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Good evening everyone. It's a pleasure to be part to the community. I've played a few visual novels over the past few years before deciding to start a business in developing them. I plan on having more of a presence among the boards as I get more time during the development and QA process. With that being said, I'd love to get input from individuals within the community about our Kickstarter and the visual novel, Where The Stars Brought Us, that my development team currently has in Alpha Testing for iOS, Mac, Linux, and Windows. Once again, I look forward to interacting with you all more and helping the American Visual Novel community grow. WTSBU Website https://wherethestarsbroughtus.ebon-soft.com/

It is done. The translation is officially 100% done Progress will now move on to post-translation, where there's TLC and QC to be done. I'm hoping to finish everything else and release the patch by end 2020 (unlikely, but hey, you never know). If not, then at least get the TLC done by end 2020. So do refer to the TLC tab of the sheet for progress on the TLC. I will save my translation remarks for after the patch is fully released. For now though, rejoice that the translation is done! Yay!

I personally think that VNs right now are in a sense stuck in a cursed loop. VNs as a medium just really lack variety and as a result appeal to a small number of people. Even most all-ages titles follow the same story structure: even in non-adult titles a male protagonist always has to be surrounded by a lot of female love interests; it almost always has to take place in high-school; even in plot-focused stories there are a lot of slice-of-life scenes, which aren't even well written, and mostly just serve as a way to stall the story for some time rather than developing the characters; finally, the personalities of the protagonist, the heroines and even the side characters typically just follow certain well-known archetypes. So, if you just happen not to enjoy some of these titles and just want to find something more unique, you're much better off watching some anime or reading a manga. Otome games are a bit different, but, from my limited experience with them, they seem to have a bag of different, though slightly similar, problems. There are indeed some unique and experimental VNs that do things differently, but most of these are doujin titles and don't get that much exposure. Most of them aren't even that good, since good authors are likely to join some company at some point and start making a lot more standard VNs, or leave the medium altogether. Also, we, the current VN fans, enjoy these tropes to at lest to some extend, and a lot of us actually prefer them. As a result, in a short run it's not a very good strategy for companies to experiment with story structures, since they don't know if the fans would like these changes, and they just stick to the strategy that worked thus far. And VNs are also expensive to make, so they don't allow for much flexibility. Nowadays, manga and light novel authors don't even have to make any initial investment at all, since they just can start posting their stories online and see how people react to them, or even completely stick to episodic online distribution. In case of VNs, even a single financially unsuccessful product can make a whole company go bankrupt. I personally think that if VNs somehow let this loop, there's a good chance that they would start appeal to a bigger number of people. They probably wouldn't be the same people as the current VN fans. Will they ever do that? I doubt it, but I don't know. EVNs might actually lead to something interesting at some point, who knows?

The next public release of Penlight is upon us! Although to be honest, there's not much new writing to be found this month :/ I've been spending my time developing Sayori's Doll storyline, and it was very slow going. Still, the first in-game week is done now, including its first CG. It's not as much as I wanted, but what's there should serve as a decent taster for what's to come. Besides that, the Spanish localisation's been tidied up a bit and there's been another round of CGs added to various routes. The one on Hiroko's second storyline is especially good. As always, you can find this month's release in PC, Linux, Mac and Android versions, on my Patreon or itch.io pages. I've also linked the most recent flowchart guide on the public news post on Patreon. For next month I'm cautiously optimistic about having the Doll storyline written to a conclusion, so look forward to that. In the meantime I hope you enjoy this update, such as it is~ What's New New CG for Sayori's route, on the new and in-progress Doll storyline Added a new CG scene on the Villainous Devotion storyline, towards the end New CG for Hiroko's route, at the end of the "Ticklish Hands" storyline New CG for Nozomi's route, during her "Trance" storyline Sayori's Doll storyline has been scripted up to day 7 Word count is now around 223,000 Spanish localisation: Various edits and corrections to the existing script Updated the end credits with the latest backers Lots of typo corrections (did a sweep of the whole script to find them) Known Issues Changing the language on a line where an animation occurs (like screen shake) will throw up an error.

Hey there all! I will start with saying that I really treasure my time spent writing this blog and interacting with various people involved in the EVN community. You guys were awesome company in this journey and despite the obscurity of this project, I feel like it benefited me personally in many ways and maybe even helped people appreciate the value within the non-JP visual novel scene. I'm really thankful to all the people that read my blog, the devs that offered me their time and gave me their games for review – they all made these 2+ years into something special. When I started this project, there were two main things that motivated me. The first one was the frustration over dismissal of EVNs which is still common sense in the large parts of the VN fan community – belittling of the very games that made me fall in love with the visual novel formula. I wanted to create a space that is fully dedicated to discussion and promotion of EVNs as worthwhile and significant part of the genre. The second part was even more personal – my personal struggles with video game addiction and other issues, my ambition to shift my focus into a more challenging and creative activity. In many ways, I consider both my goals relative successes. While slowly, the perception of EVNs is changing and the scene evolving in interesting ways – while it shares pretty much all the suffering of other indie niches, with PC gaming in general being oversaturated and hard to navigate, I feel that it at least established itself as a significant formula that is attractive for story-oriented devs and appreciated by a significant audience. In other words, EVNs are here to stay and in time fewer and fewer people will be able to easily dismiss them as poor imitations of Japanese games. Whether my work had any impact in this regard? Apart from a bunch of people on Fuwanovel that I know I influenced in personal interactions, I honestly have no idea. I want to think there was some minor impact, but I had enough fun in the process and learned enough that I don't mind either way. I did my best and changed a few things about myself, which was the most important part for me. Of course, I'm in no way saying that I'm putting the blog on hiatus because my job here is done. The real reason is much more prosaic – I just can't keep up with it. The last month was particularly devastating in this regard, with very little time for me to either read or write. And while an obvious answer would be to just work at my own pace and publish stuff whenever I'm able to, it's not really something that would work out for me. Missing deadlines, thinking about future projects, it all became a source of stress rather than a source of fun, and I feel it would only get worse with time. While I really wanted to keep the project alive, I don't want to do so at any cost. I feel burned out. I barely read VNs for fun. I don't watch anime for a few months now. I need a change of pace and ability to rediscover my love for these hobbies. The blog, sadly, became a prime obstacle in this. So, what's going to happen now? The blog will cease to get updates, unless something special happens. I might still do game jam summaries, as those are something I massively enjoy. I might also publish something on Fuwanovel from time to time – I'm theoretically still an editor there. The one part of the project that's definitely here to stay is the Steam Curator account. The devs that sent me their games deserve to at least get a Steam review and, generally, an evaluation of their work. I will also use my Twitter to publish updates about new games listed on the Curator account. The Steam reviews themselves will likely be a bit more polished – not that much though, I don't want to jump straight into the same burnout-inducing rabbit whole. So, once more, thank you for sticking around and I hope my project gave you some amusement. And, of course, see you around – I'm not giving up on EVNs and the community around them any time soon.