Narcosis

Hey guys. I decided to give it a try as well and so far I am pleased, the game is of high quality and works surpisingly well on most modern smartphones. The only thing I'd wish for them to revise would be to add more character sprites for the story mode sessions, but I guess they just want to minimize the size of the game. It's a bit annoying it requires constant internet connection to work, but I guess that's something out of discussion considering it's a social game with built-in highscore rankings. Anyway, my ID is 280630677. Feel free to add me, if you want and I'll add you back as well :3

So close, especially considering there was fifty of us. I didn't expected to win at all, since my luck is always equal to zero, but this is actually even worse than seeing a number from other side of the list. Much pain, so sad. Congatulations, Nosebleed! This CE is awesome stuff, take good care of it :>

That's 4:00AM CET time (　￣д￣

Just a synopsis of the project scope and some sort of a premise would be enough. If it's just on an recreational/hobby base, people are usually more fond to work on things they find likeable. I'm rather dubious about community collaborations, since from my experience most of them die as fast as they are born; I'm not saying it's impossible, but such spontaneous projects born from a simple need to occupy oneself with something rarely even reach the stage of a playable prototype. KS was created from a similiar spurt, but there's a lot more needed than just a simple enthusiasm or passion in order to create a working game.

Needs more furries.

The thing that actually made me dumbfounded with regards to SP, is that I thought they were only interested to bring the high quality, story-driven games; at least, that was the impression I had about them. That impression kind of shattered right now. Not sure, perhaps my expectations were too high, considering I know some of the people that make up Sekai Project. Pabloc is right - this game will definately become the first "all-ages" western nukige, as awkward may it sound. More like, the game just screams "Look how much horny stuff we've been able to squeeze into an all-ages title!". They just took a trip to check out how far they can go without getting the "18+" tag, unless someone perhaps mixed 16+ or 17+ with "all-ages", as in "there's no ero content, therefore it's for everyone"; hand wave or a dozen. Sekai Project, please.

Most japanese games (including those unoficially translated) require the japanese system locale in order to work properly. If you happen to stumble on more issues, let us know. We'll try to help.

This is exactly why we have disembodied penises in our doujinshis. (￣ー￣)

I'm very pleased they made it so fast and it trully shows the interest when a capable bunch of people is able to bring good titles to the western players. It's a specific novel, that propably won't get into everyone's tastes but nevertheless, something definately worth taking a look at.

They are, but one swallow does not make a summer. I'm not even sure why are they doing this; SP should be focusing on japanese titles, though they propably want to contribute towards the development of the growing, western industry. The art in SS seems to be of high quality and really pleases the eye, but personally I'm not that fond when western developers adapt settings which are typically bound to far-eastern culture; something, most of them has little to no actual knowledge about. I won't cross out Sakura Spirit; not yet. I have to see the most important aspect - storywriting and dialogues. For such a low price and rather high production value this might actually counterbalance well, though if it's the art only, I'd rather buy their artbook. SS feels like an experimental ground for Winged Cloud, which so far made only two otome games. There's also very little official info, which feels either dubious, or incredibly unprofessional given the release date. That is, if it's even true. Or perhaps someone woke up and realized that otome games sell very poorly and decided to make up for it with a pair of skimpy dressed, "well-endowed" kitsunes... not like I complain.

Nothing special. MG does not have any budget to port decent titles. All they can do is license more shitty nukige almost no one cares about and hope they get enough money to release an average title once in a while. They struggle to survive on the western market and I'm quite surprised they aren't trying to use KS yet, as stupid as it may sound; with their name they could at least try to persuade better studios and raise money through KS if the talks would be successful; a lot of people does not buy their games because they are shitty, but if they would suddenly drop a good title or two on the list, I bet a lot of fans would help them raise the funding to license a better title. No risk - no gain, as they say. Speaking of this game - that's exactly what catters to an average weeaboo fan - preety girls, mild fanservice and boobs. And story? What story, haha. People don't play games like these for the story and of course, there's no ero this time, because we don't want Uncle Sam to get upset, either. I'm really dumbfounded what are the more serious fans expecting to be perceived like by the rest of society, along with their precious vn's if all they do is license, create and play games like these. I think the only actual future in terms of western vn fanbase lies within the hands of good studios like Sekai Project - those who reach out far, use their brain and work close with fans to help them bring good vn's onto our market. Crowdfunding might be the only good way to persuade japanese studios to open up towards us. All the other methods, as the past shows, aren't a viable way to gain their trust. Speaking of MG, the way they act all proud of their games, including titles such as "Milles -Knight of Anal Tyranny-" makes me chuckle.

