NovelStream: Revolutionary visual novel platform

[Jake]

Wait, you LIKE the idea of demos for downloadables being released on NovelStream? Awesome.

It seems to me it makes sense from their point of view; what they need is a critical mass of games which attract players to their site and get people to recognise their brand, so that further developers can be convinced it's worth developing for their system/service and players get used to the idea of trusting the site so they'll be willing to spend money through it.

(I guess the potential down-side to this is that if they do nothing but encourage demos for downloadables, they run the risk of being seen as 'that online demo site' which could put people off spending their money there...)

[Counter Arts]

Wait, you LIKE the idea of demos for downloadables being released on NovelStream? Awesome.

It seems to me it makes sense from their point of view; what they need is a critical mass of games which attract players to their site and get people to recognise their brand, so that further developers can be convinced it's worth developing for their system/service and players get used to the idea of trusting the site so they'll be willing to spend money through it.

(I guess the potential down-side to this is that if they do nothing but encourage demos for downloadables, they run the risk of being seen as 'that online demo site' which could put people off spending their money there...)

They could eventually monetize if there are enough developers willing to pay for the service. Or make money by affiliate sales.

[Charuru]

@Jake very classic business mistake. You're accentuating the obvious, easy to blame, issue and dismissing the less obvious ones as mitigatable. The reason why it's so easy to talk about NovelStream is because NovelStream offers you an all - in - one blame package, so you know who to call if something goes wrong. Off NovelStream the issues are more numerous, more amorphous, and hence less easy to think about. But this is the sort of logic that make people think driving is safer than flying or that self publishing is safer than publishing with a publisher for a printed book. Because the publisher can decide to stop the printing of your book at any time, and then what do you do... if you're on Amazon self publish your book will never go out of print, right?

The platform going down is not the only thing that can harm the potential of a VN's sales.

I'm not dismissing the concerns people have with trusting a young platform, but this is something we can address by building a strong reputation over time. We will strenuously and professionally support any writers or publishers that chooses NovelStream, and the platform as will continue to develop and get better.

If you want to talk more about this topic you can start a new thread. I think the 3 or 4 back and forths have allowed both of us to get our points across already anyway.




@Strum on why we don't have a distributed version.
1. NovelStream is a decently complex setup, it's not something that people can install easily, if at all. Supporting a distributed version would be extremely expensive. As a result, it would also have a shocking price, putting it out of reach of everyone on this forum. Our intention is not to be a barrier for someone wanting to make a visual novel, but to rather benefit with all everyone's successes. So that's why the current model makes sense.
2. Piracy, both of VNs and NovelStream.
3. NovelStream's allows VN writers and developers to concentrate on their tasks of making great stories and great art, and outsource the distractions and dangers of delivery to the platform. Handing people a giant system to install and maintain would not serve these goals.

Why does any website not distribute its code? The same reasons apply to NovelStream.

On Crescendo, yes the source script we had access to is pretty old. JAST was not able to figure out how to open up the current retail version. If you could help, be great. Thanks.




@kinougames
Yes, you can sell on other storefronts than NovelStream. However you are recommended not to, because if you release a downloadable version, piracy will cannibalize your sales.


Some updates:
http://visualnoveldai.com/forums/novels ... s-08042010


Sorry about responding so slowly. Spiky Caterpillar I'll definitely respond to you tomorrow.

[jack_norton]

@kinougames
Yes, you can sell on other storefronts than NovelStream. However you are recommended not to, because if you release a downloadable version, piracy will cannibalize your sales.

And will remove exclusivity from NovelStream hehe
Probably there will be piracy, but everyone knows that exclusivity is the biggest advantage any company can get in the games industry. Some big portals in downloadable pay higher royalties or give bonuses to get the exclusivity.
From your words it seems that is a mutual benefit, but if people give you exclusive content, you're the one getting HUGE benefits.
Not saying that you're evil or anything, just wanted to give to people here, which mostly are newbie when comes to sell online/running a business, a better view of the situation...

[Jake]

You're accentuating the obvious, easy to blame, issue and dismissing the less obvious ones as mitigatable.

No, I'm picking up on the one part which is most likely, statistically speaking, to fail. And I strongly suspect you're over-emphasising the problems of selling your own stuff on your own, although I've not yet tried to sell a VN, myself; I'd be quite interested to hear whether people like Sake-Bento who have recently started to sell stuff have found it as difficult and problematic as you suggest.



