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I'm Josh, the founder of the Studio Élan. I'm also part of Alienworks, the group that released "Highway Blossoms" and is working on "The Human Reignition Project." With Studio Élan, we just released a demo for our first game, "Heart of the Woods." It's a yuri game through and through, although I primarily consider it to be a fantasy game with romance elements, rather than a romance game with fantasy elements. I've copy/pasted the synopsis for the game below. The demo is available on Steam for PC only, and it's on Itch.io for PC/Mac/Linux. It'll be on Denpasoft probably next week, and we'll also update the Steam version with Mac/Linux versions around then too. There's a free patch to add in the adult content - for the demo, this is just one scene. The character artist for the game is Rosuuri, whom I also worked with on HRP and HB, but who's best known for her gorgeous fanart, especially FGO. This will be her first ever time drawing adult content. Hope you like the game, please let us know any comments or feedback you have here or on the respective store pages. And please, before anyone else asks: no, we're not concerned by the recent Steam takedowns and don't think it'll affect us (backtracking or not). Steam Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/844660/Heart_of_the_Woods/ Itch.io Link: https://vnstudioelan.itch.io/heart-of-the-woods-demo Adult Patch Link: https://vnstudioelan.com/hotw-r18patch/ This demo is a sample of the full game and contains a selection of scenes from across the whole story. We've hand selected the scenes in order to give a taste of the game without spoiling too many of the major plot points (we figured it's a given that Maddie and Abby end up together). To help fill in some of the blanks though, there are demo-exclusive chibi versions of Maddie and Tara who will help fill you in on what's happening along the way. Heart of the Woods is a fantasy yuri visual novel about paranormal investigation, ancient mysteries, and a love between two girls that transcends life and death. Maddie Raines, manager, editor, and general business-handler for her best friend Tara’s popular paranormal vlog series, is swept up in a dangerous supernatural crisis when she’s dragged against her will to the remote European village of Eysenfeld. A strange young woman named Morgan has promised them undeniable proof of real paranormal phenomena, and what she has to offer eclipses anything they’d ever seen before. However, out of all the strange occurrences the three of them bear witness to, one in particular captivates Maddie in a way she’s never been before: the ghost of a young woman. This woman is Abigail, the victim of a centuries-old injustice now bound eternally to the forest surrounding Eysenfeld. Drawn to Maddie in a way she can’t explain, Abigail reveals herself to another person for the first time in more than 200 years. While Tara and Morgan investigate the mysteries surrounding the village itself, Maddie begins to form a bond with Abigail that grows to be more intense than any bond she’s felt before. As she learns the truth about Abigail’s death and imprisonment, she realizes that it falls to her and her friends to break the curse that has ruled over Eysenfeld for centuries. But more importantly than that, it falls to her to finally free the woman she loves. Features: -Chibi characters to fill in the gaps between scenes -Incredible character and CG art from Rosuuri -Fully original backgrounds and soundtrack -Multiple accessibility options -Extra features including a music room, CG viewer, and guest art gallery -At least one really, really gay ghost

Thanks for the kind words! The demo actually does have some exclusive content (the very first scene, as well as the chibi stuff, although the first scene might be included in the full game from the extras menu or something.) Regarding HRP, we're still working on it, but it's mostly a matter of real-life issues causing a lot of delays and stuff. When we ran the Kickstarter most of us were in college or in one case even high school, so our availability has changed a lot since then. Most of us who have been working on other projects too are ones who do VN stuff full-time as a career (for instance, my day job is working for everyone's favorite localizer, Sekai Project) while some other members are doing dumb, boring stuff like medical research to cure cancer. Also, we were bad at estimating and planning schedules back then, so we dramatically underestimated how much time it would take (for most of us, HRP was our first ever project). So basically, we're still working on it at the same time as our other games, it's just taking longer than initially expected.

Of course I have the answer, and it is when I started playing them for the first time. That was the real golden age.

if anything i am dumber now and starting to enjoy seeing the same 3 stories told over and over

Not exactly on topic, but if I've learnt something about "golden ages", be in literature, cinematography, videogames, even life itself ffs... is that people tend to idealize the past and consider the current state to be on decline. Most often that not it's just a biased perception. Not to say that it's not possible to talk of some golden age in some way, but experience tells me to not pay much heed to those doomsayers that babble about how brilliant the past was and how bleak a future awaits us.

Peak, peek, and piqued I think that's too subjective to determine. When it comes to video games, for example, there are people that would say the 90s-early 2000s were the golden age of RPGs with their isometric views and complex gameplay. At the same time, others say they are complete dogshit and the modern vision of RPGs like Skyrim are much better. With visual novels specifically I don't think there's any "golden age", especially because technology does not affect VNs very much. Just like with RPGs, some people will idolise older VNs and claim newer stuff is brainless, and some people will prefer the modern art-focused moeges (unless their name is VirginSmasher). Nobody is right, nobody is correct. For the record, my personal opinion is that all visual novels have been trash thus far.

you were gone?

