laiktail

I think the style more than anything else. I do like Jazz more than dubstep type stuff. There's probably an audience for both. Thank you both for the feedback I agree with the noisiness of the whole thing. It's a little too much all at once at parts, like you say. Although the trumpet is a voice, even when it's sung, things might still clash. I'll make a lot of adjustments based on your advice and be very conscious of it. Thanks again!!

I actually liked Speed Jazz the most, too. The other pieces weren't that bad! The speed jazz one would be the most likely one to end up on my iPod out of all of them. The comics are...interesting. Thanks for the compliments!! hmm i was listening to it at 1:08-1:10 to try and figure out what you mean by the weird transition. You're right, I think the timing's off there. The piano chords as well might not have been as clean because I pressed some extra notes. Deliberately, the drums are "pushing" with a lot of swing that's (actually deliberately) a bit off the beat. All that combined with a big jump combined to make it sound kinda weird. I'll let you know when the final OP is out!

I'm a he, not a she! LOL Hmmm I'll most likely be using my own compositions for OST (either that or maybe getting someone who's quite well known on the project). Thanks for the offer! But if you meant you'd like me to take a look, yeah sure thing!

I loved the original Klonoa games!

Critical is great! Thanks, I really appreciate your honesty. Oops about 0:00-0:01, that's purely an uploading error. I'm definitely gonna pay more attention to the quiet output, thanks for that! As for the trumpet piano war - the trumpet is actually going to be replaced by the female voice of my friend who's singing the song. So I'm really not too sure whether the clash will still exist or not. But I really like the sort of idea of less instruments rather than more as you've pointed out.

Hmmm, good point. The VN I'm making is closest to fantasy/romcom, but it's not actually fantasy adventure (since no-one really goes anywhere outside of the city they're in).

Hey all, I have a really rough uncompleted draft for an OP that I'm making. But, I'd love to know what you think of the basic sound of it and what do you think should be changed? The timing is a bit wrong for the melody (to be sung but currently is "sung" by brass), so don't worry about that. https://soundcloud.com/temporaneous/1-op-draft-no-2

Sorry for double posting, I only just now figured out what the multiquote button is used for, haha. Spot on about this difference. Regarding famous anime or manga adaptations in visual novel format, there's actually quite a few. Not necessarily famous, but you can see Oreimo or Toradora in visual novel format. IceD, on 12 Jul 2014 - 01:28 AM, said: I don't think VNs are necessarily inaccessible, considering that many VNs are primarily reading by adult male teenagers. In addition, you say that there's a lot of stuff to sacrifice if you take away some of the things that make up a Japanese VN. Sure, Western visual novels won't necessarily be visual novels as we currently know it, but I think the only thing you'd have to change is the writing. Anime-styled graphics, although considered a niche, is still quite popular even if not mainstream. Music is mostly universal except for songs (where OPs and EDs are very different). I really agree with this statement, though: "We need games, which aren't simply otaku-pandering crap like Sakura Spirit, but games which revolve around western-themed settings, while retaining the most important factors - the graphics, style, presentation and form." Probably not, to be honest. This is speaking from an otaku perspective, so for most people that answer would lean towards no, probably. However, this is EXACTLY why VNs aren't necessarily popular. As open-minded as we may or may not be, the fact is that the familiar beats the unfamiliar in terms of what people like. This truth is rooted all the way down to a person's physical being, where people like you more if you're more like them. But, just like it may be hard to convince Westerner's to try VNs, it would be equally difficult for a Westerner to convince an otaku to read an Arabic legend. They are both probably very interesting at heart. That doesn't mean that that's enough to convince someone. Very, very true. It's a completely different culture. And a Western cultured novel will appeal more to Westerners, simply. 100% agree! The sooner Japanese tropes are ejected from OELVNs, the sooner progress can be made. I hope that OELVNs will one day become a term that is looked upon highly instead of "Japanese game clone". I hope they are truly written as 'ORIGINAL English Language Visual Novels'. It's really only a matter of time, I think, but it's going to require a few awesome people. I was doing some market research for my VN (a fancy term for "checking out the comments on Steam VNs") and you are precisely right about this lack of interactivity. Many of the comments clearly commented on the desire for greater interactivity. But with great interactivity comes great responsibility. Financial responsibility, of course. I think that certainly, a JRPG could be one step in the right direction. Just look at the insanely well funded Kickstarter, 'Soul Saga'. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/disastercake/soul-saga-a-j-rpg-inspired-by-playstation-classics If you can raise $195k for an ANIME-styled game, trust me, SOME sort of market exists. It's niche but it's not so infinitesimally small as people make it out to be, if you've expanded the net to include anime-lovers in general.

