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Welcome back! Fellow programmers! Hello and welcome back to my 5 part guide "How to code a VN with Ren'py." Today we will have a special guide, a walkthrough on how to code an actual VN project. Last time we coded a mock VN however this time I'll be using a personal project as a guideline to teach you how everything's done straight from the drawing board! Fear not as you are on the right track and if you've checked out part 1 and part 2 then you'll have no problem figuring this third part out. (Hopefully, since my explaining is terrible. XD) That said please bear in mind once more that this is not an infallible guide to program with python or ren'py and it will not make you an expert after you've read it. However I'll do my best to try and explain how to code a VN with Ren'py to the best of my ability and I will be with you for the entirety of this guide. So let's go fellow programmers! the sky is not the limit as your creativity is...boundless. Let's start, shall we? first off, open your HUB and go to your active projects, then launch your stub project which should look similar to this: The background is black to emphasize that we have nothing set so far, some of you might have a different color depending on your stock theme. The resolution you use for your VN will also be present from the moment you boot. In my case, I'm developing this VN in 1920x1080 resolution. Now, we need to get rid of this boring background and plainGUI design. Let's make a custom main menu. First, close your stub VN, go to your HUB and click on the "screens.rpy" link. This will open the script for screens, the place where we will create our very own main menu. Leave that open for now and then open your favourite image editing software, photoshop, SAI, illustrator, Paint studio, etc. Create a blank image with the resolution of your VN (for example, if the resolution of your VN is 800x600, then you make a blank image with those dimensions.) After that just get creative, use some flaming skulls and bleeding hearts or whatever you like. Alternatively you can just use text (That's what I'll do since my project has a minimalistic UI by design. xD ) the point here is to edit the main menu to your liking. So let's go and see how it will look: This is my title screen. The focus of my VN is to make a reference to retro games, hence the austere 8 bit console look. You ought to make something different as my project is only a guideline, remember that. Now back on topic, as you can see, the clickable sections are displayed in this image, so you might be wondering: "can't you do that with Ren'py?" Yes and no. Ren'py allows custom styles but those are limited in a sense and require you to have more than just the basic python knowledge so we'll be going with this option because it's unconstrained and it allows you to make your VN look any way you like. So back to those clickable sections such as "new game" and "continue", what are they for? They are your mouse hotspots. We'll be using those to give coordinates to ren'py so it remembers where they are located and map an action to said hotspots. This image above will be called your "ground image." This is the way it looks when you are not hovering the mouse over any options. Now once you're done with this let's go and make the "hover version" which will look like this: As you can see I added an orange arrow to every clickable option. This will reflect each hotspot "hover" action when I pass the pointer over them. This will be our "hover image". Note that you can do whatever you want for your own hover effect, for example you can make the text grow larger or smaller, change colors or add a blending effect like glow or a simple transform. Once you're done with this, save both images in .png and place them inside the "game" folder, then let's go back to the "screens.rpy" script that we left open. Back in the screens script, scroll down till you reach this part: This is the default main menu that all stub VNs have. Don't worry about all that code though, we're going to completely replace it with our own. Let's start with making an "imagemap." First delete all the code shown on the image (except for the red parts, so you remember what you are changing. XD) Then type in this: screen main_menu: tag menu (this line is very important when using custom screens, forget to add it and you will regret it.) imagemap: ground "your ground image.png" (remember to replace the filenames with your own. Also don't forget that images need to be inside the "game" folder.) hover "your hover image.png" hotspot (xxx, xxx, xx, xx) action Start() hotspot (xxx, xxx xx, xx) action ShowMenu("load") hotspot (xxx, xxx, xx, xx) action ShowMenu("preferences") hotspot (xxx, xxx, xx, xx) action Quit(confirm=True) There you have it. It's a basic