Narcosis

I simply love how Winged Cloud's business became a simulator of japanese eroge industry. There's a distinct correlation between the time required to create a game, it's quality and profits you make out of it. High quality titles require a lot of work (and often heart) to be put into them; we're talking about months, if not years of hard work. It's not only about length and ammount of content, quality work requires time. When they get released, if advertisted properly beforehand, they quite often reach at least a certain degree of success and make profit; in worst case it's enough to cover production costs and continue making new games. Succesful titles or franchise get sequels or continuations... but it's not always the case, as long-term production can often lead to a lot of issues and easily turn into a nightmare. There's a lot of risk involved; history shows that with high quality titles, that haven't really achieved any sort of success (although they should), or even generated losses, causing their studios to shutdown (Katahane makes a great example). Within a market, that's highly oversaturated and full of tense competition and vividly changing trends, it's often a matter of life and death, where a single failed game can shatter everything you've built so far. This is why studios often tend to drop high quality production in favor of smaller projects, which lead us to budget games. Why did budget games became a leading factor nowadays? Simply because there's little to no risk involved, in case the game flops. Budget games can be made really fast - we're talking about weeks of production at most. They tend to be a lot smaller and high production values are replaced with quicker release dates and a lot cheaper price tag. Depending on certain factors, those games can sometimes become as successful as the AAA titles, or even better. It's no wonder a lot more studios and developers are embracing this kind of business model and churn out a lot of smaller, mediocre games, instead trying to make something big an worthwhile. Unfortunately it has it's downsides. If not handled properly, budget games have a leaning towards constant quality loss and it makes further games look even more bland than the previous releases. As the overall quality drops, so does the number of potential customers. There is a certain threeshold that cannot be crossed though; as long as one can maintain good PR or catter to a certain niche or their fans, they will sell enough copies to make a living. In a nutshell, it's Winged Clouds' destiny, if they won't change anything. Will they? I doubt. As long as their Patreon will keep supporting them, they will be able to churn out more games in a relatively small time frame and their fans and supporters will continue to buy them. As much as "Sakura-whatever" trend is slowly declining at the moment, even a thousand copies sold is more than enough to keep them going on; it doesn't matter they're only deepening their own hole and with every released game it's going to be harder to crawl out of it. I doubt they even really care anymore. It's quite ironic, since I can safely assume the majority of WG's success lies in their artist. I'm really amazed she just keeps on making art for them, as she could as well just start her own business right now and it would propably kill Winged Cloud. knowing modern standards, I doubt she's making that much revenue. I wouldn't be surprised if she's simply tied up and unable to quit at the moment. I'd feel at least deeply ashamed myself being forced to make art for that kind of business.

3DS isn't capable to operate on large resolutions. Graphic assets are stored in 240p-compatible sizes and below. The top main screen has a resolution of 400x240...

Sadly, 3DS graphics are anything but high-res.

What kind of "modern tech" are we talking about? Ren'Py and horribly compressed jpg's, upscaled by a shitty median filter? I'm not discouraging this project, all I'm saying it's preety much redundant to waste strength on such endeavours. There are better ways to learn Ren'Py, like coding your own engine/GUI from scratch; you don't even need a story - you just code and fill in the barebones. Who knows, it might come useful in the future. Besides, ff80c38 is doing this mostly for himself. I'm already wasting my breath, because he won't propably listen to me anyway

I don't see a reason to port something, that works perfectly fine. Aside from that, all the original assets were of really poor quality, because the game was old and came out at times when downloading gigabytes of data off the net was out of question. To be honest, It's not really advised to create unofficial ports without author's permission and if you respect the original creators, you'd do better promoting the original. Satomi Shiba actually released an updated remake for the 3DS with Arc System Works. I'd rather bug him to create an updated port for the PC version as well. The new art and music are really preety; they also included an omake with additional short stories.

Besides PlayAsia and AmiAmi, you can always try Mandarake and Plamoya; AmiAmi is propably the best and safest way to preorder or buy freshly released figures, why Plamoya often has older figures in stock, even months after the release. Keep in mind those might be used/second-hand or come from backorders, therefore they can't guarantee perfect condition of boxes. Japanese do keep their items in tiptop shape though, so even used figures usually look practically like new.

I think I still have my copy lying around somewhere. I actually never gave it a try on W7, but it used to work on XP, albeit you had to do a bit of tweaking; It's a fairly old windows game, don't expect any sort of a miracle. If I remember correctly, one of the most common issues on the new systems was when people tried to run it as an image, but neglected the fact it needs to run in the exact same virtual drive as installed. Another problem was with mismatched install paths, various sound-related issues and in some cases, the game would simply refuse to run on some systems.

Android support became an integral part of Ren'Py. At the moment, devs can build android packages for their games straight from the launcher. Download the latest stable version and check it out for yourself; you can build a package out from one of the samples included within the launcher.

