Unique Opportunity - A Call to Developers

[boki46]

It just goes to show what a pathetic selection of VNs there are in the English speaking world ... I would hope that VN creators are not aiming to simply trick people into buying their one-shot games for money but are working on their games to expand the VN consumer/supporter base, which is what we really really need right now more than anything else.

For someone who hasn't produced a single finished game yet, you sure do have a harsh judgement on others' hard work.

FYI, one can aim for quality, and still make profit on one's work. It's not just one way or the other.

Also, you can build up as large a private fan-base as you like, but at the end of the day you will still be stuck with only a few platforms to publish on, and a generally small exposure for your game. Not a good sales strategy... If you want to survive and keep making games, you need a wider, world-wide exposure.

[Mikan]

Wow funny, I don't see why this thread is turning into an attack on me when we should be focusing on the publisher's display of obviously unprofessional behavior. What a ludicrous way to avoid address the actual issues at hand.

The problem is entirely in the publisher and his extremely low standards of quality and lack of invaluable services or skills to offer in return.

I guess next time I see some obvious flaws I will just watch said person go to ruin instead.

[Aleema]

Seems to me that you want us "developers" (I find the usage of this word a little awkward to address game makers. Most of the developers I know have the ability to program or create a part of or a full program.) to pretty much do all the tough creative work, and that you want to use these games to rise to internet fame / pull further profit to further expand your service.

... Do you know how most novels are published? Through publishers. That's how you get books on the shelves at bookstores. Because the internet is medium you have more control over, you're letting it cloud your judgement on how business works. A scriptwriter sells their script to a Hollywood studio. A songwriter sells their song to a pop star. For some, it's a livelihood and less about creative control and art than writing novels or drawing pictures is, but that aspect is still predominant. Unlike Hollywood, they won't butcher your scripts. Unlike a pop star, you are the one singing. By all means, go indie. No one cares, it's your thing. But pissing on the publishing process in general is pretty ignorant and naive.

In regards to Ripples and Flower Shop, they are in actuality important flagships for our genre and we should support them. And their creators are right here on this forum next to you, taking your crap. If you want to review their games, you should probably do it in their threads, and remind yourself that if you want to prove to the world what needs to be done, then just do it. Harping on those who had the tenacity to complete a vision and seen some well-earned success from it just seems like childish envy.

[papillon]

I don't see why this thread is turning into an attack on me when we should be focusing on the publisher's display of obviously unprofessional behavior. What a ludicrous way to avoid address the actual issues at hand.

Because the publisher ISN'T displaying obviously unprofessional behavior. That would be you.

The idea you're suggesting of an agent working to connect artists and authors together is a useful idea, but it's not something that most publishers offer and it's clearly not what the poster here has been putting eir work into so far. They might want to consider adding such a service eventually, if they make enough contacts along those lines, it's a potentially useful service. But at the moment, they do have a different service to offer that, unlike some things that have been posted here, actually has working examples with customers.

I guess next time I see some obvious flaws I will just watch said person go to ruin instead.

What obvious flaws have you cited, exactly, other than that you don't think any game on sale meets your personal standards?

Now, unlike the vnovel poster, I'm aware that you're not endorsing a competitor, you just don't think anyone here's games are good enough. You could, however, learn to express that without suggesting that everyone other than you is fools and thieves. If we were really out to do one-time-only ripoffs, we wouldn't keep making games with returning customers... we'd just sell one title for a high price with no demo and run away laughing after we got the money.

[LordShiranai]

I don't find what these guys are doing to be unprofessional. They are looking for VNs to publish, and that's about it.

Not everyone is a business person. One may be a great artist, writer, film maker, programmer, or what have you... but that doesn't mean everyone has the resources, connections, or business savvy to get their product to a mass market. This is where the publisher comes in. They use their resources to get the work to market, and shoulder a good deal of the risk in doing so. In exchange for this, they at least are going to want a cut of the profits.

Ideally, both the creator and the publisher make money at the end of the day. I would agree that there are exploitative publishers out there that will propose an unfair agreement in hoping to take advantage of creators. However, there is no proof that this group falls under that category.

This is why you need to be careful what you sign, and preferably will have a lawyer read through a contract before your agree to it. You walk away from the table when they say they want you to sign over your IP to them, or whatever. But I don't see a reason to outright bash a publisher who hasn't shown any malice and at least has working product demos.

[Mikan]

LOL my goodness, these forums are more hopeless than I ever fathomed.


Good luck.

[LordShiranai]

LOL my goodness, these forums are more hopeless than I ever fathomed.


