CrowdSourcing

In making this website and exploring the concept of web2.0 in general, I've inevitably come across crowdsourcing, and it's very relevant to visual novels.

The whole concept behind crowdsourcing is the idea of efficiency. A true crowdsource platform would enable employers, and in this case, visual novel writers, to find the help they need without going through troublesome old methods. Here's an example, a typical VN team used to have a writer and an artist. After getting a script, the team would either draw images or go shoot some photographs. But let's say what if the photographs needed were some of Tokyo, some of Berlin, some of insides of luxury condos, but the dev team lives in a shack in Vancouver. It's inefficient and expensive for those people to get access to those areas that other people can easily get access to for free. In cases like this, there absolutely needs to be a better way. The answer is crowdsourcing. Put the needs on the website, and ask for other people to help you.

The platform (hypothetical) is there to help writers and artists connect, reward those people that have helped you, and create a reputation system to allow those with the highest quality overall rise to the top.

Let's give a more typical example. Let's say I am a writer (who's not an artist) who wrote this long VN that requires 1000 sprites. The old way would involve getting a trusted artist friend to help you draw those sprites. What if you don't have such a trusted friend, then would your completely genius VN go to complete waste? Now that we have the Internet, you can post on message boards about getting artists. The artists that come may be of varying quality, they don't really know you, and here is the biggest problem, they may leave at any time. It's also hard to hire another artist when you already have an artist, it creates conflicts. Managing artists is a huge job inofitself. It's hard, it takes tremendous time, it's time better spent doing actual writing. Sometimes internet strangers can come together in teams to produce a great thing, but it's difficult, and messy, and prone to failure.

There is a better model, the one used by tlwiki, by open source communities, one that doesn't involve teams. Rather than say, I need to build a team with these people, you say, I need to build a VN, and these are the things that need to be done. I need a 50 drawings of a blond girl in these poses, she needs to have so and so attributes, here is my real life model or anime character as model, I also want it in this style. In this scenario, artists would contribute simply contribute sprites to the VN without worrying about being in or out of some elite group. The writer would decide which ones are of sufficient quality, and pretty soon the task list would be complete, without any team management at all.

Here's a hypothetical for how compensation might work. A sold VN might typically go half to the writer and half to the artists. The (hypothetical) platform would calculate the percentage of images contributed to the final VN from each artist. Then that percentage would be multiplied to the half of the revenue allotted to the artists, and the artists would be paid by that amount. If the writer wants to compete for higher quality images, s/he might raise the percentage allotted to artists. It should also be possible to assigned different values to different images, ie CGs are three times higher than sprites and photographs only one third as valuable as sprites.

(Of course none of this applies to free VNs, people will get only credit and no money.)

Using this method, the VN artists would be able to choose and draw for only characters s/he is interested in / are good at, be able to work on multiple VNs without investing too much into one and having it fail and having his/her work all be worthless, be able to draw as much or as little he or she wishes without any schedule or deadline, and have clear and tangible rewards without inside bickering.

There will also be rules regarding the clarity of writer's spec writing, as in, it must be very clear to minimize miscommunication. The writer must also have the VN 60% outlined and at least 15% written to use the platform (only real projects allowed, no wastes of time).

My interest in this is to help improve the quality of visual novels overall. I know many talented writers who do not have access to artists… They hang out in totally separate communities. By connecting writers to artistic talent (this might also work for things like sound effects or BG music) .


Comments are welcomed of course on this idea. I really want to know how many people would be interested in something like this.