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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  22hr ago (text post)   197 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for May 12th, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

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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)

The metadata is (poorly) documented in this blog post: Converting Books Into Visual Novels Part 0: The pulp.txt Format. It's part of a series of seven or so posts I'm still only partway through making, where I plan to walk through the whole process. Here are the other two currently completed as well: Converting Books Into Visual Novels Part 0.5: Creating book.txt and Converting Books Into Visual Novels Part 1: The First Edit — Creating the Starter pulp.txt. (Again, you'll have to excuse the really bad technical writing in these, since I'm very much not good at it!)

(Also, if you're looking for a book to reference, probably any of the others is better than Cup of Gold, since what with that one being the first, I was still figuring a lot of the details out, and hadn't realized that giving all the characters one-letter IDs was a stupid idea.)

The overall pulp.txt format is one I created myself, for a couple reasons:

First, I wanted an enforcement mechanism to ensure that, as part of editing, the original text doesn't end up accidentally getting changed. So I wanted that logic baked into the "compiler", that pulp.txt (the metadata-enhanced text) would reference book.txt (the original text), to make sure they add up to the same complete book. And that required custom code.

And then second, I just my own format so that I could always be able to add in all my own idiosyncratic parsing rules and not have to deal with the idiosyncratic parsing rules of other existing visual novel formats. (Which I admit isn't a great reason to create my own format, though to be fair, book-to-VN converting is a fairly idiosyncratic venture.)

I'm not sure I fully understand your questions about the git repo automation and character sheet enforcement, but maybe the blog posts will answer those questions. (If not though, feel free to ask again.)

As for the cost, it seems to be converging to about $200 in image API spend per book, though the number will vary depending on the length of the book and number of different background and characters and character outfits.

For the time, this latest book Pride and Prejudice (~122k words) took me almost a month, although admittedly that could have been shorter if I was more focused, and also wasn't still making updates to my processes. I think if I had everything ironed out correctly, a book of that length could take as little as two weeks to do, though probably not much shorter than that, without starting to lose quality and accuracy.

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