So I’ve been working on a bit of a side project lately to take my mind off of the stress from school and do something useful with my computer science skills. First I was just gonna make a messenger-like game, but then I started using Mystic Messenger assets for the profile pictures and stuff since I have a ton of those on hand, and then it started looking like Mystic Messenger so I was like “what if I just made it look a lot like Mystic Messenger” and now here we are ;)

In summary: while it still requires some tweaking and fine-tuning, I’ve basically created a program that will generate entire chatrooms for me and animate them. Personally I’m probably going to use this for fics because wow you have NO IDEA how long it takes to Photoshop them individually but now I can just type in the text and tweak them on the fly aaa it’s gonna be great.

If you’re curious what stuff it does specifically, I’ve put more information on the program and what it does under the cut!



Some stuff the program does:

Every character has the right speech bubble colour/style/etc, and it resizes bubbles according to how large the text is etc



Also includes the “glowing” bubbles that resize themselves as well



Currently includes every character that is in the chatroom both in Casual/Deep Story as well as Another Story (wink-wink)

Special text tags for the different fonts/styles

A few select special speech bubbles (I have to do each individually so I’m doing them on an as-needed basis) (Like Yoosung’s “Why?!” bubble in the gifset)

Characters can post photos (so can the MC, technically, though she never does so in-game)

This includes gifs! That animate!





And you can play sound effects for them and play music in the background!



Currently you can’t click the photos to make them bigger though

Heart icons! That animate!

99% of the stuff isn’t hard-coded in, so I can change stuff like profile photos, the main character’s name (or anyone’s name/create new characters if I wanted)

The program prompts you at the beginning to enter a name for the MC

I can do the screen shake effect too

Can add replies to questions and branches based on the answers

Timing for the speech bubbles is auto-generated based on the length of the text, but you can add a modifier if you want a bubble to go faster than normal (e.g. Seven’s “It /exists /for sure” is modified to display faster than normal)

…And probably a lot more stuff that I’m forgetting, but you get the idea ^^

I coded this in Ren’Py, a free VN-making program, though I had to do some heavy modifications and a lot of coding on my own in Python to get it to look like this. On the bright side, Ren’Py has a ton of stuff built in that would make it a piece of cake to make your own Visual Novel sections if you so desired, even though I haven’t touched that here.

As of now, I won’t be making this available publicly like my Photoshop template, since if other people are going to use it I’d definitely need to clean it up more/make it more readable by others, and I’d want to do a lot more bug testing and probably add more features. It’s tentatively possible that I might make a GitHub of it in the somewhat distant future. For now, I’ll be probably using this to supplement fanfics ;) Let me know what you think, though! ♥