Plk_Lesiak

Aaah, this brings up memories...

Thank you! Yeah, I think it's mostly my laziness preventing me from playing Galaxy Angel already, I never used fan translations and it seems like a bother to set things up for it when I already have 2-3 dozens of VNs ready to play on my PC. But I really don't understand why the whole series isn't licensed yet, I think it would sell like hotcakes on Steam.

Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius is one of the best-known and probably most appreciated western visual novels. Developed by Love in Space and published for free by Sekai Project in July 2014, it was downloaded on Steam by around 600 thousand players and spawned a successful franchise, with its commercial sequel, Liberation Day and dating sim spin-off, Sunrider Academy, both reaching impressive sale numbers and mostly positive feedback from the community. What’s interesting, Mask of Arcadius is also a hybrid title, possibly more ambitious and refined with its strategy game elements than “pure” visual novel segments. Most likely, it is exactly that part of the game that gave it a much broader appeal than that of typical VNs and made its spectacular success on Steam possible. Does it, however, still have a similar entertainment value for dedicated VN readers, on a much more saturated, diverse market, as it had in 2014? Read the full review at evnchronicles.blogspot.com

How did we even get here? We have a full subforums of recommendations, it's not like a chart is the only format available. And it's not to critisize anyone, I'm just not sure why the whole discussion went in this absurd direction.

I guess I, quite impossibly, agree with both you and @Funyarinpa to a certain degree. From an absolutely selfish perspective, I'm very happy about this policy because I don't see any other situation in which VNs are allowed to thrive on Steam. Beyond just the fact of having porn, Japanese eroge have tons on questionable content. If Valve wanted to make some reasonable curation policy against offensive/morally dubious games, VNs would be under fire literally all of the time and many publishers would just leave the platform. For our little niche, anarchy is the most desirable state of affairs IMO. On the other hand, I agree that giving space for racist, scummy, offensive games can backfire both against games in general and Steam in particular. Plus if Valve wants to actually give us good tools for filtering content, they will have to make major modifications to how their platform works, including forcing publishers to properly describe and categorize their own games and disclose any kind of questionable content. I would more likely expect them to do something half-assed, for example filtering based on user tags. There's a good chance that the means Valve is willing to take won't change much, while all kind or scum will be encouraged to create borderline-troll games and given a platform. Long-term consequences of this might be further normalization of all kind of fringe bigotry that would normally be contained to certain 4chan boards or other cesspools of the internet. In the end, do I trust Valve to decide what is "right" and "wrong" without fucking over the things I personally like and perceive as completely harmless? Can an incest porn VN such as Love Ribbon thrive in a world where Steam is properly curated? Probably no. Maybe I'm just that cynical, but if I have to chose between easy access to my favorite entertainment niche and good of the society as whole, I will chose my 2D waifus. *shrug*

Because a Reddit account is obviously a rare commodity that only most dedicated r/visualnovels readers possess. Also, only those that check out Reddit every day might be interested in what will be pinned (for years possibly) as recommendations at the central point of the western VN community.

Nice, will do it in the morning because filling out the survey on my tablet would be a torture. :s I encourage everyone that cares enough to participate in this to include an OELVN or two (or ten) in their recommendations, let's give our fledgling industry some love. :3

Meh, if I would argue for Sakura games being deleted it'd be only because of the shitty behaviour of Winged Cloud. Ecchi shovelware, as much as we might hate it, have full right to exist - after all, JP VNs market is full of trashy porn and fanservice VNs too. And it's not like Sakura Santa is in any way more inappropriate than most eroge - actually, all Sakura games are very vanilla, I have yet to find one with which I'd have actual issues beyond it being an uninspired, poorly written piece of trash. I'm not sure what would happen, however, if the broader public actually knew what's hidden behind the 18+ patches of most Japanese titles available on Steam.

All Best Wishes to @Freestyle80! I give you a like, because damn, you're not good at gathering those. ... ...but that probably means you're just not an attention whore like me.

Maybe yes, maybe no. People will attack things they don't like/don't understand even if they can avoid them. Good filtering tools might make anime games publishers' lifes somewhat easier, but doesn't mean it will stop trolls and bigots from doing their stuff.

This has already happened, even before Steam Direct was a thing. Valve gave up on curating the storefront long ago and the stream of crap arriving to the platform can't get much bigger than it is now I think. However, they promise the tools to filter out certain kinds of games from your feed, so it's quite possible that it will soon be easy to make all the worst crap virtually invisible. If I can filter out certain genres effectively, games with mostly negative reviews etc., suddenly navigating Steam and finding stuff there might become doable again.

I think it means nothing beyong the status quo being preserved, but Valve promising not to go on arbitrary purges anymore is something. They leave themselves a few loopholes ("illegal stuff", "content not properly disclosed by the publisher") and their general stance on porn will very likely stay where it is, but the promise not to make it stricter means fully backing down from their move against VNs. In a way this is non-news and many people take it as such, but before it we didn't really knew what sparked the whole anti-porn mess and whether it's truly over. This comfirmation makes me happy, but it's essentially a bit of backpedalling from Steam, not a whole new policy or a real step towards allowing more porn in (although that last thing might happen to a minor degree if Valve disciplined their employees to not intervene unless something clearly breaks the rules).