I didn't say it, so I apologize for not making it clearer, but I was referring specifically to OELVNs here. Ecchi = no. As soon as that stigma becomes widespread, then making visual novels a mainstream thing is going to be a LOT harder, because you instantly lose social currency for sporting porn. Luckily, those sorts of VNs are at this point relatively unknown. Hopefully, it stays that way. Thank you Babiker! I'll try my best. I'm taking a bit of a different route to most of the Western visual novels I've seen in that I'm trying to raise capital through other business dealings before I start to make the VN. I have an artist in mind (who I think is mindblowingly amazing) and a significant amount of money will be spent on marketing as well as trying to get a few people well-known in the anime community to contribute bits to the VN. I'll be heavily play-testing whatever I write in the battlefield: with the help of a critical anime lover who's not afraid to say what's awesome and what's crap. We've got a recording studio lined up for the OP/ED. So, I'd love for this VN to be one of the groundbreakers. It may only be 1-2 hours long, even, but the aim is for it to be mostly perfect. I doubt that's easy, but there's a small possibility of that happening and that should be enough to work with.

Q: How to make VNs popular in the West? A: Throw lots of money at it and direct it at kids. I think that children are mostly open minded about things moreso than adults. Western adults don't pick up VNs. However, Western adults who already like anime may pick up VNs. With the case of the former - adults who never grew up with VNs - a VN is a pretty abstract concept to consider. People like what they're familiar with. That's why people CAN make the transition from anime to VN - lovers of anime can still get a similar enjoyment out of VNs. Before blowing holes right through this argument, I'm going to say that there's no such thing as an absolute and that obviously there are some exceptions to this. Whilst you may agree or disagree, however, there is one absolute that cannot be denied: Much money must be thrown. If you're trying to make VNs popular, a super-high quality VN with in-built virality should suffice. Basically, to make an explosion of popularity in the West, I think you just need one (or a few) really really really ridiculously good VNs. So good that people spread the word to non-anime lovers. So good that it no longer becomes a niche thing but a mainstream thing. But to become a mainstream thing, it has to become the "cool" thing because that's how virality works - on using things as social currency. For example, if you HAVEN'T watched Game of Thrones, you're clearly the exception (...I'm actually in this category here). Popularity begets popularity. But how does the initial popularity happen? With lots of effort, for one. And one other rule: Much money must be thrown.

This looks like an interesting project and the art is actually nice! I'm kinda confused about how it is going to be a murder mystery whilst being a comedy romance drama at the same time, but will definitely want to give it a shot when it comes out. I slightly disagree with the choice of Flash for the engine, but I think that it's not all bad news. For example, you could get it on Newgrounds and get a whole bunch of publicity there. I don't know if Android supports Flash but iOS definitely doesn't, so porting it to mobile would be a gigantic hassle. Either way, wishing you guys the best of luck, let us know how it goes.

Saya No Uta looks too gory for me! But the premise sounds interesting, I've always wondered what the story is about. You're right, everything has different sides to it. Great comparison between Stockholm and the plot in Saya No Uta. Just from reading Wikipedia, it sounds like the heroine is just some beast who is perceived as a beauty by the protag with serious mental health issues. So the perception is completely twisted. ...I'm still not going to play the game though, especially after reading the sentence "He perceives the world as a hellish nightmare with a black sky and buildings covered in pulsating flesh, where all the streets and building interiors are splattered with blood, giant organs and cartilage." That sounds scary as hell.

Interesting! Do you have a reason the VN needs this to happen, though? If you're following the protag., they obviously have their own worldview and need to develop in some direction, so what is their objective/motive? That is to say, what are they chasing after that will make them drop everything in order to get it? Are they trying to find meaning or happiness in the world or something? For you, Life, and everyone else: here is an awesome article about story structure. I'll be using this pretty much to a T, personally.

That's interesting as! I think you've concisely captured a concept I had in the back of my head but couldn't articulate. You're right - in this world, we can only conceptualize what we can imagine which is pretty much based on what we've seen (or, rather, variations/combinations of what we've seen). So in that sense, nothing is ever "created". I'm totally going to use your last quote, by the way - that's so awesome. Objective reality versus subjective reality - the topic of many mindscrews. The thing about something like color is that people don't see the same thing. They might see an object 'X' which is translated into their brain as 'X' as taught to every person by their teachers. So everyone refers to object 'X' as 'X', because that's the common consensus. If you see "green" where "red" used to be through someone else's eyes, then that person would in their mind still refer to these things as everyone else refers to them. So ultimately, the "green" that you see is something that you'll actually still call "red", because everyone else refers to that colour that way. Mindscrew /10.

What an interesting viewpoint. But, if the entire world is shifting - how would it work for people with staggered ages? For example, let's say someone is born in 2000. By your premise, they grow up and the world becomes more and more twisted as they grow older - let's say to 16 years old. But what about the person born in 2016? Does the world reset...? In which case, the 16 year old's world becomes innocent again. But if you have this on the scale of an entire population, it theoretically couldn't work. Unless, you follow the viewpoint of one person, and then everything only changes for that one special individual. That's really dark. I love anything that uses the http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnreliableNarrator trope. The reveal is pretty nuts. I've always disliked horror stories (as they scare me to smithereens) so I think it's better if someone else comments on whether they'd think that the true end is a satisfactory one, though.