imagemap with the essential functions of a main menu. Pretty simple, no? So you might be wondering, what are those "X" symbols right next to "hotspots" Well, those are coordinates for the mouse. Those coordinates will tell Ren'py where your hotspots are located so let's go ahead and find these coordinates. Don't save any changes yet, instead go to your HUB and launch your project, then press SHIFT+D to enter the developers menu. while navigating through the menu find the "image location picker" option which will summon a list of all the images that are inside the "game" folder. Find your hover image and open it: As the image says, draw a rectangle over the area where you want your hotspot to be recognised. You'll get he coordinates for this hotspot on the lower left corner of the window. Input these coordinates on the screens script where the "X's" are. Repeat this process for each hotspot and remember to input the coordinates that match each section, don't go mixing them by mistake. XD Once you're done, your hotspot section will look smilar to this: hotspot (720, 611, 391, 70) action Start() hotspot (726, 691, 384, 60) action ShowMenu("load") hotspot (726, 758, 378, 63) action ShowMenu("preferences") hotspot (815, 828, 209, 59) action Quit(confirm=True) These are my coordinates by the way, don't copy/paste them because they won't work for you. Get your own coordinates. XD Once you're done typing the coordinates in, save your changes to screens script and close it. Then boot up your project to check your brand new custom title screen. If all went well you'll have a fully functional main menu, otherwise scroll back and try to follow the instructions to the letter. Previously we covered assets though briefly. This time we're focusing on the essential things to make an actual VN project, that said we already have the most important asset of them all. YOU. Yep you only need one person to make a VN. This in paper however is terribly inefficient and making your VN would take you a lot longer than if you had help. But, you can't always sit around waiting for help to come, you need to show something to the community to get feedback, and maybe help, later on. So you need to get some placeholder assets and show your idea to the world. It's what I did and what you should do if you plan on making a large scale project. However there's always the alternative to go solo, which is totally possible and moreso if you happen to be a really talented individual who has all the skills needed for making a VN, if not then there's always the "one man army method" which we will cover below. Backgrounds: There's 3 ways to deal with backgrounds when getting started/going solo: 1. You have the artistic skills and you draw them by yourself. 2.You use the stock VN backgrounds readily available online (Uncle Mugen's collection is pretty solid.) just be aware that thousands of other people will be using them on their VNs as well. And 3. You use RL photographs. Out of all the choices for starter programmers and project leaders this is the most sensible option, you take a camera and venture outside to take pics of suitable locations for your VN. Contrary to popular belief, this method is used by professional studios, although this largely depends on the visual style of your project. That said you don't have to use the photos as is. You can make them look more cartoony and more suited for VN format: 1. You take your photo to Photoshop and add an image filter to it. A combination of sponge+cutout gives it a painting feel for example. 2. You take your photo to Illustrator and image trace it for "low fidelity" then crank up the paths and corners to 100% and finally export as .png (this is the method I'm using for this project.) 3. You do an outline tracing by hand and then paint over the details with Photoshop or SAI and a tablet. (you need some basic art skills for this.) Out of these 3, number 1 is the fastest and simplest to do. Chances are you have Photoshop installed no matter if you dabble on art or design or not and filtering is just 2 clicks away. Number 2 has a nicer looking tracing effect but you require Illustrator and the 3rd one is so tedious and time consuming that you probably shouldn't consider it unless your VN has less than 10 backgrounds or something like that. Those aren't the only methods available though, you can always come up with one of your own and use it, Go wild, make that creativity explode! For reference, here's what I did for one of my backgrounds: Here's the RL picture: Here's the traced and edited version. As you can see I boosted the vibrance for added cartoony feel and even added some otaku touches to the room... ......I'll give a cookie to the one who identifies them all Of course that doesn't end there. You can always make variants for other times of the day as well For example late afternoon: Night time: And even artificial light: There's tons of things you can do with photographs, so don't feel discouraged if you are not an artist or can't find artists. Always remember: Creativity is boundless. Music: This one isn't particularly hard and it's the same deal as with art mostly. 