Zander

We're gonna build our own recommendations chart, and make r/visualnovels pay for it!

We're gonna build our own recommendations chart, and make r/visualnovels pay for it!

We're gonna build our own recommendations chart, and make r/visualnovels pay for it!

Well if Fuwa does one too, I'd happily support it as well.

We're gonna build our own recommendations chart, and make r/visualnovels pay for it!

We're gonna build our own recommendations chart, and make r/visualnovels pay for it!

Just talk shit about every single mod and all of their insane awful decisions here tbh. 
This site is dead and everything is a garbage fire.
Bring Aaeru and lolis back. 

nobody likes me 
 
thanks though 

Thanks mate! 

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

How is that messed up? It sounds like a good compromise to me. If people don't want to see anything of a certain tag they should be able to remove it from their own feeds, in my opinion. I hate bullet hell / twin stick shooters with a passion, for example, so I will probably hide those games with this same tool. 

How is that messed up? It sounds like a good compromise to me. If people don't want to see anything of a certain tag they should be able to remove it from their own feeds, in my opinion. I hate bullet hell / twin stick shooters with a passion, for example, so I will probably hide those games with this same tool. 

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.

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.
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20 edits later - Did I miss anything?

Yes, it is. The staff ostensibly don't have time to either participate in things themselves or allow new things to happen / people to do something, from what I've gathered. I'd comment on moderation, but we're not allowed to. Quality discussion, as you may have seen, is quite rare, and we are limited to 5000 recommendation or CoC meme threads. This place is the last vestige of Fuwanovel, with only enough strength to barely put its ugly, sacrilegious visage above the surface to take gasping, ragged breaths before it is finally put out of its misery and sinks to the abyss.
On the bright side, however, it is full of quality people from a variety of backgrounds. There is still a chance that among them stands a hero that will arrive and pull this sinking relic from the water and deliver it to salvation...

When you say not responding, do you mean the "stopped responding" crash or just stuck in the same screen?
I had a similar problem with older Nitroplus games and here's some things I did to fix then:
1) installing some windows packs that contains direct x 8 dlls
2) installing Visual Studio C++ around 2013 package for 32 or/and 64 bits
3) change the priority of the running process in the task manager 
4) go back to a previous windows build, I never managed to fix Togainu no Chi (2005) any other way

Yatohime Zankikou seems to have old version of alpharom that needs manual cracking and probably install modification and I have no idea how to do it for this title. However it runs on Windows 7 so if you can get virtual machine do that.
Kuro no Toshokan has newer version that adds Windows 7 support on sale on Dlsite and DMM so that might run on Windows 10 too.

No. Hell no. 
There are two main reasons:
1. The less controversial reason is simply that visual novels are not popular enough. They barely have an international audience as it stands, not to mention the borderline nonexistent non-Japanese VN development industry. Besides being dominated by a single language/country/culture/market, they aren't in text form like plays or poetry can be. They're software. Visual novels are an exceedingly young genre (particularly outside Japan), and as such don't have an established tradition (though they do have tropes) and they thus don't really reflect different cultures or have distinct schools of thought. The fact that you need -at the very least- a capable:
1. composer
2. programmer
3. writer
4. artist
for a given visual novel hurts these chances too. For a novel, you need an author and an editor. Give them two years. Done. Not so simple for a visual novel.
2. The genre simply isn't mature or serious enough. The vast majority of VNs out there, like many anime, go for a non-ambitious slice of life or romantic comedy story. If not that, they tend to stick to many anime/manga tropes on top of the genre's tropes on its own. I'm talking about how the choices-influence-storyline idea is almost always used as skill/luck/walkthrough usage checks for getting into a girl's p-p-panties~. I'm talking about the overwhelming usage of anime/manga styling and characters (all your -dere). And when a VN does get popular for something except cute anime girls, it's more often than not for action or suspense or murder mystery (F/SN, Steins; Gate, Umineko). This doesn't mean they automatically lack merit (Umineko is one of the most emotional and profound visual novels out there and it has sideboob demons, bunny girls shooting missiles, and goat vore). However, even such serious VNs often end up bashing you in the head with their messaging, or lack enough depth to go for a second read. They don't lend themselves very well to analysis. Few VNs out there deal with real-life matters or issues, such as a particular war or a particular culture, and this matters. Few VNs out there dabble with legitimate philosophy or truly have something original to say. Furthermore, very few VNs try to expand what the medium can do. Playing with perspective, how the text is displayed, how choices are made and how their consequences are conveyed- too few VNs play with these ideas, and the genre is considerably worse off for it. Particularly notably, how almost every high-profile protagonist here is a good old straight white high school age regular guy and how so many stories take place in a high school setting (at least partly, and with a predominantly high school cast). It hurts this genre.

Pretty shit list besides Chrono Box and Hikari no Apeiria. The only two interesting VNs on there. 

Honestly there are several interesting VNs released originally in Chinese and idk if there's a single fan translation of one of those out there. Rather than working on JP->EN translation, CN->EN seems like a much more productive use of your time, not to mention that the average quality of cn>en vn tls that we have gotten has been pretty low too so standards might be different.

Not sure what to think about this one. It certainly looks very interesting and seems to be a refreshing change of pace to the usual school life moeges.
However...
While I'd like both, a seriously written horror story or an H-heavy take on Highschool of the Dead, but a dark zombie rape hentai isn't exactly on my wish list. The tag combinations of Necrophilia, Unavoidable Rape and Kinetic VN pretty much kill the VN for me. Girls raped by zombies is certainly the last thing I want to see. 

If i'm not mistaken, the Nebula Award is only awarded to American works, so I believe Stein's;Gate would be out of the running regardless. Apparently, they've recently added a Nebula Award for Best Game Writing, so I assume it would have had a chance to win that.
Considering the script of a visual novel is inherently tied to its visuals, and that they often have some form of player interaction, I don't think they can be considered to be "serious" literature alongside poetry and such, nor could they be adapted to a traditional novel without major changes and, probably, loss of quality. It'd be akin to giving the Nobel Prize to a Choose Your Own Adventure book. 
Ever tho? Maybe our standards will change and visual novels will be popular internationally when I am wrinkled and grey. But probably not any time soon. 

I expect great things, welcome aboard
Sadly this is true for many of us, last time I tried to draw... *shudder*

Nice to meet you and don't worry about your artistic skills aha  As of now during the 2 years I've been studying 3D we have only gone through the basics slowly going through more advanced stuff at the end of the second year. In the third year we have to choose one field and the one i'm going for is vfx (visual effects/special effects), I am currently working a lot in that territory to master it as we have not done a lot of it in the last 2 years. I don't have much stuff from school that I would be inclined to share as it's never anything good to say the least but I am currently working on a big project that I will publish info on, in this forum soon when the project has gone a bit further.  

The Nobel Prize in Literature is primarily a political prize, like a lesser version of the Peace Prize.  Any VN that received the award would, without doubt, be a total piece of crap.  Looking at the inside workings of the committee that are coming out due to the sex, gambling, bribery, and undue influence scandals that past year... Yeah, no.
It would also, almost certainly, be a western language original, because it looks like no one on the committee can read Eastern languages, and translations are frequently looked down on.
 
Winning a Nebula, on the otherhand is possible.  Winning a Dragon Award - or at least, being nominated - is actually pretty likely, in the not-too-distant future.