VNs have always been and will always be trash tbh

The male version of our sexual prediction quiz is now up here. Have fun~

Yes

I've been analysing the sexual content of VNs, what's become more common, what gets the best ratings, and what content tends to come together; and thought I'd present some of my results in a slightly different way: in a quiz! Using the extensive character database on vndb, I tracked which appearance and personality traits were more or less likely to engage in types of sexual activity, and put the results in a quiz format so you can enter the tropes and it'll tell you how the percentages diverge from the average. This is a slightly silly way to present the results, but I thought you guys might enjoy it. You can try the quiz here.

I'm, like, into visual novels and stuff. Enough so that I decided to learn the language! I will hang out like an awkward nerd and maybe help translate stuff if anyone needs a hand. Nice t' meet ya, or something. (I really have no idea what to put here. ;_;)

Yeah! Who says esoteric knowledge is useless? I can imagine it now, UltimateMoeWorks on an archaeological exhibition. UMW: "I did it! I found a fossilized Anomalocaris!" Archaeologist: "That's a fossilized signboard..." UMW: "No, it's a Anomalocaris from the Cambrian Period." Archaeologist: "It says 'Blockbuster' on it." UMW: "All the more evidence."

Either way, you instantly gave me a succinct neurological disorder. Color me impressed.

I think you have synesthesia

Whenever I read something like this, I always wonder about one major issue, which is unavoidable when investigating issues like this: cause and effect. Will reading make you smarter or are smart people more likely to read? New Zealand has tested a bunch of people for decades and now they can say the more TV a 10 year old child watches, the lower the grades.... or was it IQ... Either way the question is if the brain is damaged by TV or if it is because children, who are already bright have too much going on in their heads to accept passive entertainment for a long time. Another one is breast feeding (take that prude Americans). Substitute in a bottle is less perfect for brain development and the child will lose 3 IQ points on average as grown up if fed by bottle. Is it the food or is it because stupid parents are less likely to breastfeed, meaning children who are breastfed will statistically have genes for higher IQ? Answering such questions is not an easy task because how to tell those two apart and how can we be sure it's not a combined effect of both? The same is an issue in the first article. The second article seems to have the same issue with the Japanese study while the Pompeii counters this issue better by having a before and after test, which should help to filter out the differences between people and get more precise readings of the effect of the book reading. As such, that specific study is more trustworthy than the other studies in regard to the effect. I would say the premise for the studies are severely simplified and you can't say any TV show vs any book. For instance you will likely get completely different effect from a documentary than you will get for slapstick comedy. Likewise there are good books and then there are horrible books. I was forced to read one of the latter in school and the only thing I remember from it was the story was really boring and the author had spelling mistakes, which were not fixed prior to printing. I don't think there is any positive effect from reading such a book. Sounds to me like the issue here has less to do with TV vs book and more to do with parents using the TV as babysitter rather than spending time reading a book for the child. As for VNs vs amine. I would say it's likely that VNs are better for your brain than anime. Anime will likely have the same effect as TV shows. Generally speaking, anime is fast paced, has a tendency to be shallow and in any way acts like sitcoms. There are exceptions, but generally speaking they aren't brain challenging. If it is say a sengoku era anime and you pause whenever there is a name and try to remember what the real person did, then you become active and push/train your brain and as such train your memory. VNs on the other hand can be beneficial, but they don't have to be. It depends on how it's written and what goes on. If it's a machine translated nukige, then good luck trying to convince yourself you will benefit from it. If it is a well written story where you try to keep track of past events in order to understand what is going on and perhaps see if you can predict anything, then you train your brain and you could benefit from it. Another factor, which should not be overlooked is the reader. If you read a masterpiece and speedrun through it without digging into the story, pausing to recollect the scenes etc, then you will not get the benefits other people might get from reading the very same title. This is yet another layer, which makes the question even harder to answer. Your language skills comes into play as well. If you have language shortcomings and miss out on the details, you will not benefit as much if at all from having a well written VN. You might benefit from the training of a foreign language though.

