I have here a Steam code for a classic Sega Genesis action game, Alien Soldier–but I already have the game on Steam!
In the spirit of not letting good games go to waste, I’ll just have a little give-away! All you have to do is reblog this post with an answer to my question, and I’ll put you in the running! You can also send an ask if you don’t wanna clog your feed. (A cursory glance at the works on my Gumroad page will give you the answer you need!) I’ll keep this going until 12:00 am, Tuesday.
The question is, What is the name of the shadow-organization that Masked Cyborg Pyro fights against?!
Reblogs are all welcome! Get hyped–and get a cool game while you’re at it!
I’ll be starting my forties soon. And the great thing about it is that I can now actually look at my “thirties”, and how I spent them. Did I do this? Did I manage that? And so on. Many lenses to look through. But one of the lenses I particularly like is the one of “what I don’t do anymore”. So without further ado, here are the five things I’ve given up in the last ten years. Hopefully I can also explain why.
1. Watching anime
In my twenties, I used to watch a lot of anime, and then gradually watched less and less as I approached my thirties, until one day I realized I haven’t watched anything in years. In my mid-thirties I attempted once or twice to “get back into it”, and gave a chance to one or two series, but dropped them after the first episode. I stopped trying since.
What I miss: The buzz around discussing an anime, and the way anime TV shows felt different to other TV shows.
What I don’t miss: Topics that school-aged or young adult protagonists typically deal with.
Conclusion: I gave up (mainstream) anime for many reasons, but if I had to pick one it would be that I was not able to relate to the characters or the stories anymore, a feeling that intensified over time as I got even older and approached my forties. To this day I have this feeling - a new season of anime series comes out, and after I give it a look, it is confirmed once again - this is just not meant for me anymore. The reasons are many, but let me put it this way - I’m interested in topics that 40-year olds are generally interested in. Topics like health, reinventing oneself, children, changing careers, or giving back. But overcoming one’s past, accepting responsibility, or growing as a person… I’ve dealt with those already and find nothing interesting in further exploring them. And frankly, I also want to see people my age be the protagonists, too. Like when in high school or early adulthood you identify with characters of that age and situation in anime. Well, likewise I also want an anime (loads of them) that would feature a cast of 40-somethings and make me feel that sensation again where I’d be able to think to myself, hey… that could be me. And anime will not give it to me.
2. Playing Visual Novels
Yes, I consider myself a VN developer - even an “active“ one as technically I released 8 visual novels (albeit tiny ones) this year - but I actually did also largely give up playing visual novels in my thirties. This change was more abrupt than stopping watching anime, and I can pinpoint it roughly to 2006/2007, when a relatively steep decrease in the number of visual novels I played occurred, as opposed to years prior when I used to devour them, it seemed like.
What I miss: The magic of the medium, and experiencing other people artistically express themselves in this format, especially in very personal projects.
What I don’t miss: Nothing, playing visual novels had no “negative” sides for me.
Conclusion: With me, stopping playing visual novels had less to do with age-specific reasons, and was mostly a matter of the medium losing its appeal or “magic” once I started to get into the creation process. Think of it as the doctor who doesn’t like watching medical dramas at home. Or the painter who doesn’t want to spend her free time watching other painters. Not all people are like this, but I - as I found out - am one of them. Making visual novels as a primary way of expressing myself takes so much energy, that playing even more visual novels in my free time would (maybe paradoxically) not be doing me any service in terms of getting new ideas or relaxing. It would simply be too much of the same.
3. Being active on Lemmasoft
First things first - I indeed did stop being active on Lemmasoft because of impending “forum policy changes” (in a simplified way I was against honestly critiquing other people and helping them improve, and in favor of patting everyone who didn’t explicitly ask for non-praising feedback on the back) - but I think the reason I never came back was more of a time and effort scenario than anything else. Anyway:
What I miss: The kind of deep friendships you can (only) forge in a longform discussion forum. Pretty much all of my current internet friends I found through Lemmasoft.
