So it's a flash hosted Visual Novel...
Even though I'm a fan of visual novels, I'm not a fan of the sound affect, animation, and music provided with them. The only reason why I would read them over another medium is because that story is only in the visual novel format. If there isn't voice acting, I typically mute it all and just read quickly.
As far as hosting it online, it could be cool, but like you've said, it can be limiting, and depending on your story it might not be the best medium to put it in.
It seems like I may be missing something in terms of knowledge of "Visual Novels." Apparently there is a whole segment of works along these lines.
I'd just thought of the work I linked to as a funky sort of on-line Graphic Novel. Maybe I need to get out more and broaden my horizons.
As far as putting things up on-line, that is easiest way for me to publish stuff, so that is probably the way I'll go. However, it seems as if the sound FX are not all that popular, so I'll probably avoid that angle in my own work. I still like some of the things they were able to do with their work, but I'll be considering it more before moving forward.
Yup, not a fan of sound -- unless the default is OFF and I have the option to switch it on/turn it up if and when I wish.
Some use flash comics in a subtle way that adds to the reading experience... notably
Echo Callaway and the Mists of Pelleon and, mentioned elsewhere,
Martin Koala.
-Derek
Those are both interesting examples. I really like the
Echo Callaway and the Mists of Pelleon. What they did there seems even closer to what I'd like to achieve than the Morphe comic---so thanks for sharing that.
You probably don't need to do this in flash - you could do it in HTML5. I've been talking about this for EPUBs with my eproduction colleagues. Flash feels like it's on the way out.
I think it'll be very Marmitey - some people will like it, others will hate it.
As far as the Flash VS HTML5 thing, you are no doubt correct.
Unfortunately, I haven't really kept up on what has been going on recently along those lines (to give you an indication of how out of date I am, my version of Flash was released while Clinton was still in office). At that time, it was hard to do some of that stuff on a web-page without resorting to something like Flash, but things are probably different now.