goldtag

  From the moment my kid said "visual novel," we have come this far. Twenty parts. Looking back, we have covered quite a distance. Not a single line of code was written. Ren'Py was never installed. And yet the most important work of this project is done. Scenario design. The work of understanding the structure of emotion and translating it into systems. What I Discovered on This Journey At the start, the goal was "making a visual novel." By the end, the goal had shifted. Making a visual novel is not technically difficult. Ren'Py handles most of the technical challenges. The difficult part is making a visual novel that truly moves the player's emotions. And for that, what you need is not technology but an understanding of emotion. Love is not a single variable but the result of conditions. A scene is not a backdrop but an amplifier of emotion. The consequences of choices arrive not immediately but later. Good choices can become tragedy. Actions and inner ...

  Throughout this project, the area where I talked most with AI was scenario design. System architecture, character settings, conflict patterns, time structure. AI was used in every step. I want to leave an honest review. What AI does well, what it cannot do, and how to use it effectively. What AI Does Well Organizing structure.  This is overwhelming. Say "I want to design an emotion system," and it immediately proposes a systematic variable structure with layer separation. Information organization that would take a person days is done in minutes. The skeleton of the three-layer emotion model came out within an hour of conversation with AI. Verifying consistency between variables.  It answers logically to questions like "If trust goes up in this event, what should happen to tension?" When variables multiply, humans start missing things; AI does not. Presenting patterns.  For requests like "Classify the types of conflict" or "Organize the patterns of e...

  Now it's time to design emotion in earnest. Having identified the limits of Affection+1, we need to build a system to replace it. I told AI: "I don't want a single affection variable. I want a variable system that represents human emotion more realistically." And this is where AI really started showing its strength. Structuring emotion — decomposing something abstract into variables and layers — is exactly the kind of work AI excels at. How Many Emotions Do We Need? That was the first question. "How many emotion variables should we have?" AI's answer was surprisingly cautious. "More isn't always better. Too many variables leads to overengineering." Then it proposed a crucial distinction: The types of emotion you express can be many. But the state values the system directly tracks must be structurally organized. What does that mean? Love, sadness, anger, arrogance, envy, jealousy, belief, trust, tension, conflict, fear, terror, admiration....