What I don’t miss: The feeling of being “part of the community”, and the amount of time it took to participate (especially formulate replies)
Conclusion: It’s hard to make new meaningful connections with people online, and I will forever miss Lemmasoft Forums for that reason. By comparison, I think that my Twitter interactions are much slower in bringing me closer to those (new ones) I communicate with. But having been absent for so long, and now only a casual observer, I think time is the biggest obstacle here. Spending half an hour to craft the perfect reply was something I could do back then, but now with my time being limited, I simply do not have the resources to participate. And yes, every now and then I stumble upon a hot topic being discussed on Lemmasoft, and for a brief moment that urge to write up that reply comes back, but minutes later I snap back and think of the 30 minutes I would need for that, and that I cannot justify spending that time on it - not to my own projects, and not to my family. I can type up a quick Twitter response. But not a Lemmasoft reply anymore.
4. Music
I know I’m not the only person who has done this, but nevertheless - it seems really strange to swear off music completely, but I did. Going from listening in most situations when I was alone or working on something in my twenties to actively avoiding music in my thirties. The change was relatively gradual, but the last step down to zero was more of a commitment than a natural conclusion to a declining listening curve.
What I miss: The fact that music accelerated my creativity, the fact that listening to music made me generate more ideas and have them quicker.
What I don’t miss: The addictive / fun nature of listening to music while dreaming up ideas that made me have way too many of them and that in turn made maintaining focus on active projects very exhausting. The guilt of having spent disproportionately many hours just thinking about how a project could be great and having ideas about it, while making little to no progress on it, and realizing the excitement of it being great was “not real”.
Conclusion: It was only recently that I realized how much energy and attention my ideas take from me. All my notes, my project ideas, everything I have “saved for later”, all of that weighed heavily on my subconscious, and it was not until I got rid of all my notes and snippets “for future projects”, that I understood just how much it was. Additionally, eliminating music from my life has drastically reduced the amount of ideas I have to begin with, and freed me up to focus on a new, more “serial” model of creativity where I am attempting to only ever work on one or two projects in parallel. The higher focus means less ideas come to me as I work, while at the same time once a project is done I allow for a more generous break where I actively invite new ideas (whereas previously I would finish one project and another one would already be lined up). But even in this regenerative break between projects I do not listen to music anymore. Because I don’t feel like I need to, I’m happy with how my ideas come to me. I don’t need more, or faster. In fact, you can think of music as a performance enhancing drug for my idea-having. It really worked that way, and I want none of it anymore.
5. Following the VN scene
In my twenties, even very early thirties I was all about the English visual novel scene, especially because I considered myself a part of it, being with it in its infancy. I made overviews, lists and contributed, mostly via Lemmasoft. But a later withdrawal from everything in order to focus on finishing Aurora Fall made me miss major changes in the community… and I never caught up. I started fresh after Aurora Fall, but there is a hole in my continuity, and somehow the fact that I was around but missed it makes me distanced. To this day.
What I miss: Being able to follow discussions on pretty much any topic about the English VN community.
What I don’t miss: Having to spend a lot of energy to keep up as the community grows and splits into various sub-circles. The compulsion to weigh in on controversial topics as soon as they pop up.
Conclusion: I think taking a step back from being / feeling as an active part of the visual novel community would have happened for me regardless. In fact, this is almost not something I actually “gave up”, because as the community grew, it became less and less possible to get the “full picture”, to know what’s going on in the various corners of the English VN world. Yes, I could try to focus on just getting the “most important” information, but it’s in my nature in these cases to narrow my field of vision and shrink the world I want to follow so that I can truly grasp it all again. And so I did. Today, I can hardly pretend to know or even to be interested in what’s going on in the VN world - I’ve made my peace with the fact that occasionally I will have no idea what people are talking about. But that’s alright, because I’ve found some new “niches” within the VN world that I feel I can follow and understand to a satisfying degree. The world of English VN podcasts, for example.
And that’s it for this list, and I’ll be on to the next 10 years of my life - by which time I’ll be fifty. It’s quite an exciting thought.
Thanks for your thoughts. For me I still watch the occasional anime, usually the ones with militaristic themes based on the real world… Gate is one in the past seasons, right now I really like Izetta.
