tymmur

Sure. Most VNs are about ending up with a pretty bird with some nice tits. Hatoful just takes it to the next level

I think the list pretty much covers all the parts needed to make a VN. However it miss out on one important issue: planning. If you write a VN, you need to plan a storyline, design character personalities etc, just like when writing a book or a movie. I wrote more about how to do this already in another thread, where I also writes about script design from a programming point of view. It's more like a howto guide and a proposal for one approach to solve the issue, but it should give an idea of the kind of work, which this step requires.

Oh heh, as a cross platform programmer, I was thinking about what I usually refer to as platform and "all 3 platforms" fits "windows, mac and linux" well If you want an early release, use Itch.io as it's a place where people know they can get work in progress games. Once you consider it done, release it in as many shops as possible at once. You want the the hype from being new and exposed everywhere at once. Personally I don't think early releases, or public beta is well suited for VNs as it spoils the storyline for the final release, but it is an approach to get an income before being done if you absolutely have to get one.

Euro in Quebec? I seriously can't see Eromanga sensei as any worse than quite a lot of anime, which it seems perfectly fine to like. It most certainly isn't a title, which comes to mind if I'm asked to name a bad anime.

A number of people are willing to skip a VN if it contains poor English. When writing in public, particularly when it's about the VN, people will read your writing as the level of English in the VN. Because of this, I will recommend you review what you have written prior to actually posting. I know I'm nitpicking (particularly the last one), but if you want to sell as best as possible, don't overlook this issue. I wouldn't call your English skills poor and most of the issues are in the realm of typos, but it's still the first impression and a bad one if you want to convince people to pay for a VN. Don't sell untested ports, but I see no reason why you shouldn't sell for as many platforms as possible if you are able to test them prior to release. You care about sales and less about which platform people use. Particularly mac and linux ports seems to be just adding executable files (for ren'py), in which case it's a very cost efficient way to include non-windows users as your target customers.

Creative corner is about your own creations while VN Talk is about VNs made by other people (read you have no involvement at all), at least that's how I understand it. Marketing is not a clear match for the description in any of of those, but since it's marketing of your creation, it would likely fit best in Creative corner.

Typos. Ruining your math skill reputation since 3018

It could be worse. I realized I forgot to make an introduction after being active for 2.5 years Musumaker Majo Koi Nikki As for VNs, where the English translation have actually been released, the first, which comes to mind is Kamidori and then the Rance series. Sexy Demon Transformation is hilarious and fun to read despite being a nukige.

"Filthy gaijin", "weird type", "interest in VN creation, but don't know enough to do it without help". Seems like a fairly common description of Fuwa users. Welcome mr new guy, who fits right in here. You have come to the right place if your goal is to learn about how to create your own visual novel. A number of people know quite a bit about it and combined we most likely know everything you need to know. You didn't ask for anything specific, but I will still point to a thread, which would be a good start.

Hello and welcome. It's always nice to see new members with a keen interest in VNs. You did ok and you could have done worse. For instance like I did and... didn't really introduce myself until my account was 3.5 years old (and then I even missed doing it on the First of April because the forum was.... different that day)

Wow a mix of my three favorite topics, pirate themed adventures, comedy and women. Time to go into pirate mode and download this ASAP... ehh I mean whistles Look behind you. There is a three legged monkey. That's the second biggest monkey I have ever seen. Runs off

I saw your request the first time, but I still don't know the answer Try asking here instead.

I agree and disagree with you on that one. I think it would be more correct to say that the features, which makes a great anime (storyline, characters etc) is needed regardless of sexual contents or references. The problem is when they add sexual contents to compensate for shortcomings in other areas, which is sadly not uncommon.

Ehhh.... when people say they want to eat out a heroine, they don't actually mean they want to consume her like she is food, even if she might be sugar sweet.

I meant it as relative to the current market share. Surely they will never be big compared to AAA titles. I guess growth potential would be a better term. I stopped using the word liberal because there are parties in multiple countries all claiming to be liberal. It would be ok if they were always the most liberal party, but that's not the case. Feminist wanting to ban VNs likely view themselves as liberal. Just look at the US politics. It's the liberals who wants regulations and centralized power while the conservatives are the ones who are pro free speech, making the republican party more liberal than the democratic party (the democratic party supporters are often called liberals). This many uses of the word liberal makes the word useless because the writer and the reader might not agree on the meaning. I agree with your statement though as I assume you refer to liberal in the dictionary sense as in people are free to do as they like and nobody should be restricted by DRM. The linux kind of liberal ideology. People who aim for DRM free software for ideological reasons are most likely also the kind of people who just ignores software they don't like instead of flaming it for no apparent reason. In other words this move should make GOG more appealing to people feeling suppressed by Steam DRM.

