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.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.
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Notes -
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 writtenall 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.
That is a really cool project!
How do you approach the overall project of converting - with what I assume are works of literature you love - in the order that you do? Are you honing the process of works that you like and then after you've figured out a decent process you go to works that you love?
I find long-term enthusiasm and motivation management super interesting and would like to hear your perspective.
"Love" might be ah... bit strong for some of these books. I chose Cup of Gold to start with for instance because I like Steinbeck, and thought it would be fun to do his first novel for the site's first visual novel. But I wouldn't really say that that book is good. (Ambitious perhaps?)
And then since then, the order has been kind of just whatever book I feel like doing next, based on what I'm up for reading and re-reading and re-reading, though biased towards shorter books at first. (Gotta build my way up to doing those long Russian authors.)
And also I guess I've been biasing my selections against books with complex frame narratives or like epistolary-type formats, like Wuthering Heights or Dracula or Heart of Darkness or whatever, since even though those are all books I'd like to do, I want some more experience before figuring out how I'd approach them as visual novels.
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