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[dstarsboy]

I'm with Aleema on this one. He's got a great thing going here. We can probably all agree that the biggest market for VNs evolves around the Hentai arena, which he would not be able to get away with by submitting an app directly to Google or Apple, but by making the games playable from a mobile browser, he bypasses that completely and release any game he likes.

If I had a game even remotely worth porting, I wouldn't think twice about it.

Also, consider that he's on here because he seems to have some free time at this early stage in his company and is trying to give his engine some use\testing, this is not an opportunity that will be available for long.

Maybe people don't realize the possibilities here, but I find it shocking that a he doesn't have 50 PMs already.

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[kinougames]

@kinougames

Q:Why should I license my game with these people for 50% of the profit?
A: Because we're taking care of all the programming, publishing your game to a giant audience with few barriers, I.E any browser with no downloads whatsoever.

The very first thing I did when considering this project was consult a programmer. Even before I bothered with the art. You say "giant audience", but I'm not sure you can prove "giant audience", since you said yourself that you don't exactly have proof that putting things on your site will put sales numbers into a feasible range. If you do have some numbers, it becomes a different story. If you had an average of selling even let's say, 1000-2000 of a game at a certain price on average, even I would have to consider your service, and that's still low on the scale of game sales.

Q: What are they providing my group that my group cannot do, or replicate feasibly?
A: Well this is context based. If you're some kind of wunderkind programmer, you obviously don't need me. If you don't, then the list of things we provide grows pretty quickly.

I'd agree that games without a decent programmer might need you. I do not think that you need the best programmer evaaaaar! to feasibly replicate what you provide. The programmer on my project is on the higher end of amazing, but still technically an amateur, and we can still do the basic equivalent of what you're providing. I mean, perhaps you have some sort of extra, not-normally-seen programming tricks, in which case, again, I would think completely differently.

Answer about Faq: That's a preliminary FAQ presuming nothing about a game company. In an ideal situation the client would need us as much as we need them, so we lazily just said "50/50", this is completely up to negotiation depending on an infinite number of other factors.

This wasn't mentioned in the original, which is why it was addressed. I suggest specifically advertising the most special and unusual parts of your project over the more generic "we will program your games!" If tons of people will see them, then you need to put forth something that shows the amount of exposure as well as sales.

All Modern browsers: The only thing off the top of my head that would port to all modern browsers if Flash, which would kill iPhone and most mobiles. If you don't mind telling me, how ARE you making a game that runs in every browser? And you're right about the not needing an engine. That harks back to me "Progamming wunderkind" point though. If you can do it, you already don't need me, so why on earth do you even care about my offer?

We're programming with Java directly. And as for "caring about your offer", "care" is relative. Please don't get offended by what I am saying, because I think it's very relevant. You're putting an offer out. Why SHOULD I care about your offer? You keep claiming "programming wunderkind", but as I said, as great as our programmer is, she still qualifies as an amateur due to not having several commercial games under her belt. To be able to make a feasible living off of this, you have to convince me or anyone else with a game that is marketable why they should put out for you instead of someone else who charge less but does equally reasonable work.

(As far as getting scenarios in from people who are maybe doing action games, your company might end up making tons. I don't know, I only work in the VN format because it suits my likes, and can only speak as part of the forum you replied to, which is a VN forum.)

Who does know about programmers in games: It's not about the fact that you don't know you'll NEED a programmer, it's simply that there aren't very many good programmers willing to work for a 50/50 split of profits, not to mention their scarcity in general. There's just simply not a lot of qualified programmers in the world.

I think that heavily depends on what they are programming. VN programmers (especially since there is no battle system) are everywhere and a dime a dozen, even ones who can do crazy amazing professional effects. And, they work for free a whole lot of the time.

In fact, there has been at least one thread specifically mentioning the amount of programmers available for these kinds of projects whereas artists with professional capabilities are few and far in between.

[Jake]

1. If Renpy could be ported to in a browser in a month, why on earth isn't it done yet? Better yet, why don't you do it? If it's as easy as you claim, I don't see why not, the engine is excellent.

Ren'Py couldn't be easily ported to a browser in a month, because to the best of my knowledge no mainstream browser has Python support built in, for starters. If you wanted to run Ren'Py games without extra work you'd probably have to write a suite of browser-specific plugins, which is not only an extra layer of difficulty for the programmer but also a point of friction for the user which would result in much lower uptake.

But that's kind of irrelevant if you're not offering anything like Ren'Py. Didn't you say that you basically had as much functionality as the Phoenix Wright games, only without the courtroom segments? Well, just for an easy example, Monele wrote an emulation of the courtroom segments in Ren'Py ages ago; Ren'Py is incredibly flexible, both with built-in functionality and the option to script in Python.