1. You compose music yourself if you have the talent and skill for it. 2.You use the readily available stock of P.B. (Public Domain) or R.F. (Royalty free) music. In both instances make sure to credit the composers properly. A good site for all things sound is freeSFX.co.uk Sprites: Here comes the big fish. One of the most important parts in any VN in existence. The graphical representations of your characters. AKA sprites. The lack of artistic skill shoots down many projects because there's not a "quick fix" for this. There are public use sprites but they are not very good and they might not suit your needs or the style of your VN. In this case if you're a one man army, you grit your teeth and start drawing. I had to that myself at some point. Practice makes perfect and while your sprites will not always be professional looking, you can only get better as you practice. If you simply cannot draw to save your life, you can always use the "rotoscope" technique. Don't be fooled by the word tho, It's just a mock term and you only need a camera and a PC. You get volunteers, take their pictures, transfer them to your PC crop and edit them the same way you do with backgrounds. You can make them look more cartoony or hell you can even go with black and white +stamp effect to make a Sin City style VN! If you are still inclined to make your own sprites however, you certainly can. That's what I'm doing for this project. Here a sample of my main heroine. Notice my Tsunako influence? What do you think? isn't she cute? Mind you, she went through 3 redesigns so indeed it's no easy task. And this will be all for now concerning the one man army method. If you have all your assets in order then let's get coding already! Let's get a test script underway. Remember that this is an actual VN project and not a mock script as before so if there's something you don't understand. Please do tell me With your assets handy, go to HUB and then open your stub script, then check that you have the following things in order. (Add stuff as needed.) REMEMBER: THESE ARE MY ASSETS, YOU NEED TO REPLACE NAMES AND FILES YOU SEE HERE WITH YOUR OWN: 1. Image definitions: Like we covered previously, you have to define most images here in the main script: 2. Character definitions: Same drill, follow the coding and remember what we've seen part 1 and 2: 3. CTC animation: a click to continue animation. it will appear when a character has finished talking. It won't activate with narration unless you define the narrator as a character. Follow the code and replace with your own animation. All you need is a set of frames in .png (images should be 30 to 50 pixels wide.) For example: a blinking arrow. The x and y values at the end must be tweaked to match the position of your textbox. 4.Custom position definitions: Chances are your sprites appear cut off from the screen or too low. Ren'py is not exactly intuitive so you can use this code to create a default position value for your sprites. Results will vary depending on the size of your sprites and the resolution of your VN. You can also use this code for custom sprite positions. To use this position remember what you learned in part 1 and 2: example: show Neru at myposition 5.Custom transitions: Ever felt the fade out was too fast or the dissolve effect needed some tweaks? Worry not, as you can make custom transitions out of the existent ones. In this case this is a slow "drop down" but you can also make a custom dissolve, example: dissolve (0.5, 1.0, 0.5), which is a very slow dissolve effect. 6. Splash screen: Ren'py doesn't have stock code for splash screens. You can make a splash image appear while your game is loading, but the loading is so fast that the splash appears for half a second sometimes. Thankfully there's custom code to make your VN boot to a splash screen before the title screen! Follow this code replacing "mysplashscreen" and "mysplashsound" with your own. And that's it for the third part of this guide, kind sirs and madams. I thank you deeply for reading this far and bearing with my ugly orthography and sorry attempts at explaining. You are now one step ahead into programming your visual novel and we'll work together for the remainder of this process. Don't forget your passion for VNs and don't lose motivation, programming a VN is hard but your efforts will certainly pay off. Do join me next time, when I'll be covering the rest of this section and UI styling in detail. Many thanks for your time and until then. See ya Kind regards. Helvetica Standard.