More than that though, its the explosion of social media and how all of a sudden something needs to be reblogged 1000 times and be “trending” or what now, and then you come across the odd highly detailed blog post from 2012 or something with no comments and yet the level of information you find there is far more in-depth than whatever the hot topic social website is in right now. Like for example you are looking for information on a sunken ship from 1600 and the only actual info is from an amateur photographer who visited some museum – you don’t see that kinda stuff in the new “social” sites. And its sad when people who used to post very detailed logs stop doing so because their information is immediately deluged by other crap. Such is the sort of feeling I get today as well.
Its similar to the VN and indie scene today and I only keep up with lewd games (because that’s where I’m competing in and I need to know the pulse of the market). Since I’m actively developing myself I have no time to play most games. I’m way behind on visual novels and I don’t attempt to keep up anymore. I don’t even have kids so I can imagine with a young family the time limitation is even more severe.
Opinion: Four Tiers in English Visual Novel Market, Gameplay and Eroge.
I have been noticing a trend as even the niche genre of visual novel games have been getting more mainstream and diversifying: Player base fragmentation. How can this be, you ask, in the age of Steam and Kickstarter?
Well that’s because the format is becoming more of a delivery method rather than a genre. For example, on one side, you have the original english works which are inspired more by art games and interactive fiction than the Japanese side. As you move slowly towards the center, you get works which are accessible but at the same time have critical acclaim: e.g. works like Cupid or One Night Stand. Their creators liked anime, but you can showcase the work in front of an English Professor or a Graphic Designer and it will hold up.
Then as we go in the center, you have the majority of the anime-inspired works – all the releases by Sekai Project. The Kickstarted games with anime character designs. This coincides with when anime fans finally invaded Steam due to Japanese games finally being offered for PC, I believe starting around 2012 or so.
Then finally we go to the other extreme, the /r9k/ material. Unteralterbach. Teaching Feeling. Games which have been banned due to lolicon content.
What surprises me nowadays is if you go to the English community, they try to make it seem as though visual novels are just a delivery medium, and porn is but a subset of it. But if you look at history, visual novels have always been mostly pornographic, and the new mainstream all-ages works are but a very recent trend.
This puts me in a dilemma. On one hand, I want that mainstream success – I want the Youtube Let’s Plays exposure, the critical writeups from people who don’t usually play Japanese visual novels. How about some of that Steam Greenlight success as well? There are so many successful teams now releasing moderately long works. But I’m not a good writer nor a good graphic designer (Presentation is everything in a visual novel)… though I still want to write and draw my own works, there’s no other way to fulfill that creative urge.
Because on the other hand, I want the freedom to create anything. ANYTHING. With no limits. And only lewd games provide that freedom. They say in Japan, there was a minor renaissance in film because of adult works – the directors would stick in the obligatory sex scene, then just do whatever the hell they liked otherwise. There is no pressure to edit your work for a focus group since you’re not supposed to self-censor.
This will put me squarely in the /r9k/ territory, which is a very demanding sector of the market who are more likely to pirate something than pay for it. If only I were creating anthropomorphic characters (read: targeting the furry market) then there might be a chance to make worthwhile investment.
It’s so funny… we’re supposed to be all open as a society, creating works for all sorts of sexual orientations, and yet make a head patting game and its banned in Korea and the players can get arrested.
Why am I so eager regarding lewd material, you ask? Because for all of my all-ages ideas, I just do a cursory google search and some developer has already implemented the idea, probably much better way than I ever will. (This is my main issue with Elspeth’s Garden, what with Banner Saga and other 2D hand-painted isometric strategy RPGs out there. I can only tackle this once again when I have fully mastered UE4 and rework the battle animations).
But in the 18+ market, there is so much untapped potential – all the westerners are only doing furry games, and all the japanese are only doing rape games (just an exaggeration, chill). I haven’t yet seen any game that approaches the charm and character development of vanilla H-manga.
I also know that for this end of the market, they are also in want of good gameplay.
I’m not going to talk about development of that here, I already sort of blogged about it in itch.io already.
