Hey all. I have a project that has been stirring in the back corners of my mind. After a long debate, and the culmination of what could be a decent storyline, I wanted to gain feedback on how plausible, and successful, my idea would be.

My project, in general, will be a combination of an e-book and a visual novel.

I want the game itself to be read as a book, but contain artwork in the background.

It sounds like a picture book, but I want it to be more than that.

I want the background to change depending on the section of the book, and what is going on.

I want the background to move during a particular section, or written description.

I would like for their to be small mini-games (that progress along with the story).

For example, in my story, the main character attends a festival that happens annually. During this portion of the story (when the character attends the festival), I would like for there to be a section in this electronic book of sorts for the player to play games, and encounter festival scenes that the main character would be experiencing at the time.

I don't want any of the bubbles, or dialogue boxes that you find in visual novels, but I want the visual aspect to be there.

I guess my question is, does anyone know of something like this being done (I feel as though nothing is ever TRULY original)? Would this be do-able? Would moving backgrounds be too distracting? Would elaborative artwork to back up written text be a little bit too much for a reader?

My goal would be to make it available for Kindles, since those are touch screen, but I realize that kindles only allow you to ... well... read, and not do all this crap I'm talking about. But my goal would be for this type of book to end up on a device like the Kindle.

Once I get the story finished, I want to begin implementing this project. Honestly, aside from some proof readers, the only other people needed would be an artist and a programmer.

Any comments would be great. I truly want this idea to become a reality, and feedback from others would benefit me greatly.

Moving backgrounds would be not just distracting but nauseating when trying to read. As far as multimedia fiction, I'm not sure that what you're describing is different from a visual novel. Some of them don't use text bubbles or whatever - they just have an image on the top and text on the bottom. The top image can be still and non-interactive, or it can be a non-interactive animation, or it can be interactive like a minigame. The other examples I've seen are more like comics - things like Homestuck, which normally displays one comic panel at a time, but sometimes has animations or minigames. Also DeviantArt has just launched a thing for partially-animated graphic novels and visual novels. I'm not sure what it would support in the way of minigames though.

The more I think about it, the more I tend to lean towards simply writing a book. I think that may end up being what happens.

I'm not sure how widespread this sort of thing is, but last fall I bought a copy of "The Hobbit" from the Google bookstore on my tablet. I didn't realize it right away, but I had actually purchased a special ebook edition or some such thing.

Anyway, long story short, it was primarily just the book that I read as normal, but at certain places there would be stuff in the text I could "click" (touch) and get some variety of media that accompanied the story. Primarily it was audio files of people singing the songs that were presented in text. Additionally there were some appendix style maps to give a better idea of where the characters were in relation to the rest of the world. I thought it was neat in that it was presented in an unobtrusive way and if I didn't want to bother with any of it, I didn't have to. On the other hand, I did rather enjoy the maps (I just like maps in general, lol).

So, should you wind up with a novel at some point, I would look into doing stuff like that with it.

:)