Sometimes companies get in on niche markets because being small they are easier to conquer/dominate. What they hope is that the market will grow while they maintain their market shares and eventually it will pay off when they maintain their share in a big market. Apple did that with iTuneStore and maintained their share of 84% of online sales once it got big. However for every success story in this regard, there are plenty of investments in markets, which never catch on. Maybe GOG predicts VNs will become big, or at least it could happen and if it doesn't, they will not get stuck with a huge bill. Getting on GOG is likely the best shot VNs have at becoming big, meaning GOG is more like trying to create the market than just hoping that it will appear by itself. It's also worth mentioning that when GOG started, people were like "that will never work. Way too few people are interested in outdated games, which people have already downloaded for free, They won't last long". They took a chance of something and it went much better than predicted. Maybe they think they can repeat that with VNs, or at least it's worth the risk, which seems to be close to non-existing. Maybe it's their goal and maybe not. Either way it is the outcome. I think that message was created when they made the surprise move of accepting Wasteland 2. However this time is indeed different because to my knowledge it's the first time they actively accepted something relatively new, which Steam rejected. It certainly doesn't hurt to repeat the message that it's the right place for indie developers to start out if they have something worth adding. Steam seems to only think of profit and control. GOG on the other hand seems to be ruled by ideology as well. The whole concept they started out with is more ideology than regular business. Their attitude towards DRM is ideology, though it is also marketing towards customers with the same ideology. It's entirely possible the answer to "why now?" is ideology. Some sort of feeling sorry for the VN community for being screwed big time. The real answer to why and why now is likely a combination of everything mentioned and possibly some other factors as well.

I didn't say it as a bad thing. It's more like an objective observation. I have nothing against people or companies profiting as long as it's without exploitation of people and I see no signs of exploitation here. I'm quite sure GOG didn't plan this. Just think about what we know. Some VN companies have tried to get GOG to sell VNs. This will most likely have provided GOG with contact info like direct phone numbers to CEOs. GOG will also most likely have playtested the VNs themselves during past negotiations, hence having a pretty good idea what it's all about. Now Valve messed up and the English VN market is free for the taking. Odds are that whoever comes first will get the majority of the market, possibly even close to monopoly. In other words other companies had provided GOG with the means to add VNs to the store in a matter of days and they might have been in that situation for quite a while. Valve then basically said "act now" and they did. Seems like it's the company version of getting the winning Lotto numbers. If GOG planned this, it would mean they somehow managed to make Valve act like idiots, hence some sort of corruption. I really don't think that's the case because I can't really see GOG acting like that and even if they did, I don't see how they could do it. Besides Valve have on multiple occasions revealed that they are able to make stupid decisions without external help. GOG was just at the right place at the right time and they knew how to make the best of it, but they did not have control of the reason why it was the right time or even if the right time would ever turn up.

Looks like the VN haters already figured out VNs ended up on GOG and made a review. However the main story here is how many found it helpful. It shows it's just a few people. Loud, but not many. Just to show much loud this person is, she (or he?) reviewed every single VN and is the only one to provide negative reviews. It says a lot about Steam if they acted based on people like that.

That's why I said GOG. Entering an established market is tricky. You need to spend time and money on marketing and hoping to get some awareness and attention in order to get a even a tiny fraction of the market. Right now the VN community is flaming Steam and people talk about a doomed VN future (or risk of it). GOG shows up and get hero status by ensuring VNs can still be purchased in the future. This spreads as fast as the Steam bashing and threads like this one ensures everybody knows that GOG has started selling and what has GOG done in regard of marketing for this? One twitter post and one post on their forum. Simply put the timing appears to have allowed them to conquer a market overnight without marketing expenses. This is why I said GOG would start to sell VN now despite never having made that claim before. Timing is everything.

I forgot they are selling that one too. Yeah it's pretty explicit. Just do a google image search and you will get explicit images way too 18+ like for youtube. Rather than a comedy game, it's a management game with the sole purpose of earning as much as possible, be it porn, stripping, blackmail you name it. It's significantly more explicit than the Larry games and approaches 18+ VN kind of explicit. However I'm not sure you see the actual point of penetration, but otherwise it leaves little to the imagination. One major difference is that unlike VNs, what you see is what you get. There is no text based description of the act. Most likely GOG picked the all age approach purely based on business. All age versions will not require the costs of verifying the age of the customer and there is no risk of a fine for failing to verify. They don't care about 3rd party patches because they can't be made responsible for them. It's also better for the customer this way. You don't have to verify your age to GOG. People attracted to the no DRM tend to be the same people who are attracted to not having to send personal information. You don't have to attend linux conventions to think like that.

