In the interest of creating a comic book, and/or a visual novel with a comic-book vibe, I want to programmatically create speech bubbles.
On the one hand, this might just be laziness. Why don’t I just hand-draw every single bubble around every single bit of text, like an artist? I feel like that question answers itself, but let’s give another one, which is that it’s easier to produce more stuff if it’s easier to, well, produce that stuff! Labor-saving tools also enable me to easily re-edit my dialogue without laboriously redrawing it all.
The downsides are obvious: this doesn’t let me incorporate the bubbles as easily into the rest of the artwork. For a professional comic book, this might be a serious consideration. But for something like a VN, or a cheap indie comic to get me started, I’m okay.
So what goes into this process?