Why am I not impressed, as usual. I have to admit there's a bunch of cg art that looks really promising, but the overall concept and the renderings are just poor; speaking of which, this game is WAY TOO EARLY in development to be even considered worthy of kickstarting. You should only kickstart your game when it's more or less fleshed out and ready to go. All that's left should boil down to building upon the game. When I see projects like this getting kickstarted, it makes me even wonder whether people who do that are mature enough to pull off anything properly. I agree with InvertMouse upon the rest - vn's are a niche medium. A lot of western players are actually illiterates with not a single working braincell, you can't expect them to not frown upon the very fact someone wants to give them a game where basically 100% of gameplay is compromised of reading a story and nothing else. A lot of people also dislike eroge and h-content in general, that's usually associated with it; it's not a problem in terms of a playerbase, as it actually picks more of it's interest (if the art and story are good), but the main issue here is that it also attracts unwanted attention from mass media and certain people who'd like to see such type of art burning. Eternally. Another issue with western developers is that they often blindly follow japanese cliches and settings and build upon them, instead trying to adapt them properly beforehand. This won't ever work and results in very awkward, unrealistic stories that look more like a poor attempt to wank at one's weeaboo'ish dreams. A lot of the stories themselves are ridiculously bad as well, since most of their writers don't even know what prose actually is. I will state it once again - school settings are a BAD foundation and they DO NOT work well for western vn's. Japan is the culture of cute; school settings only sell in Japan, not around here. On the other hand, I can state what western readers like and would LOVE to see in western visual novels. We are generally full of angst and like deep and relatively dark stories - ones that are very few amongst japanese industry out of the same reason why people roll eyes upon school setting based vn's around here. In other words - MORE DRAMA & PSYCHOLOGICAL. We'd like to see more decent fantasy & sci-fi settings and by sci-fi I'm not talking about space opera; people often think sci-fi means STAR TREK, which is as bad as school settings (no honestly - if you want to make space operas, you'd better stick to your fucking school settings). We'd like to visit strange worlds and see incredible creatures (surreal stories or stuff that happens inside our heads, or dreams). Where's the magic? Where are the swords? We love ghost stories. We love horrors. We love thrillers and crime stories. MAKE IT HAPPEN. WHY IT DOES NOT HAPPEN? Of all the western vn's I've seen so far, only very few of them actually managed to break the mold and become something more than another bland mecha space opera or another school setting based galge, where the main premise still revolves around fucking all the girls so you can get their hcg's and forget about it. Everything is so cliched with bad japanese setups, that it makes me cringe every single time when I hear about a new, "prominent" western vn project. All of the western designers divide into two categories - those who either blindly follow the cliched, japanese routines or those who completely separate vn's as a medium and make it so "western" - so boring and unattractive - it makes me want to read a book instead trying to give them a chance. There's a lot of issues with proper direction. I know a lot of people for example, who won't read certain western developed vn's just because they aren't that appealing, their stories are very average and unorginal and they often lack the anime styled graphics and certain kind of approach, which attracts us otherwise. Then there's the main issue where a developer has to balance between all those things to make a really good western vn; it's a very delicate matter that more often leads to a failure when people making the game lack any sort of actual knowledge about visual novel medium. It often leads to cases where creators simply don't know or can't see, what could be done to make them more appealing to western fans and readers alike. I don't doubt it's possible vn's will slowly gain more interest on the west, but it won't ever be some sort of a boom. Things need to change, people need to grow and mature as well. Some things might perhaps have to change in order for this medium to flourish. If anything, there's still a very long, rocky road ahead of us. TL & DR I think that in overall, people actually aren't that interested in reading anymore. I should stop getting all worked up over this; it's not like you can force illiterates to read a story.

Yeah, you need to set your system locale into japanese. That should solve your issue.

I've been slowly cathing up with my backlog and finished few vn's just in the past few days. Other than that, it feels so tiring I often wind up playing Battle Bakraid any nothing else. I even resurrected my C64. I'm slowly losing interest in modern games, to be honest; it's especially true for the AAA prodcuctions. There's not much that picks up my interest and I'm only looking forward to clearing my vn backlog, so I can play the newest vn's.

The percentage of western players interested with console VN's is so tiny, it's not really even worth taking into account. There's no real impact whether a vn is all-ages, or not but TL'ing groups often would rather translate few PC releases than waste years trying to prepare an all-ages only translation for some insignificant console game. Console sales are poor anyway; vn players in Japan do not rely on consoles to play vn's, it's more of a marketing ploy nowadays to raise the sales of new consoles and companies like Microsoft and Sony pay popular developers to persuade them into making a console-only versions of their vn's. Don't forget modern consumer electronics are often very cheap in Japan as well; it's really not much of a hassle for them to buy a new console just to play two or three of their favourite games. It's not possible to efficiently emulate PS3 with our current PC hardware unless we will make another jump or fully utilize multicore capabilities. It took years to master PS2 emulation and it's possible right now only because the newest gen architecture gave so much of a power punch compared to specs from the period PS2 was born; PS2 is very outdated by current standards. Unfortunately, we've reached a dead end in terms of how much can we squeeze from the outdated silicon-based technology, while consoles in truth are still far behind maximum capabilities, they could achieve with our current tech.