Anyway, I'll phrase the question in a different way: why should we trust NovelStream's payment system even as much as we trust BMT Micro, an established service with an established reputation, to pick an example?

It's all very well saying that we know who to call if something goes wrong, but if the thing that's gone wrong is that your startup has gone the way of most other startups and gone out of business for one reason or another, that makes it worse; even leaving aside the engine itself, using a platform like NovelStream as opposed to dealing with two or three other companies for the separate parts of selling a VN is putting all your eggs in one basket.



You can make it a more attractive prospect just by continuing to exist, of course, and there's nothing inherently wrong with selling a service which has some risk attached. Already you have an offering which is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else I've seen in the field of web-delivered VNs, so if it's a market that's sustainable there's no particular reason right now to think you won't get there and sustain it in the end - all I took issue with was the tone of your dismissal earlier, basically claiming it was "unfair" to even bring these issues up.

1. NovelStream is a decently complex setup, it's not something that people can install easily, if at all.

From a technical point of view, this also makes me worry a bit - in the case of disaster, how quickly are you going to be able to be back on your feet? If the services you rely on disappear overnight for whatever reason (datacentres catch fire all the time, at least in the minds of risk assessors) how long will it take you to marshal your backups and organise a replacement and re-deploy your code? I'm sure the "if at all" is an exaggeration since you have a working installation yourself, but talking about how difficult it is to set up gives the impression it might be a longer rather than a shorter time... obviously this isn't so important for a VN site as it would be for a bank or something, but if you're asking indie developers with low enough cashflow already to place their trust in you, they may disagree!


(I understand not wanting to licence and distribute the source for the site itself, of course... and if it's just rhetoric to explain not wanting to support the various bizarre issues that might crop up in 5% of cases on other users' hardware, then fine.)

http://visualnoveldai.com/forums/novels ... s-08042010

It's good to see a script reference - I'll have a look through it later and have another go with the editor...

As to the text log, though - since it's possible in some browsers (and in some users' cases, desirable) to disable the ability of scripts to replace/modify the right-click menu, and on some platforms (Mac!) there's no obvious right-click for a lot of existing users - my laptop only has one big mouse button, for example - could you not provide an alternate way to get to it? Maybe something on the big black bar at the bottom or something, if nothing else? I know how to perform a right-click with my Mac, and a lot of people plug in a third-party mouse, but there'll still be a significant portion of users who don't realise it's possible, believe it or not.

On Crescendo, yes the source script we had access to is pretty old. JAST was not able to figure out how to open up the current retail version. If you could help, be great. Thanks.

Did you try this tool, which claims to extract files from archives from Crescendo (and other titles)?

[Strum]

Jast USA can't open the script? Looks like you've signed up with the wrong company, should've gone to G-Collections. As Jake pointed out there are tools on the internet that lets you hack visual novels. Although, I didn't think you'd needed to resort to that.

If you want developers to take the plunge and give your platform a chance, you'll need address two things. One, to ease their fears they might be wasting time developing a game on an engine which might just disappear over night. Perhaps a heafty compensation paid to developers should your company face closure assuming you don't literally disappear over night.

Second is to show what your engine can really do. An engine with limited capabilities limit developer's creativity. Not to sound mean, but your demo's don't wow me. I'm just not impressed with your games. I know you say its for performance sake and its beta, but I would like to see some impressive looking games there one day (and I'm not talking about artwork). Take a look at http://www.etude-soft.jp/product/asuseka/ (All areas except "Sample CGs" is work safe) Now that's a game that wows me, rays of sunshine beaming in from the corner and its not static either. They have panorama clouds moving across the sky in the background as well as use of lens flares. Putting aside panorama clouds, I don't think even renpy can do the beams of sunshine an lens flares yet. Download the demo and see it for your self, the company has a free demo people can download.

You make a game like that on Novel Stream and I for one will be very impressed.

[Spiky Caterpillar]

If you want developers to take the plunge and give your platform a chance, you'll need address two things. One, to ease their fears they might be wasting time developing a game on an engine which might just disappear over night. Perhaps a heafty compensation paid to developers should your company face closure assuming you don't literally disappear over night.