I feel like I have finally achieved core competency in UE4. If someone were to ask “Would you be able to make your dream game now”, I can say yes. So most definitely those old projects which fizzled out, once I am motivated I can reopen them and port them over and it will be grand. This includes Elspeth’s Garden. Ren’Py’s a great engine but any SRPG made with it will best be with Advanced Wars type 16bit graphics. Prerendered 3D just doesn’t work, especially in HD. I hope the old animations can be converted to new UE4-compatible FBX format. We will see soon. I’m still working with Ren’Py on a small commercial nukige release but that’s another story.
It’s ironic that I find my UE4 projects to be less taxing to an extent because seeing the logic you programmed just working is so energizing. With visual novels you just end up pulling your hair if the writing or the graphics don’t gel. But with gameplay games you can just build your world out of literally lego bricks and have fun all day.
That said, I still haven’t participated in any Epic-sponsored jams because their time limit is just too small at just 3 or sometimes 7 days total. I have a day job and cannot compete with literal game design students or full-time indies. Plus you have to register and their submission window closes shut tightly. Also remember I live in one of the slowest countries in the world in terms of internet speed. I literally spent 9 hours last night just fixing my Visual Studio installation.
I’m still pumped, I feel like making a crazy game now.
Ideally, I wanted to make console and handheld games – especially the latter because of low development cost while maintaining the console type of gameplay. But it looks like the handheld market is shrinking, while mobile games continue to dominate with F2P mechanics. If I wanted to continue with console gameplay it would have to be through the PC ecosystem… but I’m not buying another game console anymore.
Game development tools are accessible now and artists are easy to get in touch with, so I’m finally making my dream game – a console-style eroge that has 3D platforming with mild RPG elements with extensive visual novel story sequences. It may look expensive but only a few 3D models are custom-made… the majority of the stuff are asset store or Turbosquid purchases which I cobbled together. Heck, even some of them came from my Unity projects. (The Unreal asset store stuff are limited to UE projects though by license). The architecture I’m making is unique thanks to UE’s wonderful level-building tools which frankly, in my opinion, beats SketchUp anyday… and SketchUp used to be the easiest 3D prototyping suite out there.
The main reason I’m going with 3D is not only to add gameplay elements to spice up the typical story-based visual-novel like experience, but since it is cheaper to do so now, even though I noticed that freelancer prices have increased about 40% compared to a few years ago. To make great looking 2D backgrounds, you need to model the layout first in 3D then paint over them… that’s time consuming, when you can model the entire town all at once then literally walk around in them. Also, while I respect studios that make HD sidescrolling games such as Muramasa or Dragon’s Crown, the amount of custom interlocking 2D BGs and sprite animations needed are simply too much. In addition 3D gives a depth of exploration that is unparalleled.
I originally came to visual novels since it was the most accessible game type to dev in when I wanted to make longform (i.e. story-based, multiple hours-long play sessions) games. But it is simple to use more advanced engines now so I carry the VN experience with me. I remember when The Path first came out, of the first in what is to become “walking simulators.” It was made by an indie team but they had funding from the Belgian government for the arts and were using a $4,000 piece of software. Now even I too can do that, and the only thing I’m paying for is the art content.
Unreal Engine 4 is awesome. Prototyping is almost as fast as in Construct2, for non-coders. However you often have to explicitly define some backburner stuff in Blueprints, which won’t be intuitive to those who never took up coding. Triggering a lightbulb isn’t as simple as you think. But the built-in physics is just godly and you can make a variety of gameplay stuff just based on physics alone.
After a few weeks in the engine, I’m going to revise my project targets:
Indisputable Sovereignty, my eroge with 5 fighter pilots, will have its gameplay in UE4. I will just have to port most of the text from Ren’Py… and it’s so much text its almost a kinetic novel. But it will be worth it. Not going to reveal too much about the gameplay, but it will be FUN. It’s going to rock your socks off.
