Plk_Lesiak

It doesn't look bad at all (I liked VNs with worse art for sure), but it's also a bit hard to judge. There are some specific skills that go into creating VN art, like doing multiple facial expressions on one character, that you can't really assess from just one drawing. On the other hand, you won't really know until you try it. If you're not sure how much energy you want to invest, make it simple. Create a prototype or prologue of sorts. Make it about two girls and upload it to Yuri Game Jam to get some feedback. Sorry if it sounds cynical, but you don't have to start big or even start good. You just need to figure stuff out and make a genuine effort, and there's a very good chance people will like it. Edit: Of course it's a bit tricky it you want to make money from it. But leave that part to when you're actually pretty sure your skills and ideas are up to the challenge. I actually don't like people selling their super early game development experiments. When you ask people for money, you expose yourself for much harsher scrutiny. If you ask me to pay for something that doesn't look or feel like a commercial product, I'll quite likely trash you. If you put it out for free and I see issues with it, you'll get constructive feedback and encouragement. ;]

Good question to ask on Lemma where actual developers hang out. But IMO, the ability to tell multi-route, interactive stories is the obvious one. With VNs in which multi-route structure matters, it's not even a question why they are not in any other medium. They simply couldn't be. You could possibly ask why are they not other kinds of video games, but especially with SoL titles, that kind of framing makes little sense? There are of course ways to convey stories through gameplay, but if your number one goal is to present a complex, branching narrative, this kind of interactive fiction is just a logical and cost-effective choice. With kinetic novels it's more of a legitimate question. but still, VNs offer a pretty unique multimedia experience. Would Eden* manga, Eden* LN or Eden* novel be as rich of an experience as the original is? Probably not, because they wouldn't offer that complete mix of high-quality visuals, music, VA and literary text. They could modify the original to create an excellent experience in their own formula, but they'd have to sacrifice some aspects of it in the process. Not to claim VNs are by default a superior medium, because that's always a dumb thing to say with how much taste and execution matters in this, but they definitely have their merits. And in the end, there's VN being PC games that can include porn. I'm always a bit sceptical about claims of what porn can do for a story, but I have no doubts about how much story can do for porn. In the West, pornography with genuine, compelling context to it doesn't exist. It all operates in the Pornhub philosophy of fap-length videos with 30-second buildups. If you want to tell a genuine story combined with hentai you make a VN and for the players, it offers an experience that they pretty much can't find anywhere else.

I can speak only for myself and my motivation to read VNs is a bit sketchy in the first place. At first, I simply kept them as an allowed exception while trying to limit my video game habits. It evolved to the current state of affairs, where I more or less stopped playing any other kind of games. The reason I find visual novel way less toxic for me is because they require some basic intellectual effort to follow the story and don't include endless gameplay loops I could burn countless hours on. They're stories to experience, and not autistic sandboxes that'll suck me in for a week and spit out with with bloodshot eyes and realisation of dozens of hours burned on something that didn't even left me an impression that would be worth sharing with anyone. But, if course, if there wasn't something in VN that I really enjoyed, I wouldn't get so much into them. For me its: 1. Incredible variety of conclusive romance stories. I honestly didn't know I liked romance stories this much before I came back to watching anime regularly and started reading VNs. But anime quite too often means harem comedies and I happen to hate "romance" in those. Because they never commit and when they do, it's usually not the girl I was rooting for. This is why having a route for every heroine is an enormous perk. I identified the best girl? I can get the MC to romance her. I like some secondary ones? Also covered. The rest of them? I probably got enough connection to the whole cast by this point to enjoy them too in the end. No linear media will give me that. 2. Variety of romance stories once more. Yuri, otome, galge, BL. Fluffy love stories and serious drama. Tiny games for half an evening and novel-sized epics. VNs got you all covered. It might get stale if you just read moege, but, partially because of my weird blogging endeavours, I end up reading incredibly varied stuff and so far I didn't get bored of any of it. 3. Anime art. I love anime art over any other style. Give me anime girls kissing and you can take all the rest of my visual media away, I won't complain much. But aside from my personal deviancy, VN art is just that good in many cases. 4. And well, for someone like me, with pretty limited visual imagination, in many cases VNs are simply more compelling than literature. I like having at least some visual representation of what I'm reading to give my mind some point of reference/guide on how to interpret it all. For example, I'm not sure if I'd have enjoyed reading Dune as much as I did if I didn't have some vision of its world from the classic games I played. It's not something I'm particularly proud of, but from my experience, that's just how my brain is wired and I can't do much about it. VNs are a pretty good compromise between literary text and graphics, showing you a lot but still leaving a lot of gaps for your imagination to fill. Curious what other people's motivations are. :3