Nice to meet you, Nao! I'm really glad to see Japanese developers finally reaching out to western audience in such straighforward and honest way. If there's anything you want to ask, feel free to do so and we'll try our best to help as much as possible! You're propably familiar with Steam already, therefore I'd like to talk about itch.io instead. It's an online distribution platform very similiar to Steam, which was mainly aimed at indie developers (they're a bit similiar to japanese doujin circles). It offers almost everything Steam does, but it also has a couple of notable advantages: It's completely free. You don't have to pay any fees to publish your games or use their services and there are no adds, either. Itch.io uses open revenue sharing and "pay what you want" model, which means they earn their money from online transactions, for example - if someone buys your game, itch.io takes 10% percent of the transaction (industry standard is usually 30%), but it can be anything, since you're able to actually set the ammount you want to give them. "Pay what you want" means your can earn more, since the customers are free to pay you as much above the minimum value set as they see fit. In other words, even if you release your game for free, people can still pay you as a form of support. No restrictions on the type of content published. This might be the biggest and most important advantage over other platforms, especially in terms of eroge. You're allowed to publish adult content, as long as it's legal. The only thing you need to have in mind, is that certain payment providers don't allow transactions for adult-oriented content. In case of itch.io - Paypal doesn't, but Stripe does. Great services and ease of use. Itch.io offers a variety of tools; you don't have to worry about website or storing, as everything's hosted on their servers. They offer a unique way of distribution, by providing a fully-customizable web page for each product you publish. They collect usage information and statistics, so you can actually see how popular your game is, how many times it was downloaded and how many copies it sold. It also handles all the complicated technical stuff related to hosting and selling your game. You can generate download keys. Itch.io publishes your game in the exact way you want it to get published; there's no DRM involved. itch.io does not restrict it's services depending on the country. All of the services are available in the same way across the whole world. Depending on the payment providers, you can even receive money in your currency. itch.io allows your derivative works to be sold as well. Got a game soundtrack, or an art book? No problem! You can sell/distribute other variety of products tied with your games/franchise in the same way as your games. I hope this helps; You can always check their FAQ and developer's guides for more information. In that sense, itch.io does look like a heaven for japanese doujin circles. Aside from Steam, there's GOG as well, which works in the same exact manner as Steam, but offers DRM-free downloads. At the moment, it's growing to become the biggest competitor to Valve's Steam. If you're also familiar with TeamSpeak, we actually own our (somewhat) official Fuwanovel channel, where you can chat and talk online with some of our community members (I and OriginalRen frequent it often). If you're interested, but still unsure how it works, feel free to PM me and I'll instruct you how to install and configure it to work. You could even try to encourage mr. Kobushi, if he's interested to hear from western fans like us. From my experience, there's nothing better than getting directly in touch with people to discuss things and enjoy a good time. I already followed you on Twitter and I'm eager to hear more from you. I wish you and your team best of luck in your crusade to bring more great games and conquer the overseas' market ( ｡>‿‿<｡)

You have to keep in mind there are some downsides to this. Every market has a limit of how much it is able to consume; currently, we're producing much more we're able to consume. It's especially prolific in the mmorpg genre, where we have a lot of games to chose from and whole playerbase scattered across a vast sea of titles; the drawback to this is a lot of those games don't get the required ammount of players to work properly. They have to struggle to at least cover expenses and earn the people behind it enough to make a living. In a nutsheel, this is - more or less - the current situation inside the japanese eroge industry. New tools, engines and publishing platforms made it so much easier to create content and games, nowadays literally everyone can create a game and sell it, as long as they have the willpower to push onwards. This leads to serious market oversaturation, where high competition isn't good anymore, but becomes harmful to the whole enviroment. To keep with it, developers have to either raise more funds or adopt specific business models; a lot of studios focus on smaller projects made in shorter ammount of time, which enforcers lower quality to keep up with the demand; they make less money as well. It's very easy to slip out of circulation and a lot of developers and studios often face an issue, where they simply have to give up or close their business, because it doesn't entail them any revenue, or worse - only generates loss. It might be easier to debut on the market at the moment, but at the same time, it's a lot more difficult to stay afloat. Blessed are those, who are able to turn their hobby into a stable way to make a living.

Another decent moege, hehe. Keep em' coming!

You should post this on their respective message boards and forums, or simply mail them. It's nice to know, there are people who respect translators and their hard work.

The most hilarious thing is that Winged Cloud's games still attract so much attention.

I'm not going to make an exception just because they finally slapped some porn onto it.

Fuwanovel, where on Earth are you headed.

Are you running the game with administrator rights? Is your OS on japanese locale? I don't remember having any font display issues myself. As long as you've installed and patched Cannoball properly, it should work without issues; tested on updated W7. You might also find this useful.

Seems like the feeds are lacking proper theme styling. Edit: Just saw Tay's response above. I'm too fast

If I'm correct, update was at least around 150mb, if not more. I can't even comprehend how can they bloat the game size that much without actually making any changes to the game's assets; that kind of update would suggest they added HD graphics, but they didn't. Perhaps they updated the assets ahead of time for the upcoming UI update, but it's still unusual it increased the client size that much. Are they even cleaning the game's archives? What feels off, is not really timing or sync, but the EXP songs seem to be a lot "slower", making them much easier to FC. Aside from that, it seems like they increased the timing window, as now you get a lot more perfects and it's a lot harder to miss the notes.

Google, pls

The most adorable birdbrain, ever.

Flutterz is still online. Does that count as a bug?

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