Yes, but it could've been done in a bit more neutral manner, to put it lightly. I'm also not the only one who had this impression, although I wouldn't fixate on it too much either, overall this is good news.

Yeah, of course I don't mean the tools themselves, I'm all for that kind of customisation and it will definitely lead to less conflict over the abundance of anime games reaching Steam. I just meant Steam singling out anime stuff like that in an official post. ;p

Valve released a new staff blog post, basically confirming their "anything goes" stance when it goes to what's allowed on the platform. They explicitly stated that the latest mess was not connected to any kind of outside pressure and pretty much suggested it was done by some overly-eager employee (most likely someone with a serious bias against VNs/anime stuff, considering the games targeted). They also openly called out anime games as something many of their users hate and want filtered out of their feeds, suggesting that they're working on tools that will make that doable. Which is slightly messed up, but I guess it's still a win. At least for VNs. Because I'm not sure if Valve's "hands-off" approach will benefit them in the long run.

You could try to make a VNDB account, so we could see which VNs you've played already and liked the most. This makes recommending stuff a bit easier.

Last week I saw a homeless guy with a smartphone here in Warsaw. Access to information and possibility to leech on free wi-fi around the town are sometimes too attractive to skip even for those that theoretically have nothing. :>

In most cases no, unless you program the game exlusively for such devices or put a lot of effort into creating a heavily streamlined version of your game dedicated to them - usually those phones have brand-specific operating systems and very limited processing power, so they won't be able to run normal PC or Android apps. I also can't imagine reading VN text on those tiny screens would be a pleasant experience.

Congrats on being of legal drinking age and stuff! Wait... Oh, I was right! I guess you should be happy you live in Quebec right now. :3

Before people smarter than me can elaborate, I think I can pinpoint basic elements. To make a VN you typically need: 1. A game engine (most likely Ren'Py, which is free and have a lot of guides and assets available for it) 2. A graphical user interface (GUI), through which people will interact with your game - Ren'Py provides a basic structure for your GUI, but custom visuals and ability to modify the UI according to your needs is important. 3. Background graphics - static images over which character sprites and the GUI will appear. I think it's easy to find free or cheap stock VN backgrounds. 4. Character sprites - the representations of the characters involved in your story - static 2D images, usually with a few poses and face expressions to fit different situations. 5. CGs - custom, full-screen illustrations which show situations that are hard to present through sprites and text, usually used in crucial moments of the story. 6. Background music - to give your game a proper climate and make it less monotonous, underlining the switches in mood etc. 7. A script - all the dialogues and descriptions that will show in the text box (which is a part of the GUI), along with necessary "stage directions" [especially if you'll not be the one handling the programming, the person doing it must know what background, expressions etc. go with each scene]. 8. (optional) Voice Acting/Voiced Narration - expensive as f***, if you want good quality, so many developers skip on it. 9. (Optional) Other sound assets - depending on the content of your story, some additional sounds could be useful, for example if you want bring the reader's attention to something, but often such additions are quite obnoxious - music can be enough. When you have a script and all the necessary assets, you have to put them together and synchronise them properly. This part I know pretty much nothing about, as I'm not a programmer. ------ 20 edits later - Did I miss anything?

It varies greatly, depending on the scale and specific goals of you project. There's a lot of free assets that you could use to create a simple visual novel - for example, using the Ren'Py engine (most popular one in the West) you can put together a coherent story with very little actual investment, as long as you can handle tasks such as writing and programming the game yourself. The author behind Sounds of Her Love, a competent looking, 4-5 hour long VN with some voice acting, told me that he did it with a budget of $300 (which mostly went towards art and VA fees). The more custom art assets you need and the more elements you have to outsource to other people rather than doing them yourself, the more expensive it will get. But considering that you were speaking about a very short, educational VN in your other posts, making it couldn't be that hard, you could definitely rely on free music, sound assets and minor visual assets available on the internet do reduce your costs. The rest depends hugely on what kind of quality and complexity you'll be aiming for. For more specific numbers, maybe some developers active on the forums would be able to say something more concrete, but VNs vary in size and quality significantly, from no-bugdet ones to mainstream Japanese games with literally millions of dollars to spend.

Just be sure to install the content restoration patch if you play that game. I would normally not recommend it this strongly, as I personally don't care about sex scenes and the fan patch unlocks those, but it also fixes the very poor-quality translation of the original Steam release. Or you can try A Sky Full of Stars, it's by the same company and has a similar vibe to it, but the official release was of much better quality (all the porn was also removed in this one, whatever that means to you).

I'm not sure if I would call it scary, it's more about shocking/disturbing the reader with unsettling plot twists and visual gimmicks. It's a bit depressing, but I really liked it.

Hello there! Your English really seems fine so far. If you're into J-pop, you might want to check out Kira☆Kira and Deardrops. Traditionally, I would also recommend some free Western VNs, especially Katawa Shoujo, CUPID, Lucid9, One Thousand Lies, Everlasting Summer and Doki Doki Literauture Club. Those could keep you busy for a while.

Oh, yeah, I didn't mean I would be worried about kids seeing it, I would be worried about the teacher being (literally?) torn apart by overprotective parents and prudish school administration.