I remember, of course (although admittedly I didn't notice until I've checked your Itch.io homepage a few minutes after writing that previous post). 30 minutes sounds nice. We'll check it out between longer reads later this week.

Can't hide, I quite like this premise. How long is the game?

I believe it references "My Girlfriend is the President", but I don't think that has much bearing on the actual content of the game (unlike their North Korea game which was a very direct spoof of Go! Go! Nippon).

The lack of information on the h-patch and the weird tier structure makes me think this will flop. I'm not even sure why DLsite is screwing itself over like this, I know you can't fund porn directly with KS, but it doesn't stop most publishers from being clear about implementing adult content at a later date...

Devgru-p games are actually somewhat interesting with how their approach their parodies – I imagine that if someone is a WW2/history buff, they'll find tons of well-placed references to real events and biographies of the "heroines". It's super-distasteful of course, but I kind of won't be able to resist giving it a try anyways. Also, officially reserving the right to do a FuwaReview for it.

If you don't mind EVNs, Sable's Grimoire (a magic University for non-humans) and Magical Diary: Horse Hall (Hogward-style school of magic) come to mind. Both are pretty unusual, but good games in their own rights.

Posting on VNDB indeed has nothing to do with the Forums, but as you can see, posting the exact same thing here twice distracted people from your content rather than spread it further. NTR is also very niche on Fuwa, so you unlikely to get many responses no matter what you do. I apologize for my irritated reactions earlier, but simply, getting overzealous won't help your cause. Hopefully, that's it for the drama.

I am now, so please refrain double posting in the future. PS: I've hidden these two comments because I indeed went a bit overboard back then (and today too – I apologize for that), which is a bit problematic in the context of my new role. Double posting on both forums and blog is not technically forbidden, so it's not something you can get penalized for. However, as you can clearly see, it's not a thing considered in good tone around the forums. It makes it less, and not more likely for your content to be treated seriously and starting any kind of reasonable discussion. Please be mindful of that in the future.

On the forums I linked, you could try describing your problem in tech support section. Can't really suggest you anything more specific.

Lol, I like that last part. Did you try Katawa Shoujo yet? Seriously though, Inkey University is an RPG Maker game, so it should work on any computer. The only thing that comes to my mind is that you're downloading version without engine files? RPG Maker games can have both a standalone version and a smaller one for those that have RPG Maker software installed on their computer. If you accidentally kept downloading the latter, it'd indeed fail to work properly. If it's not that, maybe you should look for help on the RPG Maker forums?

It seems there's some kind of internal drama within the studio (I'm mostly basing this on gossip, as there was no official communication about this). Steam versions of their games are impossible to buy, but not completely delisted curiously enough (store pages are still up). Versions on other stores are still available. I imagine their latest Kickstarter project, which I even backed, is effectively dead. Kind of sad but kind of fitting too. And the only thing I'll remember from it long-term is the fact that they just went and had sex in the shower with Megumi covered in blood and a dead body in the hallway... The plotholes become kind of irrelevant by comparison.

But a heresy this deep? Tempting, but I'm not sure if my mind can handle it...

You can't be my waifu after all.

You mean with what? DareSora? That thing looks so niche I'm shocked it wasn't released by Fruitbat. But probably wasn't because it has a lower rating on VNDB then I thought was possible for a story-driven JVN. Unless we have a slightly different definition of "flashy", it hardly fits my description. And it's not even a self-contained short story, only a first episode of something that will probably prove pretty large in the end.

