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Diamon

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Everything posted by Diamon

  1. As promised in the blog post, here are the first two voiced trailers!
  2. I think your thread belongs more in the Creative Corner, it's a more suited place to gather a team or discuss about concept. This section is more for projects who are already a WIP. If you are thinking seriously about gathering a team and creating a VN, I'd suggest putting more effort into presentation, and detailing more your concept. Very few people will actually be interested in participating in a project they know nothing about. Also tbh with you, Fuwa isn't exactly the best place to recruit people, if only because most of the people are simply VN readers. You'll have much more luck trying to recruit in http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/index.php
  3. Here's samu-kun's (President of Love in Space) first reply to the overall disappointment that generated the game on the steam discussions. I think it was written before announcing the 2.0 patch.
  4. What's even worse from what I gathered : - You cannot import your save properly (which means that all the cool enhancements you bought for your ship and mech are not here anymore), hopefully its a bug that will be fixed in the future. - Some features from the previous games are missing (like the side quests, or even being able to talk to your ship members in between missions) - Not sure, but it seemed that the gameplay worsened, especially regarding how shields are handled. - Forced romance despite the fact you had choices that seemingly prepared for heroine routes in Mask of Arcadius. - Choices are basically useless in this episode. It's inferior to his predecessors in nearly every way, and when you know that the sequels were free, you can't help but feel bitter. And the (amateur?) japanese voice acting is not enough to compensate all the flaws I feel, even for the people that might be interested by that.
  5. I love the voiced trailer, it sounds really epic! The character designs are really cool as well, can't wait to see more of it.
  6. My way of giving feedback is to focus on the stuff that can generally be improved, or that I found unpleasant so that the developers can (if they agree with me) work on it. I believe that there is little point in talking about the things that were done nicely, because they will most likely continue doing it nicely even if I don't tell them. Plus listing the stuff that is done correctly would make my post very long. As a dev, I always like to receive positive feedback of course, but negative feedback is always more constructive, and more useful than positive feedback in general (didn't say that positive feedback was useless though). It would be different if I were to give a review of the work for example, in that case I would try to present in an equal way both positive and negative aspects. So I apologize if me presenting things that way offended anyone in the team, but they will also have to deal with people that will be much harsher than me in the future. It's not like I attacked anyone personally saying that they were bad at what they're doing, I did say and repeated several times that it was a subjective opinion. Doesn't mean I'm allowed to say anything of course, but I sure hope I'm at least able to say "I don't like it because...". I tried to add explanations when I could, maybe not as much as I should have, but trust me that's already a lot more than quite a lot of people are willing to give in general. Regarding the omniscient 3rd person view thing, I do believe that it offers more possibilities from a narrative point of view, but it is rarely done in VNs. It's less restrictive, but as a result it becomes harder to write (i only because you have less reference material to use). I'd only suggest this if your writer is experienced, if he's read several VNs that uses 3rd person narrative (I think Gahkthun used it?), or if he's read a lot of novels using omniscient narrators.
  7. This looks really cool! Good luck to you guys!
  8. Just a matter of personal preference here I guess^^ Regarding Aki's VA, she's definitely not bad, and I agree that it does fit the character and gives you a very good idea about who the character is (basically an airhead), I'm just saying that this kind of voice will annoy quite a lot of people. It's a very polarizing voice, you either love it or hate it. And when you viscerally hate a voice, you'd consider not playing the game because of how much irritating it would be to have to listen to it permanently. I believe there might be a way to get across the same feeling regarding Aki with the voice acting, while making the voice less polarizing. Once again, it's only my completely subjective opinion on the matter. Having an indiegogo and a kickstarter running at the same time is very badly seen in general, it kinda makes it look like you're attempting a cash grab. I'm not sure why I should sugarcoat my feedback? Having potential VA overlapping with my own project is a totally unrelated matter (and if you're talking about Skyler, she's not voicing on our project anymore). I know it's not very pleasant to receive negative feedback on something, but my issue here lies in the directing of the voice acting, and not in the personal skill of the VAs. I know very well that they are very talented and could probably do better with some little pointers, which is what I'm trying to give. Whether the devs agree or not with my opinion on the matter is another question. I did like the voice acting as a whole, truth be told I would have probably dropped the demo without it, and it's what allowed me to keep an interest in the dialog. But it's just not perfect yet I feel.
