Happiness+

@Plk_Lesiak I didn’t even see your response until now. Well since the VN is done, I can tell you everything. It was largely Wolf’s idea our studio director. I didn’t contribute much to the design of her character. The idea of Cheshire was to be a memento. I wanted a memento of Ji-Min like a museum of memories kinda thing, and someone brought up an avatar like Budapest from Watercress’s previous VN Palinarus. But, if you were expecting some meaning behind the story, sorry, the story doesn’t have any meaning outside of Grief. Personally, I don’t like writing stories without an arc or resolution, but the goal of “This was for you”, was for the reader to experience that grief has no resolution or arc, or any motif on it’s own. In your review, you brought up that you didn’t like the interactions with Cheshire and her twist. I agree with your criticism, however, giving her some poetic meaning seemed to antithetical to the whole theme of This Was For You. I thought about it too when we in our writing meeting, because I wanted the relationship to a bit more pronounced with flashbacks of Ji-Min or something however, the goal was for the relationship to be exclusively online. The characters just knew each other online and used Cheshire as a joke. In fact Cheshire is the joke, she was created by Ji-Min to troll MC. That’s why Cheshire is so damn annoying. She was designed for MC not to like her. Even giving her sentience, would’ve taken away from the whole grief theme we were going for. Honestly, our VN has no story. It’s the MC griefing for 30 minutes. Our goal was for the reader to experience that feeling of lost and not be so captured in a narrative arc. That’s why MC has no gender, no identity, etc, they are a self-insert. Imagine if you were there. It’s funny because as soon as I joined the studio in February, I was like “are going to make another depression simulator?” Everyone laughed on the Discord voice chat. Because This was for you is the quintessential Watercress experience. It’s our most polished VN to date. I contributed 25% of the writing. I did the audio splicing work lol. I did some of the GUI work. So yeah. Is that why you recommend it vs highly recommended it?

Finally. DO A FULL REVIEW ON OUR VN! @Plk_Lesiak 😀

I heard about it, but after visiting their twitter I still don’t know much about it. What was it?

Welcome back

Do you have a discord? You might be able find someone here. https://discord.gg/VzM6DeQ

I’ve been searching for shirts and stuff that have my favorite characters from Subahibi, Kara No Shoujo, and Saya no Uta. I found posters for the last two, but I cannot find any merch for subahibi. I know those sites exist but I cannot get over the language barrier, since I am an English only reader. Any help here?

https://watercress.itch.io/this-was-for-you 😉

So this isn’t the one I am making for the summer. This is one that was created by my employer, Watercress, for NaNoReNo. https://watercress.itch.io/this-was-for-you Let me know what you think, it’s really short at 8k words. Be honest with me, I would love to hear all your feedback. I did the writing and GUI programming.

Shit. Man. Why do you have to make me cry? I will give you something special. Just wait after March, you're going to get something real special when I am done with my first NaNoReNo VN.

Holy moly. Those are the kind of questions I wanted to ask you lolz. Honestly, I think a VN that can garner some universality like a novel can. It depends on the target audience. I know shounen anime fans would enjoy something like F/SN because of all the action. Mystery and Sci-fans would love Steins;gate. It's hard to say without an example to work with, like for Colorless, we're making an EVN right now. But the debate right now is who gonna read an EVN moege essentially. The specific elements that I know will guarantee appeal is.....furry LGBTIQ hentai. It may sound like I am joking but it's true... furries for some reason make so much money and they pay so well. Hentai sells. We can get political points if we add LGBTIQ characters to appeal to such an underappreciated market. Other that, going that far. I have one other crazy idea to make a VN popular enough to appeal outside of those niche markets. Add some relevant social commentary. Put on mobile. The problem is that many VNs still talor to anime-minded people with the aesthetics and all. But personally, we need to be more experimental. Write a VN in past tense. Write a VN in third person limited. Marketing is very important as a hype machine. Many studios rely on social media since otaku don't see the day of light. However, I think outside of using SEO and word of mouth via social media, we could just create a public image of ourselves by going to various otaku conventions. Setting up a booth and creating a press kit is a wonderful idea, even though, it's really expensive and not many people have the irl social skills to pull it off. Should new developers like yourself invest resources in marketing, publicity, and community engagement, or should they leave that to publishers and sales platforms and focus on making games? It depends on the studio and the resources they have. The weird thing about outside marketing firms is that, you have to explain what the hell a visual novel is. And as I learned from my thesis on this last summer, defining that is hard, like how do you explain to someone who has no idea what anime is or a vague idea of what anime is, what a visual novel supposed to be? Most people will think, graphic novel like Watchmen, and no........ it's not lolz. However, despite that, I think it's worthwhile to go through that struggle because that's how we break this damn barrier. We have to do that. We are creating a new damn genre of entertainment. Of course it's going to be hard, I wonder how hard it was for people to explain what a movie was about a hundred years ago. Or a book thousands of years ago. While otaku can market their own VN, I would recommend they should budget enough to have a normie marketing team handle that for them so they can reach other normie people. Because otaku only market to other otaku. I feel like the questions are going to get even harder from here on out. BRING IT ON!!!!

