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Okay, I really don't want to sound stupid, but at the same time I want to know what's up. What's this NaNoRenO thing everyone talks about?

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Mujinchitai
viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3360
Current Status: artist of R.E.M: Reality's Dream and musician, programmer, and writer of Mujinchitai

NaNoRenO is based off several other versions of the same concept: NaNoWriMo being one. For here, it gives you one month to complete a Ren'Ai game, no more then a month and you can't start early.

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Project - R.E.M: Reality's Dream - Team head/Lead Writer
Other projects - Jamais Vu (script 10k), Chronicles of Etemis
Scripts in planning- 1

Oh. Is it a contest?

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Mujinchitai
viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3360
Current Status: artist of R.E.M: Reality's Dream and musician, programmer, and writer of Mujinchitai

It's more a challenge than a contest. There's no prize and I don't believe anyone actually goes around judging the entries (and there is no way to tell if you cheated or not).

Basically NaNoRenO is meant to provide a deadline for lazy game writers to get their act together and actually produce a finished game for once!

Nope - it's a personal challenge. It helps focus people on the game-making process, firstly by throwing down a specific gauntlet rather than just suggesting vaguely that people should maybe make games, and secondly by easing the expectation a little; nobody expects a NaNo game to be perfect, the time limit reinforces the idea that it's better to get something finished than have a game that's perfectly-executed but never gets more than 10% complete.


Well, except that it's pretty free-form and casual, since it's really just a group-motivation-for-personal-challenge thing; "IntRenaiMo" is part of the same thing, where the challenge is instead to finish off an already-started project in the same month. Since there's no competition or prizes or anything any rules we have are only enforced by your own pride.

Specifically, NaNoRenO is run over the month of March - hence seeing entries appearing now - and IIRC this was the fourth year it's been run.

(There's a whole list of details up on Rio's site, but really, none of them are 'enforced' as such; no-one's turning around and telling people who write KNs they don't count 'cause they don't have two separate endings, for example.

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Some site said it must have a specific amount of words and must be about love. Is it true?

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Mujinchitai
viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3360
Current Status: artist of R.E.M: Reality's Dream and musician, programmer, and writer of Mujinchitai

Yeah, that's true. NaNoRenO gives a lot more slack then most, and it really is a good way of getting people to make a game. Rather then having them feel like they will need to put months of effort in, sometimes people like to hear "Well, just do it for a month and see what you can do!". It gets more people involved then normally would.

I don't know how many follow the rules, but most of them aren't too big a deal anyway :/



As Jake said, the rules aren't really enforced so no one is going to say "this game doesn't count, there was no love in it!" For the number of words, I don't think NaNoRenO does something like that...I know other forms of it do, but since this version requires everything from writing to programming it cuts in on the time you might be able to write on it (unless your a part of a team).

_________________
Project - R.E.M: Reality's Dream - Team head/Lead Writer
Other projects - Jamais Vu (script 10k), Chronicles of Etemis
Scripts in planning- 1

As far as I know, those limitations were only in place for the first NaNoRenO in 2005 - there were discussions to remove them for the 2nd year in 2006. Although even for the 2005 NaNoRenO, the entry Reconstruction 01 couldn't really be classified as a Ren'Ai game.

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Okay, I get it now. I'm always behind.

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Mujinchitai
viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3360
Current Status: artist of R.E.M: Reality's Dream and musician, programmer, and writer of Mujinchitai

In practice, the last couple of NaNoRenOs have been very casual. A month or so before, someone starts up a thread to see who will participate. And then people go make games.

In general, rules are destructive to community, so they should only be imposed on people when necessary. For something like this, no formal rules are needed, and none exist. If someone wants to make a game in September, and claim to be participating in "Antipodal NaNoRenO", I'd laugh and welcome them to it.

(For just about any NaNoRenO rule, I can think of a NaNoRenO game that's broken it. And that's a good thing.)

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"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming" - Theodore Roosevelt