Hi!
I’m Yuki from the PPGA development team.
As the year draws to a close, there’s a certain restlessness in the air, isn’t there? The PPGA team is feeling the same—“Year-end already? Time really flies!”—but we’re steadily making progress on development🦀
This time around, the dev diary covers the Naninovel implementation. That is, we’re moving on from the scenario we completed in the last diary and putting it into the game itself!
As a total beginner in game development, I had to start here. A little research told me it’s “an asset that makes creating visual novels in Unity easier.” To be honest, it was my first time encountering it, so I didn’t really know much about it.
While writing the scenario, I vaguely heard Director Fujisawa say, “We’ll handle implementing the ADV part ourselves,” but I had no clear image at the time—I just thought, “Oh, okay.”
Then, after finishing the scenario, it was time to implement it. An engineer had prepared a rough script for Episode 0 in advance, so I took a look. And I was… shocked.
A snippet from the Episode 0 Naninovel script
Instantly, I thought, “Ah… this might be impossible.” I’ve always been more analog—being a former pet groomer and all—so PCs were not my comfort zone. Seeing all that programming-like structure made me freeze. I basically declared war on Naninovel… but of course, I couldn’t just walk away.
At first, I went line by line using a “Naninovel Command Guide” the engineer made, swapping illustrations and updating dialogue to match the latest text.
Here’s a peek at that command guide! ↓
The engineer’s kindness made my eyes blur
With commands pre-registered to call images, I nervously started entering them into the Naninovel script.
I typed in the first line: @back Fire
…and then!
It looks so hot!
The fire background appeared! And the text displayed exactly as I entered it.
Working with the command guide, I slowly began to understand:
“@back shows a background.”
“@char displays character illustrations.”
“If I want to hide something, I basically use @hide.”
What initially looked like a jumble of English words now made sense line by line.
…Hey, wait a second—this is actually kind of fun.
Doing engineer-like things feels kind of cool.
Wow, how simple I am.
Once I made peace with Naninovel, implementing new scenes became much smoother. I learned how to register custom commands in Unity, and swapping illustrations or adding background music and sound effects quickly became second nature.
I could even place props, icons, or effects exactly where I wanted them, and change text colors with ease.
But humans are creatures of ambition.
Just having characters talk makes the ADV part a little plain. To make it fun for players, I felt we needed more creative touches.
The engineer pointed me to the official Naninovel guide, and I dove into it headfirst. Reading it for the first time made me excited: “Wow, you can do that too?!”
At the same time, though, information outside the official guide was sparse. When commands didn’t work as expected, online searches often led nowhere.
Sometimes, I even relied on ChatGPT. Most of the time it gave me solid solutions, but occasionally it made up total nonsense, leaving me thinking, “I trusted you… 😭” While frustrating, it was still a huge help.
As I became more comfortable with Naninovel, I was able to make the ADV scenes increasingly expressive. What started with simply displaying backgrounds, characters, and dialogue gradually evolved into something much more dynamic. Here are a few of my favorite scenes from Episode 0 ✨
There's a scene featuring Fufuka's mother, who never seems to stop talking. The overlapping speech bubbles help convey her rapid-fire way of speaking.
Fufuka calls the counselor a “liar.” The sudden zoom on her face emphasizes the impact of the line and catches the player off guard.
In the last flashback scene, we applied a desaturated filter to the entire screen and distorted the background while zooming in on Fufuka. Together, these effects create the unsettling feeling that the player's perception is beginning to warp.
What did you think? ☺️
By tailoring the presentation to each scene, we can make the ADV sections much more engaging. We used similar techniques throughout the game, so when you play the full version, see how many you can spot!
Next time, we’ll dive into the “Illustrations Edition”! One thing you might not know is that nearly all of the illustrations in PPGA were created in-house. Even the character designs for Rio and Fufuka were developed internally from scratch.
You might even get a peek at rare Fufuka moments and the behind-the-scenes story of how the characters were born. Follow us so you don’t miss it! 🦀
Thank you for reading all the way to the end!
See you in the next dev diary 🙌