Cincinnati entrepreneur Sonya Fung discovered that she could turn her passion of visual novels into a community, one that enriches creators and makes the art more accessible to others. The result? CloudNovel, an engine where users can create visual novels and make their creations available to viewers.
CloudNovel was the result of a perfect storm of Fung's passions, which were fostered in big ways when she began studying graphic design at her hometown college, Boston University, to become an animator.
Once there, however, she discovered that she also loved computer science — and went on to eventually get her Bachelor’s degree in business administration and management in 2015. It wasn't long after that she moved Cincinnati with her mom (who was relocating for a job at General Electric) and found herself pursuing a career in web development, a job she still works during the day while CloudNovel is her evenings-and-weekends side hustle.
With all this combined experience — animation, tech — it's easy to see why Fung is drawn to visual novels; as she mentioned, they are the perfect combination of everything she loves. After all, visual novels are a type of game that use two-dimensional animation and a story in a dialog box that gives players the ability to make choices that will affect how the story unfolds.
“CloudNovel is for writers, artists and musicians."
“Visual novels are their own medium of art,” Fung said. “They are a combination of mixed media entertainment. That’s what I love about it, because it’s a mix of a video game, story and an art form.”
And she's long had experienced reading and writing her own visual novels. In 2012, she published "Café Rouge," which eventually went viral with more than 1.6 million hits. The success of "Café Rouge" led Fung to realize that there were plenty of others out there who also wanted to make their own stories, but didn’t want to learn how to code. So, she got to work creating a visual novel maker that didn’t require users to know any of the technical elements.
The first version of her visual novel maker, Joilly, came out in 2015, using Flash as a dependent. However, she switched to HTML 5 as the dependent and Joilly became CloudNovel.
This visual novel maker takes care of everything for creators, who just need to have their images ready and start importing files to create a visual novel. Users can also use the format to create their own mini games.
“CloudNovel is for writers, artists and musicians,” Fung said. “So, anyone that wants to make a game but doesn’t want to learn coding can start making it right away.”
Fung holds weekly art and writing contents to stimulate the creativity of the users. Other features on CloudNovel include the ability to upload character designs for other users to buy; Cloud Avatar, a character dress-up game maker, and profile pages that showcase creator’s portfolios.
Content uploaded to CloudNovel can be viewed online by website visitors or downloaded for offline viewing for 1,000 Cloud Points, which cost $2.50. In addition to Cloud Point purchases, CloudNovel also makes revenue through the placement of Google AdWords and monthly membership subscriptions.
While a few other online visual novel makers exist, CloudNovel is unique among them because it is the only visual novel maker that is hosted on the cloud. Other visual novel makers solely allow users to create content. In order to keep their content online, creators still need to host their own website. However, CloudNovel takes care of hosting for creators, so all they need to worry about is creating and uploading content.
“The goal of CloudNovel is to create a community of artists, writers and musicians who can come together with game developers,” Fung said. “I’m trying to spread awareness of visual novels because it is its own unique medium of storytelling. Teachers, bloggers, writers and many others can find use and entertainment in them.”
CloudNovel began with just a few users, but the number of users grew as Fung improved the engine and added additional features she thought would be useful to creators. There are currently 50,000 content creators who use CloudNovel and 300,00 users who interact with the content, which includes over 2,000 games.
In addition to the constant improvement of the engine and adding of features, Fung also credits influential YouTubers for the growth of CloudNovel. YouTube celebrities such as Mairusu have made gameplay videos of CloudNovel games that attract more people to the website.
New features that Fung said she plans to add to CloudNovel this year include giving creators the ability to add video files into their visual novels and create in-story dress-up games, in which users can change the appearance and clothing of a main character; separating visual novels that are appropriate for all ages from those that are more suited for mature audiences, and adding a digital goods shop where artists, writers and musicians can sell their work for Cloud Points — which she plans to make exchangeable for cryptocurrency.
Fung hasn't been alone in her development of CloudNovel. In fact, over the past year and a half, Fung has worked with Hamilton Labs. It's new, North College Hill-based business incubator, and it's provided participants like Fung resources to build a revenue plan and given her access to mentors.
And, of course, community. Fung said she loves talking about the progress of CloudNovel at meetings and continuing to build her business with the incubator's help.