BlazBlue can hardly be called a real vn. It's just a fighting game with "elaborate" storyline that takes the narrative in a form well known from vn's (textbox + character sprites + cg). It's not a vn per se and shouldn't be ever place on vndb in the first place. The ammount of work compared to ammount of visual novels available for console market does not make TL'ing worth the effort. If you add the fact that all of these are all-ages titles, there's really not much to even look forward to. You can forget about emulation of newest gen consoles anytime soon, if ever. The ammount of processing power required for that with current techniques makes it completely out of the question. There's also a lot of issues with delivering the TL patches themselves. Console games are aren't even worth the attention in terms of TL'ing, since a team can do a lot more in the same ammount of time in terms of PC game translation.

Typically, a visual novel translation requires the team to extract the data required for change (most often, scripts and graphics). Most of them are usually compiled within archive(s) (similiar to rar or zip files), with an exception that most of the times the archive format is made either specifically for the vn by the game designers, or works with specific game engines. Those archives are typically encrypted and can't just be opened or unpacked in the same manner we do with rar or zip files. The task of a hacker is to identify the engine and find a way to "disassemble" the game into base pieces that make it; when translation is done, they need to put everything back together and make it work like it did before. In most situations, it requires reverse engineering to be done in order to understand how the file formats used by the game work and to open (unpack) the game's archives. In certain situations (if the game for example is really big and difficult to work with), hackers often also write additional programs that make the repacking or script extraction easier, or even automate the whole TL'ing process (for example, team only feeds the prepared scripts and program automatically replaces the files and repacks archives). It works preety much the same with any other game or type of software.

Not sure whether to laugh or cry.

You shouldn't be afraid to bug other people, you know. Asmodean has a message board on his website made specially for that purpose. It's available to anyone and if he's not around, someone else might actually post an answer to all your questions. Don't make me post it for you.

Oh, I kinda missed the fact Asmodean managed to write a working tool in the meanwhile. I tried to open up Biman's archives in the past just after the release, but the key encryption made it impossible back then. I guess there's a big chance someone might actually try to TL it now. I does not seem there's any info available on the net and I did not tried to compress pack files, either; I bet the best choice of action would be to simply mail Asmodean and ask whether it's possible and how to do it, if you feel that serious.

I'm quite surprised, as for a project of such a small scope, it does give a really solid feel. The addition of stealth missions that supposedly affect the outcome of the story (I preassume?) is an interesting concept for a visual novel, as it seems to be quite enjoyable, judging from the preview videos. I can't comment much on the storyline itself, since there's really not much except for what you've released already, but the general idea seems preety nice; I hope the story won't become dissapointing. You have my support. I looked up your previous projects and you've made quite a progress with Bermuda since your last game, which wasn't bad either. I'm really curious to see this finished. Your future as a game developer seems to be bright, as long as you'll continue; you're on right track. If you don't mind me asking few questions, I'm interested on how you managed to get those quite well-known voice actors to dub Bermuda. VA costs a lot, usually the most in terms of visual novel development and it's even more admirable you're actually working on your own without any sort of real budget, unless the previous project helped you considerably to get some funding to continue without bigger issues. Even though, I guess you're still outsourcing in terms of sound and graphics? I wish you best of luck.

UPS and you won't have any problems.

Dojin circles - as usual - will be the only ones who will profit from Kancolle, given their stuff is good enough and becomes popular. The lax attitude japanese hold regarding derivative works helps maintain a really healthy market teeming with life. Narcissu getting on Steam was just a minor thing, since it already got a lot of praise and attention long before people even considered it would be fun for vn's to appear on it's lists; an additional effort, to make it even more accessible, with regards to modern standards. As for the Steam access and Greenlight system, I'd say it depends on the developer. It's not entirely true it's hard to get onto Steam nowadays. It used to be like that in the past. Right now it's actually very easy, provided you're already known or established, have a lot of fans or produce high quality work. A lot of it actually depends whether you're able to sell and distribute your product. Right now everyone and everything gets on Steam, so it's not that much of an achievement anymore. For new devs it even became more of an obligation, than anything else.

Welcome. Hope you'll enjoy your stay around here. Sorry to burst your bubble, but TL'ing is far from enjoyable; it's an addiction, where you sacrifice everything so a bunch of perverts may read their favourite chinese porn games, while you get nothing in return. This world is low on JP translators, therefore I expect you're going to be abused preety soon anyway. Enjoy~

Likeable in what sense? The divergence between different types of female characters and their traits is so huge, there's no possiblity a game might host a cast, where all the characters will be likeable to a single person. If you find a game, where you like everyone and anyone it might mean the characters are really shallow. This is far from reality, where people often differ tremendously, out of various reasons. And if by "likeable cast" you meant "realistic", then you should rather grab a book, as vn's rarely tend to have realistic, down-to-earth characters. Besides, this is an extremely subjective question; what you like might not be what others like. How are they supposed to help you, then?