Hmmm, "should" is a strange word here, because every person who reads VNs does it for different things. Many people who read VNs actually like sex-scenes and expect them. I personally don't mind them, as long as they actually don't seem completely out of place in the story (which basically happens in almost every plot-focused VN). What I actually want, on the other hand, is variety. I mean, if we have a typical eroge, it always means that a) we are going to have a story with a 1st person narrative; b) the protagonist is male and surrounded by a large group of attractive females. It's already a great constraint on the story! I mean, even VNs like Ever17 that don't have h-scenes still follow the same eroge formula, which is kind of frustrating. And, you know, there actually are quite a lot of doujin authors who don't care about these constraints at all and create quite good titles. Fata Morgana is a great example of a VN that literally has nothing of an eroge in it. I'd say, it's way more influenced by western literature than anything else. Umineko is another good example. On the other hand, as long as the budget of a work increases, the originality often drops. Which is actually pretty understandable: the developers need to make sure that all the extra money they added to the production comes back. And the experience shows quite well that people like sex, and the developers who try to experiment with going all-ages may fail. So, imo, expecting major changes in the Japanese VN industry right now is hopeless.

Confession: I thought those reactions were for when you whip your donger out

Confession: I'm not sure how to interpret any of the smileys we have, but I still use them a lot.

Confession: neither do we

@Happiness+ Oh, sorry, reading again through your original comment, it looks like I actually misread what your point was. Well, I'm being me again.

They don't Need proxy

It includes the OST

That is the whole game though, the amazon link lol

す、すみません！

We missed your spicy april fools jokes boss!

My readership is elite JOPs that refuse to admit they look at Fuwo but look at my blog

.

Looking good! Ah yes, every good story needs one of those

What

Welcome to our glorious forum full of awkward nerds. I'm sure you'll fit right in!

https://www.suruga-ya.jp/product/detail/120116239001 https://www.amazon.co.jp/みなとカーニバルFD【予約キャンペーン-主題歌-サウンドトラックCD-Amazon-co-jpオリジナル特典-オリジナルポストカード付き】/product-reviews/B071KVBMPJ

No complains.

I ...... um....

Not at all disappointed with the results. Now I just need to figure out how to become an eroge protagonist. I love how 4 of my categories in the subjected to section are blowjob, handjob, footjob, and boobjob (I wouldn't mind being subjected to a vibrator, either).

Thank you for the warm welcome everyone. Thanks! I will definitely give it a read. Yeah, I can't imagine life without anime; the stories in anime have always sort of shaped my worldview and values growing up by exposing me to culturally relative concepts that I never would have encountered. Well, in response to @Pik_Lesiak and @tymmur, if it wasn't for fan translators, I don't think I would have been exposed to translated media and consequently decided to learn a second language and study translation in university, albeit in a different language pair. Ayo! Totally down man once I get further along. Gotta get that VN xp! I'm learning from this Living Language Japanese box set, but i'm still in the first book (beginner) of the three, lol.

Welcome to Fuwanovel, and feel free to ask if you need help here. Hope you'll enjoy yourself here.

Yo.

Welcome!

If you care enough about reading a VN to the point of personally contacting a fan-translator, you might as well use MTL software or just learn japanese.

fuckin plebs using MLA. Chicago/Turabian or gtfo

For a second I thought you meant porn involving books, instead of books containing porn.

Phew, it feels good finally being able to talk about this. Sisterly Bliss is definitely something to look forward to for yuri fans! And it will be uncensored, which I'm super excited about. The artist really put effort into all the art, even what was put under mosiacs, which is not always the case for eroge artists. If you haven't checked it out already, you can see some sample CGs and more on Mangagamer's blog. (Link contains NSFW pictures)

lol

Welcome to Fuwanovel, and sorry for the late greeting. If you need more VN Recommendation here, just ask us if possible and I hope you'll have fun here PS - In regard of hospitalization, I think it's depend on each people whether they'll spent time by playing VN, reading manga, or just doing nothing. Although if anything I guess the patient nowadays would be playing with their gadget because not doing anything while hospitalized would be boring. I'm sure that all of the hospitalized people would be more concerned to stay alive, and I'm certain that read manga/VN is allowed as long as there's no rule that forbid it (After all the patient need distraction from the boredom).

Japanese has a super rich vocabulary. Even the most confident translators would often look up words in translations, sometimes just for confirmation, but not infrequently simply because they've never encountered the word before or it's being used in a context that they've never seen it used before thus confirming what other possible uses of the word there may be. From what I've read, most tertiary educated native speakers know approximately 50,000 words. Literature, depending on complexity, often uses infrequently used words for colour, and even native speakers will encounter words they've never seen before - often they can surmise the meaning simply from context simply because it is their native language, but not always. Guessing at a word's meaning is not accurate enough for translation. By the time one is fluent in a second language, they usually know about 10,000 words. The likelihood of needing a dictionary is still high at that level, yet they clearly have the knowledge to translate. The most famous Japanese dictionaries have almost 500,000 words in them...

Thanks Funhaus for showing this abomination to me

You're living in the golden age English wise.