On one hand - speaking as a professional programmer - I have little doubt that I could write an arbitrary in-browser VN engine that provides the same level of functionality as Phoenix Wright gives you in a month of work time. It's not an earth-shattering achievement unless you're talking to someone who isn't a programmer themselves. There's a lot of stuff you haven't mentioned that you could have done which might impress me, but you haven't mentioned much so it's hard to say. (How are you handling pre-caching/streaming of assets? How scriptable is your engine by default? How are you handling save and load? How secure is your payment barrier? Do you offer any Ren'Py-matching features like UI-hiding, auto-skipping or rollback?)

On the other hand, if you're offering to re-code any custom scripting in people's games that doesn't already fit into your engine into cross-platform in-browser, and including that in your profit-sharing, you start to get into more reasonable territory, since for most saleable games on this forum, you'd need to do a fair bit of bespoke work if your scripting engine isn't already as flexible and powerful as Ren'Py.


(Why haven't I written an in-browser VN engine if I think I could do it in a month? Because it doesn't interest me. I don't want to try and make some spare change off of browser-based sales when I could put a better VN on the desktop using a more powerful engine.)

We can probably all agree that the biggest market for VNs evolves around the Hentai arena

(Actually, I always got the impression that porn doesn't so much 'sell' as 'get pirated', will get stale quickly, and you have to do a damn good job on the art or nobody's in the least bit interested, so you're more likely to make reliable cash off of a decent stats-based sim where the bar for entry isn't so high and you're more likely to produce something people will play again and again.)

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[Jake]

You seem to be asking me all the nice little secrets of how my engine works. I seem to be trying to sell my services, why on earth would I tell you these things?

Because nobody sane would sign a contract with you unless you can tell them what you're bringing to the table. If you're talking about people trying to make money off of VNs, and your product isn't up to scratch, it would damage their brand to be associated with it.

I'm asking you basically if you have even thought about these things, because you don't mention any of them anywhere. There are three things that make me suspicious about what you're promising: one is that you don't mention any capability details other than "we can do everything!", one is that you get defensive whenever anyone questions you, and the third is that you've not shown anything concrete at all.

It's not an unreasonable question to ask, whether you have any plan in place to deal with pre-caching or streaming of assets. It's not a difficult question to answer without giving out source-code, but it's a very important consideration with web delivery. Give us a brief technical overview, it'd still take a skilled programmer to do anything with your response, but it'd give those of us with a little programming knowledge a bit more faith in your claims.

It's not an unreasonable question to ask whether your engine is capable of rollback, or how saves work. Tell us from the end user's point of view, that's all that matters in the long run. Does your engine rely on anything being enabled in the client's browser (JavaScript)? Does it rely on any particular common plugins (Java, Flash)? Is it entirely delivered as HTML?

As for your claim to about the in browser VN. Prove it. You're professional programmer, you must be able to give me a short technical outline of how you would do this. Cause it took us a very long time, and our spec is VERY big. I'm very curious to see how you would accomplish this.

I could, but I'm not the one making wild claims and trying to get other people to sign up to make me money. And if I were cynical, I could see this challenge as you fishing for an answer to give me back to the questions I asked above. :P

If you have such a great engine, why don't you show it to us? It runs in a browser, so why is your "demo game" a YouTube video? If you have a working engine, you can demonstrate it with that engine; you must have a test project lying around at the very least. If you don't, it's a little early to be trying to sign people up to port their games with grand and unsubstantiated promises.


Also:

Constraints: It has to work on EVERY modern browser including mobile ones without any sort of modification between engine types. I.E you can't just hack the engine to load something else when on iPhone.

I don't think this is a very good design constraint, unless you're being pretty opaque; when your display device has a much smaller resolution, or a different aspect ratio, you should deliver a different set of assets to make it possible for people to still properly enjoy the game. Would you have people pan around their iPhone screens to see the whole BG? Would you have people on a desktop peer at a tiny 3x2" section of their screen because you're only delivering iPhone-scaled graphics? Would you download a massive graphic to the mobile device, wasting the user's bandwidth (which they're quite possibly paying for by the megabyte) and time and device memory when you're only going to display every third pixel?

[kinougames]

@Jake, for you everything you've said here.

Thank you Jake, for saying a lot of things that I was also thinking. The original contract asked for 50% of the sales on this product, and yet I'm not seeing much of anything that would make me want to give someone a full half of the work done on my intellectual property. Fortaat isn't very nice, but he made a very good point; what "marketing" is going on here? The OP states that "he gets the product out to a huge audience", but going to his dating sim website makes me believe something completely different. It's a completely unprofessional website, clunky, hard to use website, and there's no way I'd go there and think "these people are going to make me money, let me sign away a percentage to them."