Yeah, I also wouldn't agree Newrin was a bad choice. The premise was grabbing attention, art looked nice. It was not a widely-requested kamige, but I remember many people, myself included, being curious about it and the quality of releases SolPress is going to offer. Their other releases really didn't stand out though. Also not sure if they were bad picks by themselves, but the company really should've offered some variety and smaller, more flashy releases in between, to gather attention and earn some cash outside of those large, expensive projects. Even if they do all of this more from "love for VNs" and building a brand for themselves, rather than direct income, they could've done more to make it sustainable.

よろしくお願いします ! Not many otome fans out here, but we're that much more happy to welcome a new one. Hope you'll have fun around here. ^^

It was a browser game? I guess it's not very surprising it died, VNDB suggests is never fully transferred to Android and iOS and that's pretty much the only way this kind of project could survive long-term. It does sound cool though. How was it monetized?

Well, that's honestly a scenario in which I'd really want to prevent causing random pregnancies...

Damn, you made me think for the first time how good Sakura Spirit must have looked when the only thing people really knew about it was Wanaca's art. I came to the community too late to experience such misery, but approaching that game with expectations of it being at least decent? Even thinking about it is depressing.

In our obscure EVN market, there are rarely games or events that could be described as major controversies – even the most unfortunate releases or Kickstarter disasters usually don’t involve enough people and money to gather the attention of the community for a longer period of time or spark a mass backlash. Along with Aeon Dream Studios’ k-pop fan game debacle (a really amazing story of incompetence and borderline-fraud, if you care to follow it), No One But You is possibly the most controversial and polarizing EVN ever released. Appearing on the relatively-barren landscape of early 2015 and promising experience similar to the high-budget Japanese VNs, it sparked a lot of interest and hope for the second coming of Katawa Shoujo – an EVN that would not feel overly niche or amateurish, but actually capture the charm of beloved Japanese titles and rival them in its storytelling. The reality, of course, proved much more underwhelming. The unexpected Kickstarter success (the campaign reached over 1200% of the initial, $1200 goal) resulted in a highly upscaled and complex project, developed within just a year by then still-unexperienced Unwonted Studios. Involving a network of over a dozen writers and artists, and a heavily-rushed release (which was never moved from the initial KS campaign claim despite of many major features being added through stretch goals), No One But You was eviscerated by many reviewers, with Fuwanovel notably giving it lowest possible score in two separate articles, and received only a mixed reception from the readers after showing up on Steam on January 2016. In a way, it remains one of the most infamous story-centric EVNs, possibly only beaten by the cheap ecchi titles such as Sakura games in the amount of hate and ridicule it gathered. However, looking at it three years later and with all the fixes and additional content added post-launch, is it really that bad? Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com

Very close to the Isekai Cheat Magician's crappiness, but on the exact opposite side of the spectrum when it goes to my personal enjoyment, I think I fell in love with Maou-sama Retry. No, I don't claim it's good. It's probably anything but. But my brain seems to not care about that in the slightest. I'll let my MAL review of it speak for me: " I feel weird defending this show, because it's not good. More than that, by any reasonable definition it's pretty awful. It's basically an Overlord rip-off, playing on the same themes of an experienced player being sucked into a dying MMO, having to adapt to the new world and the ridiculous persona/gameworld elements he created for himself. It's animated and produced very cheaply, not being even close as colourless and pathetic as Isekai Cheat Magician, but still pretty damn bad. On the other hand, it's extremely self-aware and genuinely hysterical with how purposefully dumb and juvenile it is. I think one thing people completely miss is the middle-school-level fantasy of the protagonist's persona and the things he encounters after being "isekai'ed" are not something the show is trying to sell as cool. Much of it is straight-up the protagonist's creation – a planet-size embarrassment that he now has to live through. An absurd, eclectic mess that can only make sense in a trashy video game, but is suddenly brought to life against all logic and reason. A burning trainwreck you just can't get your eyes off despite all your better instincts. I'm not sure if this series will produce an actual plot or stakes. I'm not sure if I even want it to. It's absolutely glorious being completely stupid and pointless and I love it for it. Bring me more. *.* "