  9. Right, the terms are subjective / objective omniscient, my memory is very rusty. It's really interesting indeed, I never actively thought about the fact that you need to characterize and develop the characters that are not the main through narration even when the narration is objective to them. Basically you're saying that unless going with an omniscient subjective narrator, building and developing your characters will always require to be done through the use of narration that will not allow itself to go in the head of at least some of said characters (main character included if you decide to go with omniscient objective) ? What are the differences you could see between using first person and omniscient objective third person to develop non main characters if that's the case? The presence of narrator bias / unreliability? And is it possible to get the same level of character developement between an objective and subjective viewpoint regarding the main character in your opinion? The demo seems to be favoring objective narration, which is somehow unusual in VNs. What advantages do you think it could have over subjective narration, in terms of character development and depths at least? Or even what kind of advantage in general? (Hopefully I didn't misunderstood what you meant) And yeah, I took a shortcut with vocabulary here, I felt that the little of what was introduced to me regarding the main character was generic in the premise, but it still lacked a lot of development as well, those are two different issues indeed.
  10. Unfortunately, no, the narrator is not omniscient here. Maybe it's because of the language difference so I don't know how are they are exactly called in english, or maybe my memories are rusty, but I was taught that there were 4 different type of narration in my litterature classes : - 1st person (pretty self explanatory) : "I opened the door slowly, and was praying silently that the noise wouldn't wake up my mother." - 3rd person internal : third person narration that will distance itself from the character but will only give us the internal thoughts of one character. You could describe it as a narrator that has access to all the thoughts of only one character at the time through telepathy, and describes what he sees while supplying the reader with this additional information he obtained : "John opened the door slowly, fearing that he might wake up his mother. Fortunately, it didn't look like the noise would wake her up." - 3rs person external, third person narration that completely distances itself from the character, forbidding itself to narrate anything that might be a thought of one of the character. It's basically narrating from the viewpoint of an invisible human presence: "John opened the door slowly as the creak sound resonated through the room. "I hope that didn't wake my mother" he thought. His mother wouldn't budge, still snoring heavily on her bed." - 3rd person omniscient, which is as you described it: "John opened the door slowly, silently hoping that his mother would not wake up because of the noise. Little did he know that she was actually pretending, and purposely ignoring the night strolls of her good for nothing son". While I won't deny that an omniscient narrator in a VN could definitely be interesting to read, the demo I read definitely used the narration I called "3rd person external". It had some first person narration mixed in the flashbacks, and from time to time used first person when the main character was alone. But everytime there were people dialoguing on the screen, there was presence of external third person narration. Because it is very descriptive by nature and ends up being awkward in a VN (there were quite a few extracts where the narration was somehow similar to "Kazuki opens the door to the room and walks in"), dialog was heavily prioritized over narration. Which brings us to the info dumping issue. I agree that info dumping should not be left to the narrative only, it makes it very indigest and hard to read. Ideally (imo), when info dumping is a necessity, it should come through character dialog and discussion, while supported by additional details from the narration. And my issue here is that the info dumping was made uniquely through the use of dialog. And not only it makes it indigest as well, it also really deteriorate the flow of the conversation, the characters being forced to add those details to give more info to the reader, while in universe it feels totally unnatural and superfluous. Kinda like "Hey, we've been friends for years now. It's about time you stop obsessing yourself with the crimson thief, you know this incredible guy that steals from the rich and give to the poor and that you met when you were 10." (I'm exaggerating, but I sometimes had this impression when reading). And regarding the character being bland, I'm mostly saying that he is not as developped as he should be precisely because they've been using this kind of minimalistic narration that allows them to not give us any meaninful insight about what and how he thinks. If they had used first person, or even omniscient narrator, that would have forced them to give more depth to the character, because they would most likely notice that something is missing, for example, what does he think of the other characters? How does he view them? After the demo ended, I still don't know what his personality is. I still don't know through whose eyes I should interpret the world : a pessimist? An optimist? An angsty teen? A delusional fool? A sarcastic and bitter assh*le? A sociopathe? You might argue that it might be something interesting to play on as a writer, and I'll definitely agree, but in our case it's really an issue and not a litterary trick to enhance the experience.
  11. Everytime I play her and she launches her ult, I'm expecting an "EX----CALIBAAAAAAAR!"... Also now her two core items are athene's and infinity edge of course. But best japanese voice is indisputably
