most recent (Pride and Prejudice) as... perhaps approaching being okay.

It's a trend of improvement to be sure, but I'm also annoyed with myself by how long the results are taking to improve, and just how long I'm taking with the conversions in general. I really do want to have visual novels for every book ever written all the major novels of the public domain western canon, but at this rate, it's going to take some time. Especially if I want to get the results to the point of being good. And I also need to decide: do I go back and re-edit all the bad VNs? And if so, when, since I don't know if that's such a good use of marginal effort at the moment, with so many books still to do. But I also hate to leave up a bunch of garbage on the website.

Still, at least in terms of prose quality, the site currently has the nine best visual novels ever written. But visually, there's still many process improvements I need to make (including just getting better at slideshow editing), which hopefully the continued release of better image generators will help with. (I was optimistic about the recent GPT Image 2 at first, but it turned out to have... interesting issues.)

I think I'll do A Study in Scarlet next, where I'll try to tackle some of remaining sprite generation issues.

Thanks for sharing this. The project is fascinating to me from a technical perspective.

I'm currently working on a make-like build system for automating LLM workflows like yours. I've only been using it for internal projects so far, but I might try putting together an example that outputs material compatible with your system. So I looked into some of the technical details, and I have a few questions for you.

Q1

It looks like each novel is stored in its own git repo. I dug through your https://github.com/JohnQPulp/CupOfGold repo and I think I understand how all the info is stored. My first question is: is the annotation format you use in pulp.txt standard for visual novels or something you invented? Specifically, in the lines

All afternoon the wind sifted out of the black Welsh glens, crying notice that Winter was come sliding down over the world from the Pole; and riverward there was the faint moaning of new ice. It was a sad day, a day of gray unrest, of discontent.<e>"Winter... of discontent" opens Steinbeck's first novel. That's some neat, Shakespearean <book>The Winter of Our Discontent|career bookending</book>.</e>
b=wales

The gently moving air seemed to be celebrating the loss of some gay thing with a soft, tender elegy.
n:r=Robert Morgan; n:m=Mother Morgan; n:g=Gwenliana; n:h=Henry Morgan

I'm wondering if the html-like tags and the b=wales metadata stuff is formally documented anywhere?

Q2

These two repos look like how your generating the actual HTML from a book repo:

But what are you using to automate the actual git repos of the books? Could you walk me through that workflow a bit? (This is the part that I might try automating with my own tool.)

For example, I don't see anything in the book repos that look like they are designed to enforce consistency (like a character sheet) anywhere. All the material in the repo looks more like a final product than intermediate developer/artist "documentation". Do you generate any intermediate files like this?

Q3

What's the approximate cost for the full conversion? How much time does it take? (both manual and API/compute)

Excellent! What are you using for the sprites and the illustrations? GPT Image? I was using Kling AI to make an original visual novel but I haven't got round to it recently. It's pretty good though.

Currently I'm using Nano Banana Pro, which was the best model at the time I started the project. The more recently released GPT Image 2 is probably the better model overall now, but for what I'm trying to do, it has a few issues.

GPT's interpretation of "literary cross-hatching" style is more beautiful overall in isolation, using thin fine stippling, which gives it a really nice engraved look, especially for character sprites. Whereas Banano's style tends to use thicker lines and give a more exaggerated and perhaps less realistic overall appearance to characters. But even though style-wise Banano is the more amateurish one, I'd say its use of bolder/clearer lines with less detail makes it easier to more quickly understand what's going on, both in the backgrounds and in characters' expressions. So it wins from an information standpoint, even if less pretty.

Also: GPT seems to do a better job at following prompts details, like including everything you tell it to include. But, it seems to be worse at understanding how objects exist in space (or maybe it just screws up more often due to including more fine details), leading to more nonsensical elements in the backgrounds. (Banano does screw up physicality too, but less often.)

And I find it interesting that, no matter how I try to prompt the differences in style out of the models, even with style reference images, they really do just seem to have their own interpretations of cross-hatching that they can't help but converge to. (And that does make me a little worried that, should Google deprecate and replace Banano with a different model, the "upgrade" might have a fundamentally different style, which would lead to the website's art becoming inconsistent. But I'll figure out how to deal with that if it comes to it.)

And then the last weird about the GPT model is its bizarre fixation on cleavage. It can't help itself but to include prominent cleavage in all the female sprites, which... could be acceptable, were again, its art style not so distractingly detailed. But you end up with these perfectly spherical breasts contoured with perfect curve-following grids, which look like they belong in a calculus class. Beautiful! But distracting. (Banano is comparatively more modest, and also just does a better job diversifying its faces away from always being of the perfect form, which helps keeps characters identifiable at-a-glance.)

It can't help itself but to include prominent cleavage in all the female sprites, which... could be acceptable, were again, its art style not so distractingly detailed. But you end up with these perfectly spherical breasts contoured with perfect curve-following grids, which look like they belong in a calculus class. Beautiful! But distracting.

It sounds like the training material was the 1992-2002 corpus of Image Comics.

converting public-domain novels into visual novels

It's my understanding that a purely linear visual novel is more often called a "kinetic novel".

A kinetic novel is a VN that does not present the "player" with any choices at all; he simply reads through a single unbranching story.

The term originates from Visual Art's brand KineticNovel (and all games produced under that brand are examples of this), but it is now also used to describe games by other companies with a similar structure.

Using the term "visual novel", with its connotation of interactivity, may mislead readers into thinking that you have added new branching paths to the plots of these books.

That does seem like the more accurate term, though I'll admit that I hadn't actually heard that one before. I'll probably stick with "visual novel" overall for the site and Github repos, since "kinetic novel" strikes me as being less descriptive and also kind of obscure (though I may be betraying my ignorance), but I could see it being a good idea to include in parentheses on the home page.

(And yeah, I don't have any plans to try and make these interactive, since I don't think there'd be a non-gimmicky way to do it.)

This is very interesting. My first reaction was doubt, if not scorn, but clicking on the link I see that when you say unabridged that's exactly what you mean. It's the full novel, not a graphic novel rendering with speech bubbles etc. Maybe that's what a visual novel actually is and I am just learning the term. I suppose for some nonreaders who prefer pictures instead of text alone this could draw them more into reading, regardless of the art style. This must be quite time-consuming!

It's the full novel, not a graphic novel rendering with speech bubbles etc. Maybe that's what a visual novel actually is and I am just learning the term.

Yes, that's what a visual novel is.

A typical visual novel consists of text over an anime-style background image and is accompanied by background music. Throughout the game, the player usually has to answer a few questions which will have an effect on the story. Thus, playing a visual novel a second time while giving other answers may result in an entirely different plot.

Note that these particular visual novels are in the non-interactive "kinetic novel" subcategory.

Sitting at 36317 words; I have really slowed down. It's another scene with a stubborn character, a different one this time. I am flipping between two storylines in two locations, so it's a constant struggle: I bang out the banging in the first one in 15 minutes and then spend the rest of the hour on the other one, painfully trying to steer the story in the right direction.

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