Good luck.

So, just to get this straight.

A publisher comes onto these forums and says they are looking for OELVNs to publish, proposes a very creator-friendly agreement (creator retained IP, etc), and actually has a site with working demos. They have thus far shown professional behavior, and it is also known that at least one very respectable OELVN creator has signed up with them. Their tone in their posts shows a willingness to at least negotiate terms with creators, or at least this is the impression I get from what they are saying.

It isn't every day that a publisher (even if they are not a big publisher) tries to attract developers in this manner. This could end being a very good opportunity for some of the people here. I don't see any risk in qualified developers at least talking to them to get more details.

I'm really not sure why you feel the need to meet them with hostility. I'm not trying to bash you, but I don't understand the need to basically give a publisher the finger right off the bat like this.

[Morhighan]

Firstly, let's all calm down.

I'm going to have to agree with Mikan that VNovel leaves more to be desired by their posts. In the first post I want all the information I could ever need, links, legality, cost, pictures, etc. Just stating my expectations.

Just because Mikan calls this "unprofessional" (which is how I view it as well. Not good, not bad. Just unprofessional.) does not mean that people have to leap down their throat.

If someone wants to present my visual novel (or anything, really) to the world, I want them to be as professional as possible, whether or not it is their personal forte. If it's that much of a problem, hire/use/volunteer a person who has a more professional air and attitude.

Anyway, this is an interesting business opportunity, so let's get back to the topic at hand. AKA "A Call to Developers."

[fortaat]

boki46 - Could you please identify yourself as associated with Vnovel in the profile\signature? I doubt everyone here read your post as such.

I also agree with the claim you were somewhat unprofessional. Not everyone here knows you (we actually had a retrospectively amusing thread about it), and you can only benefit from the recognition as the publishers of Flower Shop and Ripples.

[Strum]

Hmm, you're the third person to come here and offer this kind of service. Of the three, you seem to be the most promising. Your website is nicely laid out and simple to navigate, and the games are easily accessable (ie no registration required) You also seem to have a good eye for quality, in terms of music and visuals at least. I can't really comment on the story, until I sit down and play through it.

Is your engine finished as you seem to lack a readback feature? Its a standard feature in every visual novel. If its something your planning to add later then I won't say another word on it. From what I've seen, your engine works just fine (minus the readback feature) Overall I say good job, you've shown a bug free engine, and you also have a humble attitude towards developers. Its almost like you've readup on your previous two competitors and avoided making the same mistakes they did.

[boki46]

boki46 - Could you please identify yourself as associated with Vnovel in the profile\signature?

I speak for myself, as an independent member of this forum, Fortaat. My opinions are my own, and not a representative of any company.

[fortaat]

Oh, I thought so because of this post, where you wrote :
"If you'd like to know more about the engine that runs this game online, please PM me, and I'll give you the rundown."

Are you one of the developers of Ripples?

[Jake]

FYI while everything is subjective (sake bento writes quite well and deji's art is not "slightly before average") both Flower Shop / Ripples were in the top50 worldwide of appstore Books section, so they cannot be too bad, don't you agree? :lol:

In the grand scheme of things, on a scale which stretches from zero to Neil Gaiman/Harper Lee[*]/Rembrandt/Leonardo, Sake-Bento and Deji are 'slightly above average'. I mean this with no particular disrespect towards either of them, but seriously: they're not gods - Sake-Bento isn't about to win the Booker prize and Deji isn't getting hung in galleries - and this is all Mikan is really saying on that front. At least in her first post, before everybody reacts in the worst way possible.

This forum - or at least a significant portion of the population - has a terrible habit of being violently against any critique whatsoever, no matter how valid, and it makes everything said by those people less easy to take seriously as a result. It's true that Mikan is going about it in a very blunt and unapologetic manner, but that doesn't have any bearing on the validity of what she says.




From my point of view - and before anyone gets into childish accusations, I say this from the point of view of someone who's finished three VNs (one of them completely on my own), written my own engine for kicks and done a lot of other related work besides - the vNovel engine as presented doesn't impress that much, as Mikan also said. It's nicer and more solid-looking than NovelStream, which was leagues ahead of the DateSim.org offering, but - to the best of my recollection - I've not seen it do anything beyond simple branching stories. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall hearing all the minigame bits (by which I mean "interesting bits") of Flower Shop had to be taken out for the iPhone release? Is that actually all the engine can do, or is there more to it? If it's capable of doing more, then I would have to agree that those aren't very good demonstrations, because we don't see any of the more-advanced features.