  12. Whoa, this looks very good! The sunset on the third drawing is particularly well drawn!
  13. Alright, sure thing then. While I do have experience in VN development, Keep in mind that a lot of what I'm going to say is purely subjective, so feel free to disagree with me. Like I said, the writing needs a bit of work. It was sometimes awkward to read, and failed to catch my attention. Narration didn't flow very smoothly, and there were a lot of "show don't tell" instances I could notice. You're trying to pack too much information at once, I kinda felt like the whole demo was a big info dump. The issue is that I'm not especially awarded as a reader for going through this info dump: there is no action scene afterward, or no scene that makes use of all the knowledge I forcibly received in the prior scenes. There was a lot of use of capitalization, but I don't think it's a great way to put emphasis on the text. Bold or italics is a more subtle way to do it imo, capital letters tend to be aggressive to the eyes so it tends to be considered much more as screaming. The fact that you do have voice acting really makes it unnecessary to insist visually that much on some words on sentences, since it should be portrayed in the voice over anyway. There are very few in game explanations about what Igrasil is, and what each of the members are responsible for. I thought the first meeting could have been a great place to introduce properly and formally the characters, but surprisingly enough it didn't happen. The biggest flaw is how the narration is handled I feel. Using external third person narration limits you a lot regarding what you could narrate. We don't get to hear the thoughts of Kazuki as much as we should, and you could have switched a good part of the info dumping onto a first person narration. It makes it much harder to empathize with Kazuki, or even to understand him. As a reader, I end up following a character instead of a main character. You're using some internal narration from time to time, but why aren't you using it all the time? I haven't seen any benefit with using the third person narration so far on this demo. Characterization isn't done extremely well in my opinion. We have to guess what is each character's personality based on their interactions solely. And because of the narration issue I stated previously, you have to cram a lot of those interactions into your demo, to the point that it becomes not very natural and makes the reading not flow very well. A good chunk of the dialog lines could have been removed or changed to more meaningful discussions if Kazuki's internal narration was presenting the characters as they were appearing and commenting on them, making the dialog flow much more naturally. What's more, Kazuki's interpretation of their personalities could give more depths to them as well. The restaurant scene felt really out of place especially for some reason, like the game was forcefully telling me "Hey, get to know more about the characters through even more interactions in case what you saw previously was not enough! And of course you won't get to know much more about their personalities!" The main character comes off as very bland and generic. This is even more exacerbated by the lack of internal first person narration. Regarding the voice acting, it was decent / good. Akito's VA is probably the best out of them. Kaoru / Suzumi's VA felt like she was more reading a script sometimes. Aki's VA is trying way too much to be on the cutesy side, and it's really grating tbh. Comparatively, I felt that her natural tone I could hear during the extras was much more pleasant to listen to while still remaining cute. For some reason, it seems like the voice acting is not as fluid as it should be, maybe because it is trying to insist on having perfect pronunciation? I don't know, it just felt that some of the lines were said much more slowly than what they should have been. The music was very nice, it fitted well the ambiance overall. You might want to have smoother transitions between the tracks, cutting abruptly the audio in order to play a new track breaks immersion a lot. The art is beautiful, I like the characters design a lot. Hopefully in the future the characters will have some pose variations, as it makes it much easier to associate the characters with a name and a voice. The GUI is pretty neat, but it doesn't look like I can change the settings in the option menu. Probably that you didn't have the time to set it up yet. Background art is nice and fits correctly with the sprites style, that's always a good point. The cameo of your project leader at the end was a good idea, was actually surprised that it happened^^ There were more efforts on the direction than what I would have expected for a demo, so good job on that! Basically, your demo was trying to introduce us the characters and the world, but it lacks a hook. There wasn't any action scene that could justify me taking an interest in the plot and the setting, and the characterization was too awkward for me to care about the characters. However, if you only intended your demo to be something where you can display and show your assets, you definitely succeeded. Hopefully it doesn't sound too harsh, it's just my honest opinion. I'm not expecting you to fix all of those things, but hopefully you will take some of them into consideration!
  14. I've played your demo, it was looking good! You might want to edit and proofread a bit better your text though, there were some approximate grammar and awkward sentences that even I could spot as a non native speaker, and people will judge your project heavily on the writing. I'm not sure if you're looking for feedback regarding your demo in general, since it's only supposed to be a demo to advertise your kickstarter, it is only natural that there are some flaws. But if you're interested, I can write something.
  15. Personally, I'd just wish there was more of an investment from the community into the OELVN scene. Expectations for them are just too high, and in return most people will ignore them, which is a bad thing for a medium that relies mostly on word of mouth. It just seems like there is this vicious circle : OELVN are too amateurish => Projects get ignored => No feedback or support whatsoever => No recognition for the game => No sales (if the game is even released) => No funding and no direction as for how to make the next game => Next project stays amateurish (if there is even a next project) An exaggerated, but somehow accurate comparison I've seen not too long ago about EVN development : A lot of people are waiting until they see a great OELVN to give them hope about the scene, but that's not how it works. The more we are ignoring the objectively less good projects, the more devs will decide to take the red pill and go for the money. Now is the moment to support developers who are still brave enough to take the blue pill, even if what they are producing is not up to japanese standards yet. It's basically an investment in the future of the EVN scene. I say support, but it doesn't have to be monetary support. Feedback, constructive criticism, message of encouragement on their threads, reviews and articles, spreading the word...
  16. Well, since you seem to be dodging my question, I won't pursue the matter any further. Though with all due respect, I don't think it's a very sensible marketing argument to say that you can provide a better collaboration environment than others while not actually knowing how your competitors are proceeding. Hope you will succeed in finding people interested, and hopefully you can become a big publisher in the EVN world as well!