I have had accounts in both places for quite a while. I generally prefer GOG if a game is available in both for the same price. Steam DRM is an issue and steam workshop can be used to remove mods, which then deletes it from the HD of everybody who downloaded it through steam workshop. That's not a good setup and it's getting worse over time. They don't want 18+ titles . They have Leisure Suit Larry (+love for sail and that campus game), which are all about getting laid. There are boobs, nudity and sex references everywhere (genitals are usually Easter eggs), not to mention on screen sexual activity, though with convenient censoring of the actual act. It's likely something related to legal issues in verifying that the customer is 18 more than it's an issue about how they feel about it. Them being open about external patches fits their DRM free approach. You keep mentioning this, but is it such a big issue? I have regional pricing with GOG, but not Steam, but I can use both without issues. You can look up the exchange rate online if you aren't sure and usually you just have to multiply with a specific number to get something, which is roughly correct.

You missed the MG blog, which states I called GOG as the new outlet way back on page 4, but that was quickly shut down as GOG will not have anything to do with VNs.....

Nice camouflage strategy. Look like everybody else and we can't figure out who is the new guy. I would like to welcome you, but I already lost you in the crowd

Obviously the golden age is when a major event happens and I would say it's when the Musumaker translation patch is released. It started in 2008 and is still ongoing. The tale of the translation project itself has turned into an epic tale of its own. My personal involvement has nothing to do with this statement

Whenever I read something like this, I always wonder about one major issue, which is unavoidable when investigating issues like this: cause and effect. Will reading make you smarter or are smart people more likely to read? New Zealand has tested a bunch of people for decades and now they can say the more TV a 10 year old child watches, the lower the grades.... or was it IQ... Either way the question is if the brain is damaged by TV or if it is because children, who are already bright have too much going on in their heads to accept passive entertainment for a long time. Another one is breast feeding (take that prude Americans). Substitute in a bottle is less perfect for brain development and the child will lose 3 IQ points on average as grown up if fed by bottle. Is it the food or is it because stupid parents are less likely to breastfeed, meaning children who are breastfed will statistically have genes for higher IQ? Answering such questions is not an easy task because how to tell those two apart and how can we be sure it's not a combined effect of both? The same is an issue in the first article. The second article seems to have the same issue with the Japanese study while the Pompeii counters this issue better by having a before and after test, which should help to filter out the differences between people and get more precise readings of the effect of the book reading. As such, that specific study is more trustworthy than the other studies in regard to the effect. I would say the premise for the studies are severely simplified and you can't say any TV show vs any book. For instance you will likely get completely different effect from a documentary than you will get for slapstick comedy. Likewise there are good books and then there are horrible books. I was forced to read one of the latter in school and the only thing I remember from it was the story was really boring and the author had spelling mistakes, which were not fixed prior to printing. I don't think there is any positive effect from reading such a book. Sounds to me like the issue here has less to do with TV vs book and more to do with parents using the TV as babysitter rather than spending time reading a book for the child. As for VNs vs amine. I would say it's likely that VNs are better for your brain than anime. Anime will likely have the same effect as TV shows. Generally speaking, anime is fast paced, has a tendency to be shallow and in any way acts like sitcoms. There are exceptions, but generally speaking they aren't brain challenging. If it is say a sengoku era anime and you pause whenever there is a name and try to remember what the real person did, then you become active and push/train your brain and as such train your memory. VNs on the other hand can be beneficial, but they don't have to be. It depends on how it's written and what goes on. If it's a machine translated nukige, then good luck trying to convince yourself you will benefit from it. If it is a well written story where you try to keep track of past events in order to understand what is going on and perhaps see if you can predict anything, then you train your brain and you could benefit from it. Another factor, which should not be overlooked is the reader. If you read a masterpiece and speedrun through it without digging into the story, pausing to recollect the scenes etc, then you will not get the benefits other people might get from reading the very same title. This is yet another layer, which makes the question even harder to answer. Your language skills comes into play as well. If you have language shortcomings and miss out on the details, you will not benefit as much if at all from having a well written VN. You might benefit from the training of a foreign language though.