Memories.mp3

My commentary on this: -Most users from '12 are long gone and generally only lasted a few months to a year. Fuwanovel was quite small than, and after most users talked about all the topics that interested them, they left. - '13ers are split into two groups in my view: The '13ers from before August (or around that period) are different from the one who joined after August. -'13ers who joined before August are more similar to the '12ers in the sense that after a few months they left or significantly dropped their activity. This happened to me and to a lot of acquaintances I remember from back then. I'm different mostly in the fact that after a really long hiatus I actually came back (and became more active than ever). Back then discussions on Fuwanovel were mostly focused on detailed discussions of VNs and anime. Which was honestly fantastic while it lasted. But once most people had discussed everything they wanted to, they grew bored of Fuwanovel; and generally left. Keep in mind this was back during Aaeru's reign; and she was more concerned with fighting copyright than with fostering the community (in my view at least). And I think the flaky attitude in the community back then reflected that. -'13ers after August: This would probably be the first renaissance of Fuwanovel. This was when users like Nosebleed and Nohman joined, and also when Kaguya published his 50 translated VNs that you should read before you die. Fuwanovel was finally starting to build it's own community and wasn't simply a place solely for dedicated VN fans to discuss what they wanted to and then leave. This was a period when newcomers were coming and taking over the place, creating a new community. I honestly felt quite alienated during this time because a lot of people I remembered from earlier '13 were no longer active and most active users were new to me. Some people were even new to VNs! Which was crazy to me, since back in earlier '13 and '12 virtually nobody that was new to Fuwanovel was new to VNs. Most people who joined back then were already VN fans and just wanted a place to discuss them. Nonetheless, it was the new users from back then that helped shape Fuwanovel's community in a new direction. -'14ers: The revolutionary direction that started with the community that was active during mid to late '13 was starting to really come into fruition I think. Honestly, I was absent for most of this year. I just know this was when OriginalRen started becoming really active, and he in particular helped built a sense of community. Again, I still felt alienated during this time (hence why I was absent for most of it). The new community was a community I really didn't feel much attachment to back then. I appreciated that Fuwanovel was growing and doing well, but I felt really lonely. At this point most members I was previously acquainted with were either long gone (most notably was Ryoji), or were promoted (Tay, Down, and I think Zaka (I think this was when he started becoming an important Fuwa blogger)). Honestly, back then OriginalRen's community podcasts only made me feel more out of place; because they served as a painful reminder that this was a new Fuwanovel, and that I was not a part of it. '15ers: The revolution of late '13 and '14 was over, and a new society was formed. With Tay as the stable leader, and Fuwanovel thriving; I returned. This was when I finally reintegrated myself back into the community. I don't know why, but for whatever reason I finally felt like a part of Fuwanovel again. I really liked the new community (and no longer felt threatened by it) and chose to participate in it. In fact, I like the community so much now, that I think I actually prefer it to what I had in early '13. And that's saying a lot, as I have some fond memories of back then. Well, that's my commentary on the different years Fuwanovel has been around. The community has changed quite a bit, and that's my humble perspective on it.

Honestly Yume Miru Kusuri is one of the former gateway vns...it has a good amount of plot, sex, decent art, decent music and is short enough to keep most people's attention it has a few different characters and chances are you will be able to appreciate at least one of them. Now whether the vn is good or bad really depends on what you've read prior. To someone just starting out this is a great visual novel and it was for a lot of us who read it back when it first came out before there were a whole lot of good visual novels available for reading. Before fan translating ever really took off visual novels were primarily only able to be bought via JAST USA, (Mangagamer had not yet come into existence) and fan-translations were in infant stages with even Fate/Stay Night only being in trial stages and the only real fan-translated visual novel available for reading being Tsukihime. Kana Little Sister had issues when it was released, Ever 17 while brilliant had translation errors, censorship, and a few other small problems thanks to Hirameki, and really there were very few story emphasized visual novels at this time. YMK is the visual novel that changed that as far as company translated visual novels went. Yes it may have had a ton of ero scenes but they were done in a way that helped emphasize the overall plot. JAST really went out on trying to push the title and even tried to emphasize that this was a classic from Japan and a much more plot driven title. The game released in April of 2007 in english so the visual novel is quite old compared to what a lot of people have read and has not aged overly well in the advent of the rise of fan translations and better titles released since then but when you look at it in the context of what else was released prior to it you realize that YMK was a pretty good title for the time of its release.

I posted this in my issues thread but, just so other people can see, ITH does not work with Angel Beats, it crashes the game (at least most of the people report this issue) ITHVNR however hooks just fine and you don't even need an h-code for it. http://www.hongfire.com/forum/showthread.php/438331-ITHVNR-ITH-with-the-VNR-engine/page2?s=03200a033e213962d4ac5ad51689ca6e It works the same way ITH does (similar interface) but using different hooking thingies whatever. Point is, it works and I've tested it myself and can confirm it.

Digging through our reports a little, I know they're not e-mails but, some incredibly useful info. The best part about this spam post is that, it's not even trying to accomplish anything, it's just random infodump. 10/10 Title: The scent of ovulating females peak men's testosterone stages, investigate exhibits

Because it only takes one "scandal" for everything to be destroyed. And trust me the West is the best at coming up with scandals. There's demands by fans, but over here you also have all the people who turn games into a political thing and would likely attack many of Japan's games to fill their political agenda. The west is plagued by people that work for the sole sake of running their mouths over every little thing and turn it into a national issue. Because they have nothing else to do with their lives but to complain, otherwise they have no jobs. Eroge becoming popular here would be like building a huge bait for them. I'll say it again, all it takes is one game to get enough attention to make the whole company come crumbling down. We have nothing but our own culture to blame.