Furthermore, my original game runs in 800x600, art is 300dpi, and is an estimated 14-16 hours long with a ton of small artistic details, from layout design to movie effects, made for beauty and enjoyment of the game. It would look absolutely ugly crammed onto the iPhone screen; we'd have to cut down the art to make it playable. Furthermore, how many people are even going to want to play a game made for intense visual enjoyment on a screen so tiny? Most everyone who would even be interested in this sort of game has some kind of computer and can yank internet from somewhere.

Like I said, for action games, Bejewled-type stuff, this might've been great. For VNs, I'm not seeing anything that makes sense to pay for when you can likely find someone for cheap or free.

My advice is to improve your website, OP, and improve your marketing strategies. Like Jake says, I can't see anyone with the business sense to actually make money and the quality of product to sell a decent amount going for this as is, and frankly, a few people here have a couple of completed VNs...none of which are selling quality.

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[fortaat]

First thing, relax chap, you're on the internet. Moreover, you're trying to sell a product. Both activities require a thick skin.
As you can see from other threads, a great part of improvement comes from criticism and one's ability to understand it. The fact I criticize you doesn't mean I don't like you, it means I don't like your product.
With that in mind...

1. If Renpy could be ported to in a browser in a month, why on earth isn't it done yet? Better yet, why don't you do it? If it's as easy as you claim, I don't see why not, the engine is excellent.

You missed the point, probably because you were too defensive to read carefully. The reason Renpy hasn't been ported, is

because it needs to allow people to write projects. If it only needed to interpret games (AKA run the executable in a browser), it could have been done in a month.

See Jake response.
95% of VNs are composed of a very simple selection tree, accompanied by pictures and flags. These features are trivial in HTML5, which is more than enough for most VNs (it has native support for music and video, for crying out loud). 90% of the VN writers don't need you, or Renpy for the matter. They choose Renpy because it's free, has a nice interface, and a supporting forum. If they reach the point of financial feasibility, it means they already have a programmer skilled enough for such simple coding, and shouldn't give up half the income.
As for the other five percent, they can program - these are the people who create RPGs or dating sims. Nearly all of them are professional just like you, and deserve much better than what you offered. I specified why your deal isn't fair, giving an example to illustrate my point, but you haven't replied.

2. I don't appreciate the personal tone of your statements, I can almost 100% assure you that I do indeed how much time and effort it makes to make such products. Because I've made them before.

Maybe you made some VNs, but you haven't made professional ones (unless you want to share their names?). These require both a professional writer and artist, usually a programmer too. These are all professionals just like you, and they deserve a lot more than you offered.

3. How is iPhone negligible? Does Renpy run on that too? Android? I had no idea Renpy ran on android. I suppose it could if it has python support. Is there a lot of Renpy games on Android?

La sigh...
Iphone:

"Iphone is quite negligible as it only requires a partner who has an Iphone developer license (Footprint will be glad to help, as others)"

Please read his thread, and search for "Iphone" in the forum's search engine. It's really simple to distribute on the IPhone.

Android? I had no idea Renpy ran on android. I suppose it could if it has python support.

Search for "Android" in the forum's search engine. It can't run Renpy, but it can run the games.

Sadly, you make a lot of bold claims without citing any reputable sources, like about what I offer and how difficult it is to provide, which makes me skeptical of your claims because I have sources that say otherwise. I don't really want to argue them with you because that's a waste of time, but if you DO have sources, they would further aid me in my current endeavors, so please provide them.

Use PyGame and Pyglet to "convert" it to a web friendly version, use Django or Twisted for the network. Creating a version compatible with most games would take a professional less than ten hours. Happy I could help.


Now that I proved myself worthy of your time, please answer MY MAIN POINT:
As demonstrated, you don't offer meaningful publicity, and your distribution is irrelevant to most of your customers.
I gave an example of another distributor, much bigger than you, who offers much more than you do (both in distribution and publicity) and demands only 15%, half of what you did. Guess what, artists are leaving the site because they asked too much. Draw conclusions about your rates, and why the other 5% of customers should dismiss you.

Your offer is unreasonable, Do you have a better one?


Even after you come up with one, I suggest you try a different approach to advertisment (for reasons specified by Jake and Kinougames), as the current one cripples your chances. And If you fail at advertising yourself, why should I entrust you with advertising my game?

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[fortaat]

I am interested in what you offer, and I was honestly asking for a reviewed price offer. I suggest your read the thread again in a week or two, after things will cool off.
Good Luck!