I hired a GUI artist who so far is doing a good job for La Naval 1646. I’m really excited for this project. A shoujo-style eroge in Unreal Engine pretty much does not exist, until now. And I’m using UE because of Nvidia Apex cloth physics. Because what is shoujo style without pretty flowing dresses and bouncy hair, amirite? The main character is currently in rigging/animation stage. The high poly 3D model isn’t impressive though (of course comparing to the best Japanese artists here), so I hope her lowpoly ingame version works well enough. Well hey, Drakengard 3 and Nier were Unreal Engine games – they looked kinda flumpy but that was made up more by their sheer charm. And charm is what I aim for, even though my game developer budget undercuts the shittiest of shovelware.
I’ve taken a look now at turn-based stuff in UE… hmmm, this one is tough. I might have to go with Unity for Elspeth’s Garden. UE is great for physics and Blueprints and pre-defined game styles, but doing custom RPG stuff is easier in C# than C++. I dunno, I’ll look into it more.
The Nanoreno-sized game is now in its own full project track. Gosh, I always do this. Maybe I just don’t feel like releasing short forgettable games anymore? Not with so much wonderful competition. I mean, there are commercial games being done in Nano now for crying out loud. These are done by full teams, by people who do this for a living. What’s one person who has to balance work and commuting and emails and paying the bills and having only 1-3 hours each evening to do? And I’d rather spend that learning a new skill, such as a new (well, new for me) game engine.
Hey everyone! I wanted to spread the word about a really awesome project that’s in the works!
It’s called Steamy, and it’s basically what a LOT of you have been asking for; a content delivery/marketplace EXCLUSIVELY for hentai!
Now, right now it’s in the works, so it’s not a fully finished product yet, but you can join the pre-alpha and test it out for yourself right now at the links below;
The beta demo comes with a selection of hentai games already, including demos by H-devs of their own indie games (myself included) so you can test out the downloading interface and so forth!
As long as it gives better cut to devs than DLsite, I’m game.
Well I haven’t touched this blog in ages. Might as well keep a journal here then, if just for myself.
A combination of factors… I have more money than time now (compared to years ago), more responsibilities, plus I realized the landscape has changed.
I feel glad for my peers who have achieved success, or have been able to release their personal works with satisfaction these past few months/years.
But I’m not done yet. Especially during these chaotic times in the games industry, it is the best opportunity to head in and carve out a niche before people get entrenched again.
I have 3 active projects now: 2 in Ren'Py and 1 in Unreal Engine 4. (Yeah visual novels to AAA engines, imagine that). I’m also going to be helping out a project in Unity5, from a programmer who’s living off Cup O Noodles.
Elspeth’s Garden while on hold, will eventually be resumed. I need to either 1.) Keep using Ren'Py and Jake’s Battle Engine, but turn all the pre-rendered 3D into exacting Pixel Art for smoother animations or 2.) Port the entire thing into either Unity5 or UE4. No wonder they don’t advise making an isometric tactical RPG for your first commercial game.
Indisputeable Sovereignty is also on hold, but will be resumed. It’s a big game with four heroines, and I think I can finally achieve gameplay. I’m thinking of Unreal Engine 4 and the flight mechanic. Since it’s a severely politically charged game, it will be free.
The games I’m working on now are smaller games, but still quite an undertaking.
La Naval 1646 (tentative title), the hand-holding yuri nukige game, will be ported to Unreal Engine 4. It’ll be using Nvidia’s Apex cloth physics for the 3D models. The Ren'Py part will just become relegated to the “dating” aspect of the gameplay, while the main game will be a platformer. The more you collect, the more “scenes” you will be able to unlock. Due to Epic Games revised EULA to protect its reputation (due in no small part to the Hatred game controversy), La Naval 1646 will be rated M, not 18+ anymore. In other words, there will still be boobs, but no nether regions. And unfortunately, it will no longer be free, as I had invested way more money than originally intended. Something that was originally gonna be a quick fap became a full-fledged torrid affair. I will be replacing my pinned tweet with something more appropriate in the coming days, as I have a surprise in store.
The undisclosed voice-acted nukige which was written by a veteran writer almost 3 years ago has been proceeding ahead at full steam for a few months now. I hope it will be a star title in Mangagamer’s lineup.
Now I am working on a free game, this time a nano-sized game, but even it has proved challenging due to all the tech stuff I wanted implemented. I’m also changing the character design at the last minute and hunting for new artists at new places. Oh well.