A compensation fee seems a little unreasonable to me (after all, if they fold it means their engine work was just as wasted as your VN work - perhaps more so, because it may well be easier to port the VN to a new platform than it is to make a profit selling a webapp whose feature list includes 'bankrupted the developer') - and more importantly, IMPRACTICAL. If NovelStream goes under, they WON'T HAVE MONEY to pay a compensation fee with.

For me, a Ren'Py->NovelStream conversion tool will allay worries about them going under - I could then just do most of my development in the engine I know and love, import to NS so that people who either prefer streaming or are running one of those platforms that NovelStream supports and Ren'Py does not can play, and then NovelStream's presence increases my overall business reliability - if BMT catches on fire, users will still be able to buy the NS versions, if NS catches on fire users will still be able to buy the downloadable, and if both of them catch on fire at once then I'm no worse off than if I was using only one vendor.

For devs using NS's editor for the master copy they could set up some sort of escrow arrangement where one or more third parties will release the source under some suitable open license(s) in the event that NovelStream goes under. (And, of course, devs need to remember to make and keep their own offline backups of their VNs. Which applies whatever engine you're using.)

[Charuru]

@Spiky Caterpillar
Thanks for contributing extremely sensibly to the discussion.

On Fonts:
Yes if you need custom fonts you should get your own licenses. NovelStream cannot handle that for you.

On Warez:
Yes, we should move more of our code server side. We'll definitely get on that.

Media Licensing:
We'll pay royalties when we have to. Just one more thing we take care of for you. We don't want each developer to have to deal with their own royalty payments. As for as encoding goes, I'm sure people will be able to take care of their encoding issues themselves...

On refunds:
Yep that's exactly what we do.

On demos of downloadables:
We want to help the community and promote Visual Novels, if we can do that by allowing people to post demos, that would serve our goals as well.

@Jake

Anyway, I'll phrase the question in a different way

That's not just a rephrase, that a different question. It's the question I've been saying you should've been asking this entire time.

But if you're seriously asking about payments I'll actually have to defer to another time... Some things are still in flux here, and I'll be able to give a more solid answer in a month.

From a technical point of view, this also makes me worry a bit - in the case of disaster, how quickly are you going to be able to be back on your feet?

This is not something people should have to think about haha, of course we have this well covered. I meant it would be hard for people to learn how to use all the component pieces that make up NovelStream, but it's obviously a different matter when we're restoring a backup.

Textlog / Right click:
Yes, you're right, we'll do that.

@Everyone on Crescendo:
We used the tool that Jake linked to get the assets from Crescendo, the main script file is unreadable though. The arctool did decompile the script, but not fully... There's no voice data in the output. There's no contractual issues, JAST now owns G-Collections.

It's good to see a script reference - I'll have a look through it later and have another go with the editor...

Thanks a lot for all your help. Looking forward to it.

@Strum

to ease their fears

Jake's strategy of continuing to exist is probably best.

Haven't tried the demo you suggested. But the things you mentioned like rays of sunshine and lens flair, is that not just correct application of images? I'm sure you can do them in any engine. Interesting animated backgrounds is something that's on our list. Anyway you make a good point about having technically impressive demos to show people. We'll definitely make more polished demos, but on many levels the things that you described are not that technically impressive.

Thanks for all the feedback everyone, you guys and girls have been tremendous.

Expect some of these things next week:
Native clients, Achievements tutorial, a new effect, a ren'py converter.

[Jake]

(The payment question is a very similar question - it stems from the same concern: that you might disappear one day and make it difficult for users and developers alike to recover what they invested with you.)

Haven't tried the demo you suggested. But the things you mentioned like rays of sunshine and lens flair, is that not just correct application of images? I'm sure you can do them in any engine. Interesting animated backgrounds is something that's on our list.

I went and tried the trial version last night. It's rendering things like raindrops, falling leaves and so on as 3D polys with a raindrop/leaf sprite texture, as best as I could tell.

The only sunbeams I saw looked pretty static and could be done with an overlay, and stuff like the drifting clouds in the background in some scenes would be doable with 2D graphics so long as you can set up animations to run in the background of your scene, but other stuff would require some particular coding... there was a parallax effect in the menu when you moved the mouse around, which was pretty nice, and a scene where a girl was laying in water in which the surface of the water was rippling around - which looked like a pixel shader over a water-surface sprite with a static parts-of-the-girl-above-the-water sprite overlaid, to me. Also, in their 'right-click-to-hide-the-UI-and-look-at-the-pictures mode you could left-click to zoom in and pan around, which was kind of neat.