(And is vNovel Janet being unprofessional? Personally, I would count "accusing anybody who tells you your service is less than perfect of obviously working for the competition" as unprofessional, yes. Not to mention paranoid - is it a prerequisite for writing an online VN engine?
The response to Mikan basically seems to say "our games are selling therefore they must be excellent" - McDonalds sells burgers by the millions, and lots of the people who eat at McDonalds like their food, but they're definitely qualitatively worse burgers and fries than a lot of other eateries provide. They're unthreatening, they're mass-appeal - but they're not great, and to say that they sell good food just because they sell a lot is an outright lie.
The kind of braggadocio displayed in this thread gives me the impression that the vNovel people aren't interested in art, they're interested in money. Which is fine, there's nothing wrong with that and good luck to them - but it puts me off even thinking about dealing with them, because it gives me the impression they'll be less interested in niche-interest things which aren't mainstream-appeal.



[*] It seems it's harder to think of literary figures who are so unambiguously good as the two painters...

[jack_norton]

This is only about Mikan critique, not about the vNovel part:
Premise: anything about art is SUBJECTIVE (and I hope nobody has something to say even about that!!). I like Van Gogh pictures, my gf hates them. She like Keith Haring and I think is total crap. My favourite movie ever is Blade Runner, hers is Hair. Who is right?

Anyway: I think the problem is that Mikan compared INDIE visual novels with the top AAA VN you see in Japan. I don't recall any exact figures (there was an interesting article translated in english about a year ago but I forgot the URL) but I can say without much doubt that the budget of an average indie VN is MINIMUM 1/25 of the budget of those "big beast" that dominates the JP market (or even less).

I'm sure Deji can do even better art if I could pay her 5k/month and she could work fulltime on a game with the help of several other artists, and I'm sure sake could write even better without having to:
- adapt to the art available (some BG artist disappeared/changed style/blabla), anyone outsourcing art knows perfectly what I mean
- adapt to the timelines (you cannot finish a commercial game in 1 year and hope it was profitable or you'd get a decent ROI)
- in general being free to do what she wants without worrying too much about the game profitability. Sometimes you need to write in a specific way or use some "standard plots" simply because they sell more, even if are maybe not too much original.

So, yes. If you compare my games (or 99.9% of the games in this forum) to any original japanese VN I think you're going to find them mediocre or slightly above average.

If you think (not you Jake or Mikan, it's a generic you) to be able to make something infinitely better than those two games, both on writing, art and music, I'm looking forward to see/play it

[Jake]

Who is right?

Well, you, obviously. Blade Runner is one of the best movies ever made! :3

Anyway: I think the problem is that Mikan compared INDIE visual novels with the top AAA VN you see in Japan. I don't recall any exact figures (there was an interesting article translated in english about a year ago but I forgot the URL) but I can say without much doubt that the budget of an average indie VN is MINIMUM 1/25 of the budget of those "big beast" that dominates the JP market (or even less).

Sure. But a lot of 'indie' VNs are also labours of love rather than commercial ventures - not everyone has deadlines and ROI to consider. And in that field, if people keep up the "we're just some indie guys and we're not a big company and therefore it's impossible to do anything better than the stuff we currently do and anyone who points out that our stuff isn't the best possible stuff in existence is evil and missing the point and trolling" attitude, then they'll continue to never improve and never produce anything any better than the level the community's stuff is currently at.

I'm not saying everyone has to produce VNs with high-literature writing and old-master visuals, but if you stop to come up with excuses as to why you're not better than you are, it's a self-limiting practice and you're shooting yourself in the foot. Similarly, I wouldn't say Sake-Bento's writing or Deji's art is bad in the context of amateur VNs - it's generally significantly above the bar from both of those people - but that's only a useful yardstick when you're only showing your work to amateur-VN people. If people from outside the community keep seeing us rave about how it's "excellent work" they're going to get a worse idea of the community than it deserves, because those people will be rating it against yardsticks like Lee and Rembrandt, because that's what they know.

It's perfectly valid to describe Ripples as "just above average", "terrible" and "excellent" depending on the context you're referring to - but similarly, if the context you're referring to is "the open market", then it's not exactly unfair to compare it to everything else on the open market.




Anyway, like I said: by all means write and draw and produce at the level that you do because it's a reasonable balance between time and effort and profit for a commercial venture; there's nothing wrong with that at all. Just bear in mind when you respond to criticism that people often don't get shown Ripples and told "this is an excellent piece of work considering the limitations under which it was produced", they get shown Ripples and told "this is an excellent piece of work".