  17. I see, that does seem fair, I don't have any particular objection on the matter to be honest. However, I'm curious about what could push a developer to choose you over someone else? Let's face it, your two current big competitors are Manga Gamer and Sekai Project. I'm not extremely familiar with how MangaGamer advertises their projects as a publisher, but I do know about Sekai. While I can't say (from an external point of view) that their PR and marketing is the best, it is currently easily counterbalanced by the fact that they have a huge reach, to the point that even if what they are only doing is retweeting stuff for my own project, I get instantly big visit spikes on my website. Do you have any guarantee that you can provide better than them in terms of visibility (because in the end, it's really what matters the most in publishing and advertisement)?
  18. I think black sand was merely wondering about what would be your rate / price, since you don't have a website and are not talking about them in your first post. The fact that you're only aiming at commercial releases tell us that you are not really interested in publishing games that won't make a profit, so it'd be only natural for us to ask about how much such a service would cost us. Outsourcing a service for a price is always a risk for us dev, so we need to know if the ratio risk / benefit is good enough. If your goal is to eventually create a business out of this, we need to know why we should pick you over another publisher (or even over self publishing). Either a guarantee that you will bring results, or either a cheap price that makes the investment not something too risky.
  19. Yeah, it would definitely help if you could provide a website. At least it's much easier for people to link your page, and it gives the impression that you're doing legit and serious business, and that you're professional about it.
  20. If I'm not mistaken, I think the developers for Nostalgia might be looking for a publisher, especially since they started their campaign recently. Possible I'm confusing them with another project though. Anyway, here is their kickstarter page : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/magnastudios/nostalgia-two-worlds-one-soul Two other projects that I've stumbled upon and that do not have any publishers associated yet, and which seem to be of rather good quality : - http://bloodychronicles.com/ - http://void.vifthfloor.moe/ Not sure if they'd be interested in collaborating with you, but it's still worth a shot messaging them I believe.
  21. Thanks everyone for your kind words! I've (finally) got the time to make the guide readable again, sorry for the long wait. I can't believe that I wrote this guide more than a year ago... I will try to edit this guide in the near future since I have acquired more experience and now that we've progressed a lot in the development of our own project, I'd really like this guide to be as complete as possible.
  22. Indeed, very nice of you to offer an alternative to OELVN projects! Best of luck, I do believe that healthy competition between publishers is a good way to make the EVN scene grow!
  23. Welcome to fuwanovel, hope you'll enjoy your stay!
  24. A slightly ambitious proposal, but since quite a few people seems to believe that the front page lost it purpose, I feel that it would be great to find something regarding that. I personally believe that the front site as it stands currently is useless as well : you can always find a better website that does the job better, whether it is concerning VN information (VNDB) or VN related news (reddit). I've always seen the front site as a way to introduce new people to the community. You need to create this sense of comfort to the visitors so that they get used to visiting the site, and at some point consider visiting the forums. It might not be obvious for us since we're all pretty much forums veterans, but to the average internet user, forums are things people don't feel extremely comfortable with, and some are even afraid of them. With the removal of torrents there isn't a good reason anymore for visitors to visut regularly the front site, and as a result you have less chance for people to gather an interest in trying out the forums. If we're fine with the current state of things with the current growth (?) of the community, then simple design / qol / user comfort improvements such as those that were alreay suggested before should suffice. But if we want the frontpage to actually have an active role in the growth of the fuwa community, then it has to offer something that you can't find on another website. I'm seeing two things currently : - Walkthroughs : making the frontsite become a centralized place where you can find walkthrough. I don't think there's any other website / community that does it better than fuwa currently, and it's a shame that you have to actually search in the forums to find what you're looking for. - A review hub made by users and rated by users (a system like MAL basically). Though it somehow defeats the purpose of having the review hub blog. And also it would probably be difficult and time consumming to implement. But that's the one thing that always bothered me when looking at VNDB scores when trying to find new stuff to read : there are no reviews, only ratings. And that greatly limits me in how I can assess if this VN is a good read for me or not. Also judging by the suggestions section in the forums, there are plenty of reasonable people who can write some good reviews. Anyway, it would be a community driven work that would actually create an incentive for outsiders to check fuwanovel more regularly, and eventually involve themselves with the community. Kinda like "Hey, I need a place where I can find various opinions on a VN to know if it's worth my time/money... Oh right, I could go to fuwa!" Anyway, sorry if I'm slightly off topic, I'm more talking about content, and you're probably asking about functionalities. I do also approve of the inter-connectivity between blogs/forums/reviews/fuwazette though, we have quality content posted on the forums very often that would deserve being showed on the website, and on the contrary website content should really link to forums discussions more I feel.
  25. http://myanimelist.net/anime/6347/Baka_to_Test_to_Shoukanjuu?q=baka%20to%20te
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