Don’t be like that JVNs are awesome. From Subahibi, Higurashi, etc. I love this medium. EVNs, JVNs, and any other kind of VNs that come from across the world.

Yes. Literally. Euphoria is just SAW the hentai. And that’s why I will never ever read it.

Jokes on you, I actually fantasized about this. So, I would just take over the world after looking into the mirror and pinching myself to see if I am not dreaming. Since this is an isekai and therefore, I am the MC. My plot armor must be thicker than fucking lead.

Yeah, that’s why I like talking to people like you. Because your VNDB is literally filled with EVNs like how @Clephas is just a treasure trove of JVNs. As one of the old timers, you know way more than any of those VN guys do on Reddit. The VN groupthink is why I left that crowd. They are always searching for kamige, but when asked, “Will there be EVN kamige?” They just shutter at the very thought of it. I just don’t share their cyncism and arroagance towards EVN devs; I also don’t share their ungrateful attitudes towards fan translations; Another thing, I also don’t hop on the hype train for new JVNs; personally, I just prefer to wait a while and see how the commmunity reacts to it before I take a look at it myself. The newest JVN I’ve read was KnS 2 and that’s mainly because the translation took a while to get here.

So, I actually look up to you a little bit because I remember reading one of the epics from @sanahtlig where you got into several intense arguments that literally shaped the history of this site. You even became a mod during some the interesting times. I can go on and on, but I remember you saying something really fucking epic. I quoted it before when I first talked with you. You said something along the lines, then why we do have that motto. I probably could find the quote but I am on the road right now for spring break and I want to make this simple and sweet. But you’re really cool. You made a difference on Fuwa during the most important moments in this site’s history. You see me as an outsider? What gave you that impression? I’ve known about visual novels since when I was very young when visual novels and dating sims were practically the same genre. That was about two decades ago on the internet. I got into visual novels from newgrounds.com. Before that, I was largely playing dating sims like galaxy sim angel and Pico Sim date. Funnny enough, your avatar from a very interesting anime where the MC seduces girls from what he learned from playing dating sims, and someone who dated a handful of girls; I can say those skills actually worked. Visual novels as I see them as an evolution of dating sims with less gameplay mechanics but with character route story structure. Now Fuwanovel. I came here from time to time originally because you guys had torrents and it was awesome back in 2014. I never was on the forums until last year because of a important debate. That debate being visual novels being high art. Oh thank you so much, I feel like I am very online in my philosophy regarding visual novels. I think EVN devs are stuck in their own way too. They are stuck on so called “conventions” of the medium. So if you notice any weird commonalities between the EVNs you’re reading. It’s because of that. The funny thing is that there’s no convention. “EVNs have to be like this.” “EVNs have to be like that.” “No past tense.” “No people of color.” “No long narratives.” “Add more slice of life moments.” These are the handful of things I heard on a few dev channels on Discord. So when you said: It seems to me sometimes that the genre gut stuck in a way that authors always think too much about satisfying the same needs of otakus that they have satisfied for the last 20 years. I agree with you a 1000% percent. I literally had an argument with a studio director over this last week. Because he want to make an EVN that targets shounen fans, but they wanna make a moege. Like, what shounen fan is going to read a slice of life moege EVN? We debated for two and half hours over this until they settled on making it more like Fate/Stay Night becayse I can imagine shounen anime fans reading something like fate and they get into the VN medium. EVN fans don’t read enough JVNs; JVN fans don’t read enough EVNs. JVN fans be like: “EVNs are just meme games lolz like DDLC or KS.” EVN fans be like: “JVNs are too long like Muv-luv and F/SN” I am really glad you like my thoughts. It makes me feel that someone is actually listening to me.