I was bored. I did this. This was probably a terrible idea but LMFAO wHo cAREAS HAHA Xd. Yeah my mic is a potato, hope you enjoy it. (✿◠‿◠)

This is a long comprehesive guide It has now been moved to the mainsite. to read it click the chapter images for the individual parts: note: part 4-5 not made yet. but hopefully will be added in future

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I wrote previously about a display bug in Dual Tail's strategy eroge Venus Blood -Hypno- that prevented interface text from displaying correctly in non-Japanese Windows. Fan hacker binaryfail generously donated a patch that fixes the issue. I sent this patch to Ninetail (parent company of Dual Tail) via Twitter, requesting that they include the fix on their official support page. Project manager and game designer Keimaru responded to me in broken English. His response, edited by me, is as follows. Original: I thanked him and went my way. A commentator on Reddit later informed me that Keimaru had posted a much longer comment in Japanese. This comment showed such sincere and thoughtful consideration of the issue, from a Japanese developer's standpoint, that I decided it needed to be relayed to the English audience. Japanese eroge developers are well known for their reluctance to get involved with the Western market. Packaging and splash screens prominently declare "For sale in Japan only". Westerners tend to dismiss this policy as apathy for foreign fans, even regarding the practice with contempt as just another manifestation of Japanese isolationism and xenophobia. When eroge companies block foreign IPs, they automatically assume that the company has closed its doors to Western release (despite abundant evidence to the contrary). "The companies are just being xenophobic," they say with bitter contempt. "Might as well just fan translate their titles, since they'll never officially release their games in English. They don't want dirty gaijin playing their games." It's about time that we get the other side of this story. And who better to deliver it than a prominent and well-loved Japanese developer--one puzzling over how to respond to a bug that prevents foreign fans from playing his games? I provide my translation of Keimaru's Twitter comments below. I regret that my translation skills could not fully convey the honest simplicity of the original message, but I did my best to at least get across the ideas and intent. We've been aware for some time that Venus Blood Hypno has a bug affecting users of non-Japanese Windows. This bug causes Japanese characters to display incorrectly, making certain interface elements unreadable. We had reports very early on from users of non-Japanese Windows about this, but we weren't able to resolve the issue. Today however, a DLL file that fixes the issue has been sent to us from what appears to be a user from overseas. On one hand, we're incredibly thankful! On the other hand, this presents a bit of a dilemma... In the past, certain distributors bought up Japanese eroge and sold them overseas without consulting Japanese developers. This led to an international scandal, causing considerable turmoil within Japan as well. Since then, we've been obligated to display warnings like "For sale in Japan only" during game start-up and on the packaging. This user's request raises a worrisome issue. While there's no issue if users want to play these games in Japan on a non-Japanese OS, if this is a request from overseas to support foreign OS's, then that's an entirely different matter. At that point, isn't it no longer just our company's problem? Should we respond to this request and support users that we were never supposed to be selling to in the first place, since selling to these users risks another incident? Is it even ok to support them? I'm not sure... Honestly, I'm torn. What to do...? If we officially support this patch, that would have to be our decision as a company [our stance on the matter]. To be honest, we could just leave things in a gray area, where we let good-intentioned users do as they please in the shadows while we stay silent on the matter... To be blunt, when we received very early reports of the bug from users we believed to be Chinese, our user support team felt they were really skirting the line with regards to the JP ONLY clause, thinking 'I hope these people are playing within the country.' They puzzled over how to handle the issue. If a user buys a game in Japan, returns to his home country, and plays it on his own PC purely for his own enjoyment--is that ok? Where's the line? As just one company of many in this industry, it's extremely hard to make such a decision. This nagging feeling... is there anyone who could resolve this issue? No, there probably isn't. A conclusion arrived at after some debate: after things have settled down let's quietly fix this. The issue seems like it would be resolved with the previous version of the KiriKiri engine. It--it's not like we're fixing it because the overseas user told us to! We're doing this voluntarily, because we feel like it (guh). However we're pretty busy so it might be a while before we get around to it. I don't know about you, but Ninetail just earned one new (very loud) fan. For an example of one of Ninetail's outstanding games, see my Venus Blood -Gaia- review! (NSFW version, SFW mirror) Special thanks to those of the Fuwanovel community who provided feedback on the translation, especially Majikoi fan translator dowolf.

