Leaderboard

Good evening. We've put our upcoming visual novel, Where The Stars Brought Us, demo into open beta. This will be rolling out to production at the end of the month. We'd love to get your feedback. This VN will be full voices, however; the demo will not be. The game is currently in English, Japanese, and Traditional Chinese(Taiwanese). We hope you enjoy. Story: “Where The Stars Brought Us” is a visual novel game about a boy, Ryo Yung, who is from Seoul, South Korea. He and his family (mother, father, and sister) take what was meant to be a week-long trip to Tokyo, Japan. This begins Ryo’s many adventures. Though he does not embark on these adventures alone; Mae, a non-human girl with healing powers whom he met by chance in the Narusawa Ice Caves, joins him on his journey. This very journey begins with Ryo searching for the aforementioned ice caves, where he meets Mae along with another odd being. In that time, Ryo’s sister, Nam, has gone missing. Mae uses this opportunity to strike up a deal: she will help Ryo find Nam, if Ryo helps her in return. Ryo agrees, and the events of the game are set in motion. iOS https://testflight.apple.com/join/Lc5GjYRy Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.EbonSoft.WhereTheStarsBroughtUs2D (Android link) https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.EbonSoft.WhereTheStarsBroughtUs2D (Web link) Windows http://www.mediafire.com/file/k8oc07fxn7v54st/WTSBU_Windows_v0.29.7z/file Mac http://www.mediafire.com/file/ktfjtifhzzdki3j/WTSBU_Mac_v0.29.app.7z/file

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html You can find info about all of them under this link. Honestly, things are advancing at a very good pace and I heard rumours that in the EU the vaccine might start appearing around late December/early January. Of course, it will be a while before it reaches wide availability – it will be used for medical personnel and high-risk groups first. And if that's indeed how things will go in the EU, India won't be far behind with its massive pharma industry. Still, this means there might be many, many months before you'll have the opportunity to get the vaccine yourself. Stay safe everyone!

Yes I know about this one and I can try this one.

Quite a few Western developers will have android versions of their games available, because if they work with either Ren'Py or Unity game engines it's really easy to port to Android. They might not be on the Play Store though, as google can be even more prudish than Steam was in the past, banning people for random reasons (like a little bit of cleavage in cover art). So you might need to find apk files on Itch.io or developer's sites, for manual install... I'm not sure it will be very helpful, but you can browse android releases of VNs available in English here. You'll find a lot of small, freeware games, a lot of mobile cash-grabs and very few mainstream titles among them – major visual novel publishers didn't have much success bringing their catalogues to Android yet, which I like 100% put on their marketing ineptitude.

A while back there was a serious effort to get more VNs to work on Android. Way back in 2013 actually, I would recommend reading this thread: Android Visual Novel [Let's play visual novel on the go!]. However a more up to date thread from 2018 goes over it a bit, and most people in that thread don't seem to recommend it. If on the off chance you can read Japanese, there are some high profile VNs you can get on the Play Store. I'm pretty sure KEY has some of its VNs on it. They may be in English, but I'm pretty sure they are Japanese only for now, might be worth at least checking to confirm for sure. I think Katawa Shoujo might also have a port for Android. Which is a VN I would highly recommend.

I think that one of the problems with VNs is that so many of the heavily recommended VNs are very long. So many of the ones that are really often recommended and very highly rated are 50-100 hour titles and I just don't think that getting into something where those types of titles are seen as an introduction is easy. Another thing is how so many in the community tries highlight VNs as some sort of high art superior to every other medium and completely disregard anything part of the VN market that doesn't adhere to what they consider good, like calling moege and nukige trash and trying to make it out to be as if VNs would be way more amazing and mainstream had it not been for those damn genres. I personally think that one of the ways to get people into VNs would be to actually get people into things like moege or nukige as I think there are a lot of people who would want harem anime and manga to actually have conclusive endings and based on the amount of 18+ doujins of popular characters there is a demand for ero content with characters you actually get emotionally attatched to during a story. I think trying to highlight VNs as having good stories won't really do much as every medium has good stories to offer, I think instead it is important to highlight the things which makes VNs special and the types of content you either won't find in other mediums or you won't find done as well. Some I would highlight is integration of porn in the story, harem stories with branching routes and romantic development as well as mystery which can be enhanced by route and choice systems. Take nekopara for instance, in the realm of moege it was well done but nothing special, but it managed to go sort of mainstream and there seems to be quite a large base of people who are fans of it outside of the VN communities. I think some of this love people have for it comes from how it has done stuff they haven't seen before as they haven't gotten into VNs.

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?

Congratulation on the successful Kickstarter, and it's just too bad that it barely almost reach sixth stretch goal with ~37,660,000 yen funded (Sixth stretch goal is at 39,600,000 yen funded). But reached five stretch goal there is still a sizeable feat compared to Frontier when it only manage to reach three stretch goal with ~23,600,000 yen funded, so overall I'm content with it. I look forward to the eventual release on Hypno, so good luck.

Jokes on you, I actually fantasized about this. So, I would just take over the world after looking into the mirror and pinching myself to see if I am not dreaming. Since this is an isekai and therefore, I am the MC. My plot armor must be thicker than fucking lead.