Description:

Visual Novel games (VN games) aim to immerse players in stories. While the photographic technique of Depth of Field (DoF) is currently underused in VN storytelling, I believe it offers a valuable opportunity to increase player engagement. This project explores how changing DoF in game illustrations can enhance both immersion and storytelling effectiveness. To demonstrate this, I developed a VN game that uses the changing of DoF in its illustrations.

"Illustration" is not a word that can be easily defined, it is not art or graphic design, it lies in between. Illustrators use illustrations to visualize texts, stories, or other abstract contents. As an illustrator, I want to seek a way to make static illustrations express more content, I want to draw viewers into the words illustrators have created. For this purpose, I decided to combine the photography technique named Depth of Field (Dof) which is not only used in photography to provide artistic results but also can be seen in film shooting to provide information to the audience or shift the audience's attention from one object to another quickly.

DoF can be adapted to static illustrations by strategically blurring and sharpening elements within an image, illustrators can guide the viewer's attention, emphasize key details, and create a sense of immersion. Digital games are a place that uses illustrations a lot, and VN games is a genre that relies heavily on visual storytelling, matches my purpose of giving static illustrations a way to express more content, provide an ideal platform for experimenting with DoF. On the other hand, to helps players immerse in the gaming word. This project explores the potential of combining Depth of Field (DoF) techniques with static illustration in Visual Novel Games to enhance storytelling and audience engagement.

This project confirms the effectiveness of Depth of Field (DoF) in enhancing storytelling within visual novel games. By simulating layers of focus, DoF not only directs viewer attention but also deepens emotional and spatial engagement.

This research reveals opportunities for the broader application of DoF beyond visual novels, suggesting its potential to enrich visualization and interactive storytelling. Future studies could expand on these findings by testing dynamic implementations of DoF and engaging a larger, more diverse participant pool, such as changing DoF with the movement of the mouse (hover, click, etc.). Changes in music and sound could also be added to enhance the feeling of DoF's changing. Ultimately, this work highlights how blending photographic techniques with digital illustration can offer new dimensions of immersion in interactive media. Bring more dynamic and expressive force to VN games, and enrich VN games' narrative techniques. Expand VN games' artistic boundary, and help it become a more diverse media.