I haven't read too many VNs since before recently, my PC stats were mostly not good enough. Demo demo, I really like the VNs that I've gone through, and honestly, I'd like to see more VN adaptations...though it's a very difficult thing to do. It's not like I've been lurking Fuwanovel for a while before joining, so this is all new enough to me. VNs have really given me a renewed motivation to write again. Yoroshiku, minna!

I-it's true...I like Milk Tea. Oh, and yoroshiku!

My guess is... 'We decided to remake Tsukihime based on the anime, to prove that the anime, whose existence the fans deny, does not really suck donkey balls'. PS: rofl

Get hyped. (Next issue of Type-Moon Ace will have something about the Tsukihime remake)

In order to obtain a percentage that accurate... Wouldn't you need to have used at least 100 umbrellas? I think the most I've used is 5 or 6. Should I bring out the sarcasm sign? You may be in need.

If not me, nobody I guess it's kind of like honourably admitting defeat and committing sudoku.

Confession: I bet that's just a clever ruse to find out where she lives Confession 2: I'm really happy it's raining because that means I don't have to water the plants.

Got lots of friends after i joined Fuwa. Some of them are really special to me. i didnt expected that i will be in Fuwa for this long though, since back then i was just spamming majikoi thread, i didnt even know how i could get 1k post. FYI my fav thread gonna be my own thread..yeah the now dead "traps are cute thread", please spam more traps! And i want to say thanks to FSG for lots and lots memories.However i decided to leave not a long time ago because after Arakura left its not the same fsg anymore(and there some annoying people ). Even then i`m still thankful for loads of funny and sweet memories. Hm......for the final i really want to say a special thanks to my favourite Palestinian When i saw him for the first time, i never thought our "relationship" will go this far. Flirting,Bitching,Sexcaming,and other stuff.Whenever i feel down he knows how to hit the spot to make me happy. Especially the Tsundere RP...it hits the bullseye in my heart.It took me almost a year(i think) to get this photo and yup.....he is as hot as dem Robert downey JR. I really hope our friendship will last, and stay sexy and awesome HMN. (Nini,HSMS,Cofee,jptje and Shu....i`ll write things bout u another time, all of you are precious to me, more precious than the ring )

There's a great 2nd hand japanese store close to me (in New York City; called BookOff). They have RAW jp games there for very cheap. I got Tales of Destiny two there for like $10 or something. If I happen to be there, I'll keep you in mind, if it's cheap enough, I'll grab you Xenosaga II and III. They had Crosschannel in PSP, Ever17 in PS2 (though it's gone now somebody had bought it), and lots more other RPGs (like the entire Breath of Fire series). The selections fluctuates since it's based off of the people selling their stuff to them. From what I can tell, there are lots more people selling japanese games to them than buying, that's why the prices are low, and the selections are fairly large for being in America.

The face when you realize that all of the porn emails you guys are linking come from browsing sites with porn on them and signing up for certain things.

Considering Angel Beats has been my #1 anime since Middle School...well...safe to say the hype has been strong since 2010.

Confession: I have spent the entire day listening to music and it wasn't a waste of time in the least. Utopia Melodia

Fuwa has become an irreplaceable place for me. I joined because I wanted to talk to people about the stuff I like, and I wasn't able to find such friendly place like fuwa before. Part of the reason is also me being lonely during the spring. I had barely any school left while my best friends were still studying, so I sought some kind of interaction from here. Over the time Fuwa kind of turned into haven for me, a haven where I can have fun and share my experiences I couldn't share with anyone before. I think I'd be much worse off if I hadn't joined and continued with my hobbies alone. Fuwa brought new kind of cheerfulness to my life. So continuing in the same way as I started: Thanks to all of you wonderful people!

Instructions unclear. House is now on fire. Good job!

Thers only busty on that picture though

tons of h-scenes & surprisingly good plot? try Harumade, Kururu

Just as Heizei said above, Amiami ships internationally. I have had it preordered on there since the day they offered preorders. If you want to buy it legally, you can also try: http://www.jlist.com/product/PCG8460 Saw that go up earlier today, so if that interests you can go with that instead of going with Amiami.

