Velvetique

Real heroes edit the game's files to remove the limits for M A X I M U M P L E A S U R E

Welcome, friend! I really like your taste in VN's. I'm sure you'll like it here!

Well this is a surprise. I'm surprised they came back to it despite the trainwreck with Episode 2. I'll be very impressed if they can bring it back from the ashes successfully this time.

This is probably a little harsh, but it really does sound like you've convinced yourself you're incapable of anything and want to find excuses to not improve.. I don't know what you really expect to be told here. If you want to learn to draw, you gotta practice a lot. You're not gonna learn it in one single day, or even a week or even a month. It takes lots of time. At the moment it doesn't look like you've done a lot of practice, but thats just an assumption on my end. If you want to learn to draw, you gotta be patient and really focus on it. It's fine if you can't draw though, that's why you work with artists who know how to do it, or you comission people for assetts you need. If you have trouble programming, there's an incredible amount of books and guides out there to help you learn. If thats not enough, try looking for a class you can take on it. On top of that, you can also hire or get help from programmers in this community or elsewhere. There's also VN engines that require almost no programming. As for your fears of writing, all of that is really a bunch of excuses to not write and to not show your work to others. That stuff is scary and i understand the fear of you wasting your time, but the thing is every writer usually gets good at what they do by making mistakes and learning. The fastest way you're gonna learn and the fastest way you'll improve is to just work at it. You'd only be a laughing stock on the internet if you handled people's reactions poorly. Theres plenty of successful writers and game developers who have made rough games before but have gotten better over time. None of the stuff you've mentioned is enough to absolutely prevent you from ever making a visual novel. If its something you genuinely want to do, there's lots of ways to get it to happen. It won't neccesarily be fast, but it will happen if you work hard enough at it.

Welcome, friend! I'm sure you'll have a great time on this forum!

Ahh okay! I'll try that then when I get the chance, thank you being so helpful! I look forward to you adding more to the engine and I look forward to playing around with it. Where can we submit our entries into your contest, by the way? Just through the sharing features? I'm glad you were able to admit when you were off base at least. Honestly though even if a corporation developed one of these kinds of tools, I don't really see the problem in that. Most of the most commonly used game engines for independent developers are made by larger corporations, like Unity or Unreal Engine. It hardly would become a monopoly on development tools for the genre, since people have highly subjective workflows that different engines accommodate for. Plus if it had shitty policies people more than likely would avoid it. Creating an engine doesn't really steal the genre away from the people most passionate about it, even if they charge for it. It's good to have options, and sometimes a properly funded and developed piece of software from a company is what you want, since it can get more polish more easily. Assuming it's developed well, anyway.

I figured! I can tell you put a lot of work into this. I'll look forward to any updates you put out and i'll probably be getting the export DLC soon, I'm really interested in playing around with this! I have that downloaded but it doesn't seem to want to appear in my create page. I can play it fine but I can't look at it in the creation screen. Some things I also noticed while playing around, I can sometimes glitch out the menu by clicking on the menu options when the loading symbol is on screen at startup. It ends up reloading the menu options and leaving them on the screen permanently. I also can't seem to exit to the main menu from the create page, I have to go into a project and press escape to get back to the main menu it seems. Not a major issue but it's a bit clunky with that.

It's pretty barebones at the moment, but I like what you're going for! I'll have to play around with it more, but if I had to request anything at the moment it'd be some way to customize the UI more (if it's there I can't seem to find it). Some tutorials or example code would help too.

It's sorta been said a lot, but this is so ignorant it hurts. You're acting like Valve is going out of their way to find VN's and put them on Steam exclusively, but they don't. They've never done that with any kind of game besides Valve developed ones, frankly. VN's are getting on Steam because it's the most widely used distribution platform for PC games, so many developers want to put their games on Steam so they have the higher chance of getting a profit. Not only that, but it makes a lot of aspects of marketing and selling games easier since you can use its built in blog functionality and use its built in forums which get generated for every game. While it's better to use other platforms for these functions, it doesn't change that Steam is very very appealing to a lot of companies and developers. You're pretty much hating on Steam purely because people want to use it. On top of that, while Ren'py is nice and powerful and well documented, speaking from personal experience working on it, you actually do need to know a bit of programming to really take advantage of it. If you don't wanna change the UI at all or add any extra features, then sure, you don't technically need to program at all beyond putting in your script with some basic functions. But if you want to do anything more than that, you not only have to know how to understand and read the structure and syntax of Ren'Py's scripting, you also have to learn Python to really add more to it. It took me a long time to understand how the screens work in the engine and to get them to do what I wanted. An engine like this or TyranoBuilder (when it works anyway) is much better for people that want to be able to customize and have some deeper control on their visual novel without needing to do a lot of code to make it work. In other cases, it would also just make development time faster even for people who already know how to code since having all the things they'd want to do already built in or given an easy interface (like Tyrano's drag and drop GUI and sprite placement). I like Ren'py a lot and a lot of my favorite VN's were made in it, but there's absolutely a place for engines that can make the process of creating VN's easier.

I have a ton of favorites, but here are some that come to mind immediately!

Thank you all for the warm welcome!

I really like your music, keep up the good work! It can, but I think they're referring specifically to the Japanese vocals and more hyper anime OP kind of style their music has going on for it.

Hey there, friends! I've sorta lurked on this forum before (Especially when I was following a walkthrough on the Toradora VN that was posted here), but I've finally decided to join up! I really would like to find more VN's I haven't heard of, and I also at some point would like to get feedback on a VN I'm currently working on when it's in a more presentable stage. Some of my favorite VN's include Steins;gate, VA-11 HALL-A, the Zero Escape series, Ace Attorney, and the Fruit of Grisaia! Looking forward to making friends and having a good time on this site!