Ren'Ai Archives celebrates!

[mikey]

Well, it celebrates not any anniversary, but 50 titles available.

And try out the new additions, they are real classics, from 2001, long before Tales Of Lemma started it all for us here - in fact (I can say this now), this was more or less my personal goal when I started with RAA - to bring those other games into the Archives, not only ones from our community, not only Ren'Py, but also from people who do their games individually or with other groups.

So I'm happy that we received permission for basically all of the games. And I think you'll find we have a lot more variety now - and hopefully in the future people will want to submit their games as well - regardless of engine or community.

So that's it, I do realize I started a whole topic just so say this - but I'm happy so sue me .

[DaFool]

Awesome!

This is really a diverse selection now, and will only get better with time.
I can only hope I can add a game or two to that list before it hits 100!

I also like the philosophy of the earlier games...lots of content, minimal mb. The last time I experienced that kind of efficiency was with DOS games circa 1995-97.

[monele]

Woop~! A legitimate celebration I say ^.^

I also like the philosophy of the earlier games...lots of content, minimal mb.

But as time passes, it will be more and more about graphics and not content... until some new medium emerges. Mhh... where have I seen this already?

[mikey]

But as time passes, it will be more and more about graphics and not content... until some new medium emerges. Mhh... where have I seen this already?

Why so depressive? ^_^

Honestly, if you think about it, could Kykuit be "better" with flashy graphics? And even for myself I have to say, O3 isn't the pro-level game that the community wants for the future, but actually, from my point it couldn't be made any better. Really, what should I have added? And I even think that anything more would have made the game too fiddly and a showoff.

So high-budget titles should be designed as high-budget. But actually, the nature of the free fan game means that most will indeed be made with constraints. It doesn't mean that we won't get one or two really cool-looking games, but I don't think we've seen the end of lo-meg titles.

Then, there's the issue of being overwhelmed and tired of too much graphics. Playing only very high production value games, I am confident that anyone would find a fangame with sparse graphics and grayscales refreshing - and actually, too much graphics tends to detract from the other elements - I suppose that's why a lot of the atmospheric titles cut down on color and possibly even the number of characters - so that one can be closer to the characters and thoughts that really matter. Kind of like closing your eyes to hear something better.

*looks in mirror*
Hmmm, geez, I've really become a fan of amateur ren'ai

[Alessio]

could Kykuit be "better" with flashy graphics?

Sorry to disagree here - I think Kykuit already has flashy graphics. I really love the drawings. :)

[monele]

Hey, hey, no worries : I was joking . I don't see amateur VNs (or VNs in general) following the general game trend anytime soon . Actually, VNs can't really become like this by nature, since their concept is to put the story to the front. Remove the story from a VN and all you get is a slideshow.
If high-tech VNs exist one day, then they'll be interactive animes but... you can't call them Visual *Novels* anymore

So really, if VNs get prettier and more flashy and animated... all the better. But if the story has to go for this to happen, that won't do . For now, it seems future projects lean towards the "story AND eyecandy" path. I couldn't be happier ^^.

As for Kykuit...

Flashy : –adjective, flash·i·er, flash·i·est.
1. sparkling or brilliant, esp. in a superficial way or for the moment: a flashy performance.
2. ostentatiously or vulgarly smart; showy; gaudy: flashy clothes.

No, really, it's not flashy. But it *is* brilliant and stylish ^.^

[PyTom]

Hm... it's not like the earliest games in the archive are all that small. Yami no Romance and Love Impact require an 11 meg runtime. The flash games also require the flash player... but, admittedly, most people already have the flash player.

The really small games that don't cheat are mikey's pre-renpy games, and Abagail.

Well, this did inspire me to trim down the size of a minimal windows Ren'Py game from 2848k to 2532k. (This will be in a post-5.6.7 release.) Switching out DejaVuSans for the smaller, English-only Vera font drops it to 2296k. Going in and editing the zip file to remove .pyo files drops it to 2072k, at the cost of a slightly longer startup time the first time the game is run. (To be honest, a trivial increase... I might make this the default in a future release of Ren'Py.) Using 7zip instead of zip turns that into a 1680k self-extracting file. (1576k without the self-extracting part).

Wow, 7zip is effective. I was able to fit "The Question" (the slimmed-down version included with Ren'Py) into 2700k. The death of the small game is greatly exaggerated.

[DaFool]

Well, this did inspire me to trim down the size of a minimal windows Ren'Py game from 2848k to 2532k. (This will be in a post-5.6.7 release.)

The death of the small game is greatly exaggerated.

I'm really rooting for this 'efficiency' development. Sure, it's not just to cater to dialup users, but efficiency and minimalism are wonderful goals in themselves that pose an excellent challenge to the "Bigger, Better, and Flashier" trend (we only need the 'Better', thank you.)

Imagine if I can make that dream of a multi-hour, multi-story epic RPG-kinetic novel hybrid under 10 megabytes all-inclusive...kick butt!

[Recca Phoenix]

Other Age is SUPER-FUN and addictive! Definitely one of the best ren'ai games I've ever played.

[PrettySammy09]

Congratulations! I can't wait till we have a 100 game celebration. I hope that I can contribute a game or two as well. ^_^

[DaFool]

Just wondering why Genetic Glow was not included

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/345431

since it was mentioned in the description for Other Age

Still cannot beat the quality of a Zeiva Inc flash game, its hard to believe this was back in 2002, it has better production values than even some anime I know.

[mikey]

Just wondering why Genetic Glow was not included.

Well, GG1 and GG2 weren't included, because their gameplay was more RPG-ish than VN-ish - there was a balance, but in the end, they weren't as story-focused as the IR games. This would probably still qualify with a significant romantic content, but that isn't there either.

They are of course wonderful games, no question about that, but IMO they'd stretch the scope of the Archives. It's the same reason why "Wan Wan 1ko" by Akane wasn't included - it is more about serving people etc than the story, even though it's from a maker that has made games which we are now happy to host.

But all of these games I have a list of, so in the future we can put up a list of those that didn't quite make it on the CW, as we discussed. Along with games we don't have permission for etc.

[PyTom]

I was showing a friend of mine some of the games in the RAA, and I noticed with some embarassment that we were missing mac and linux builds of some of the games... even some of the newer games, for which Ren'Py builds in that support automatically.

I propose a new rule... if a game can be built for multiple platforms, then we should include the distributions for all those platforms. Specifically, we should have all the Ren'Py distributions for each game.

Ideally, we'll also go back and add these to existing games, where possible.