You make it sound like some silk road smuggling had to have happened Amiami ships internationally, you don't always have to go through a private service (such as Ren's) to import games. I was thinking about preordering a hard copy through them a while back, but decided not

La from True Remembrance About saya

Way back, the forum is more of a "if it's not VN related, it should not be posted in the forum". It's only later that they added boards for members to post things unrelated to VN.

I haven't played Rewrite yet but I loved Little Busters and I'm loving Angel Beats. One of the things that sets these two games apart from a lot of other VNs is the emphasis on a group of friends rather than it just being about one guy chasing after one of many girls. Even on the routes focusing on individual girls you are still spending lots of time with everyone. They flesh out all the characters in your group a lot and it feels more like you're part of a circle of friends than just some lonely guy looking for virtual girls to date. Eustia also captured this feeling pretty well with how active Kaim was in the community.

*ahem* But what about my right to free speech??

Yeah. Fuwanovel's a pretty awesome community. If it weren't, then why would we still be here in the first place? Not to mention all these dank memes. It's wonderful.

Confession: I made the appointment today. Hopefully things turn out well. I'll either be going in this Monday or Wednesday (they're gonna call me back about it).

No homo

Monthly data for May, forums.fuwanovel.net

Thanks, and looking forward to it. I might actually get the tests out of then way before implementing anymore functionality to get the existing pieces to some form of stability (being confident in your skills is not enough, even when my product manager at work keeps saying "testing is for scaredy cats"sarcastically )

Keep up the hard work guys, I really hope the patch comes out before the summer ends ,really want to read this while I have the spare time. It's like waiting for the Majikoi patch, except with more hype, because I can't finish Majikoi without the sequel patched first, Don't want to wait in between games

You can donate for a higher like quota, Oh god it is pay to win!

Ok also guys remember that killing is also a bad thing and a very complicated topic so no talking about people killing each other in videogames and eroge, FSN is so evil! (Oh and those detective games and stuff like that, too evil to talk about. And what was it... corpse party? - that game has even evil name!). Actually can there be consensual murder? I guess if the person wants to be sacrificed to gods or something. You know since the lolis in the games I play actually like it which I don't think can be said about murdering someone. But then again you cant really ask the murdered person if they liked being killed... unless they turn into a zombie or a demon... that actually has a mind... I'm pretty sure there are some VNs like that as well... I don't even want to know about them! (Don't even remind me the games that involve consensual sex with a slime [yes, its a real tag on VNDB]). But hey, worse crap happens in the world, Apple took down games about American civil war because they have historically correct depiction of confederate flag. History used to be censored in my country too during the soviet era and stuff, its actually funny what my parents were taught at school and the actual history that happened. But yeah, censorship is never good, usually leads into revolutions and stuff so be careful. Or people just leave somewhere without it... that's the easier way I guess. Damn you stalkers, I need to hide my online status xD Yes, people usually link interesting topics to me expecting my opinion xD

出る杭を打つ is drawn from a Japanese saying that is basically the opposite of the American saying 'the squeaky wheel gets the grease'. He is taking an even larger risk than Sanahtlig is hinting at by saying this. Japanese companies in general do not take kindly to their employees putting the company out there on a limb, and the industry already suffered badly as a whole from the infamous Rapelay incident and a number of follow-up incidents. I don't think those of us over here can really comprehend the pressures the average Japanese companies are under. For one thing, social pressure can turn into economic pressure with alarming swiftness over there. For another, Japan is reliant enough on other countries' trade for its survival that these kind of scandals overseas can cause hysterical reactions from their lawmakers. The eroge industry, being a niche industry by nature, is vulnerable to crackdowns in a way that the car and food production industries aren't. Since eroge are basically a guilty pleasure and a luxury, there are plenty of lawmakers that wouldn't see a problem with doing away with them if it meant they could improve their own chances of remaining in office. It isn't like they are universally accepted, even by otakus... so before you criticize eroge-makers for being 'xenophobic', you should at least try to see the bind they are in.

And it's up - still missing some basic usage information in the readme, but since this is easily updatable I'll let the few people who know their way around PHP code have a stab at it already. https://github.com/Fuwanovel/VNDB-Client The recommended entry point is the ClientFacade class, which abstracts away most of the complexities of the client, see my previous post for an example.

Monster Girl Quest come into mind

Subtitled: How Fuwanovel/Aaeru saved my life. Hello dear Fuwanovel community, Many people around the forums and IRC already know me under nicknames like "the Fuwanovel coder", various variations of my alias like "Naynay", "Naylicious", or simply "the German" (because I'm the only active German person on IRC as far as I know). In real life I'm called Timo by coworkers and family and "Dieter" by very close friends who know the origin of that nickname. I'm working as a professional web developer for a few years now, but have been creating web sites for various purposes for more than 10 years already, mostly for private servers for Ragnarok Online and Lineage 2 back in the day and later guild homepages and forums when I was actively playing World of Warcraft. Not too surprising that I signed up here and immediately PMed Aaeru back when she was asking for PHP help for the site as I have just been waiting for this opportunity. Many people ask what keeps me going for me to invest quite a lot of time, even going as far as reworking the entire backend and quite a lot of the frontend AND introducing many new features to a site I have absolutely no relations with. There are two reasons for that, one is very simple while the other is quite complex, the first and easy one being that I was looking for a project like I did 10 years ago for quite a lot of time; Now that I'm professional and not just a random script kid I really wanted to start making a name for myself, so I loved the idea on working Fuwanovel because it's a site about something I hold very dear, Visual Novels. Now the other one is quite complex and reaches back about as long as I can remember. I've got crippling depressions and anxiety issues, bad enough for me to feel too powerless to even leave my bed save for basics like eating, drinking and sanitary needs. Most people don't even notice it except when I vanish for weeks at a time - because I may be shy and pretty reserved, but I love getting to know people and am fairly talkative once I warm up to someone, so they can't even imagine me being depressed. I'm introverted (meaning social interaction expends energy for me) but generally love being around people I know and feel I need social interaction to function properly. This is also why staying at home also depresses me even further, until I either snap out of it or it spirals completely out of control like it did last winter, where I stayed at home for a whole five months. Which, as most people can imagine, is long enough for my medical attests not being enough for me to keep my job. So I was depressed, missed social contact - my best friend who used to force me to go out with him when I was feeling down was working in the US, so he wasn't around to save me from the downward spiral I was in - and about to lose my job (which wasn't perfect, but had its fun days and at least paid the bills), spiraling everything even further out of control. All I did during that time was sleep, eat, drink, shower and read. I read the Visual Novels I torrented earlier that year but never came around to read because of work and other stuff leaving me too tired to even read in the evenings. It didn't take me too long to either finish or tire of them, I simply didn't have enough; Going through the hassle of searching VNDB for new translated Visual Novels that interested me and then having to torrent them, find and apply the TL patch was too much of a hassle at the time. I was seriously considering just ending my life right there, because reading Visual Novels made me tear up and feel for the characters, it's the most touching medium for me because of the combination of graphics, music and writing - especially the songs in some of them and acted as kind of a substitute for all the social interaction I was missing out on because of my depressions. That was when I found Fuwanovel and its easy-to-use interface, most VNs were prepatched so everything was pretty easy for me to work out. I started and finished HoshiMemo, G-Senjou no Maou and the MajiKoi partial patch and began reading Rewrite. They kept me going long enough for the worst to tide over, for me to finally pick up the broken pieces of myself again and start getting back into life again, get back on medication and search for a therapist to work this out once and for all, as I was having these downtimes annually. Fuwanovel literally saved my life; It was my main motivation for wanting to help out when Aaeru was asking for help on the site and it still keeps me going today, 3 months and thousands of lines of code later; I owe this site so much, and I love the community and working on new features with everyone involved. A special shout-out here to: Naomi, Aaeru, Tay, solidbatman, shcboomer, Kendjin, Rakushun, DrKleiner, Lewycool, Zakamutt, ThatPlayer and Mephisto - and everyone else I'm forgetting to name explicitly. Please stick around so I may never lose interest in the site. I hope everyone who reads this enjoys this small, very personal write-up. I'm looking forward to continue working with everyone to keep this site running and become even more awesome, complete and more widely known with each passing day. I love you guys.