(Since Strum mentions it, off the top of my head: my guess is that Ren'Py could do the rain relatively easily from a technical point of view (although you'd need to be more careful in the setup of your sprites than I'd guess these guys had to be, and create a new particle system for each rain angle) but it probably wouldn't perform so well in software mode; could have an attempt at the leaves using the same method that wouldn't look quite so natural; the clouds and sunbeams are doable so long as the sunbeams weren't using some particular blending mode; the parallax I think would be doable if you came up with a custom-Python-scripting way to find the mouse cursor's position; and the water-ripple would be fakeable with pre-rendered animations but wouldn't look quite so nice (and/or would take up a lot of space).)

a ren'py converter.

From Ren'Py to NovelStream, I presume? How will you handle all the things Ren'Py does that NovelStream can't really auto-convert, like custom scripting? Just leave them out?

[Strum]

A compensation fee seems a little unreasonable to me (after all, if they fold it means their engine work was just as wasted as your VN work - perhaps more so, because it may well be easier to port the VN to a new platform than it is to make a profit selling a webapp whose feature list includes 'bankrupted the developer') - and more importantly, IMPRACTICAL. If NovelStream goes under, they WON'T HAVE MONEY to pay a compensation fee with.

If they had to close down, they'll go through liquidation. I'm assuming there will be law-binding contracts involved when people deal with Novel Stream, unless deals are done over a pint of beer and a hearty handshake at the local tavern. When one side fails to deliver (ie the company can not host the game for any reason, or the developer suddenly wants to pull out of the deal and go with a rival company instead), the other will pursue compensation through the courts.
Maybe I'm completely misunderstanding how business will be carried out, but I'm under the impression they are a legitimate company with their own premises either rented or owned. As well as a team of staff who are on full time pay working for the company. If it turns out they are simpily college students out to make some money using their class project and are operating from their bedroom then what I say doesn't apply since everything is done informally.

@Charuru
You think Etude just used some animated gifs or something simple to make those effects? Then I'd like to see you try something similar in Novel Stream. While it may not seem technically impressive especially if you compare it to today's 3D rendered games; for visual novels which previously only used static backgrounds these little effects are impressive. I have yet to see anything else as impressive used in a visual novel.

As for the topic of Crescendo, are you able to read anything in the file such as what dialogue is to be spoken next etc? I don't think that software was meant convert the script into nice readable "line 10023 play voice97732.wav". Its a hacking tool for people to rewrite the in game dialogue for fan translation projects. If the code is completly unreadable, it means its still encrypted. If you can read the dialogue in the script file then study the script file. You will figure out what command is used to call the voice files.

@Jake
If you can do all the neat visual effects in that game on renpy, can you add it to the cookbook please? Although I don't have plans to use it myself, it should be a big help for other people to make their games look more visually impressive especially if they have a good artist to to make good use of these effects.

[Jake]

If they had to close down, they'll go through liquidation. I'm assuming there will be law-binding contracts involved when people deal with Novel Stream, unless deals are done over a pint of beer and a hearty handshake at the local tavern.

From what I saw, it looks more of a self-service model, much like CafePress; the user agrees to a generic T&C contract, writes and uploads his VN and puts in payment points, then someone from NovelStream just has to approve it and it's online.

I would expect in a situation like this that the T&C includes clauses like "if we go under we don't owe you anything", "client assumes all risk" and so on, because I would expect that otherwise they couldn't really afford to run the service.

You think Etude just used come animated gifs to make those effects?

On an unrelated note, whereabouts in the trial did you see moving sunbeams? I'd be interested to see them, the only ones I saw looked pretty static. Not that there weren't lots of other impressive visual effects in that game, mind.

[Strum]

If they had to close down, they'll go through liquidation. I'm assuming there will be law-binding contracts involved when people deal with Novel Stream, unless deals are done over a pint of beer and a hearty handshake at the local tavern.

From what I saw, it looks more of a self-service model, much like CafePress; the user agrees to a generic T&C contract, writes and uploads his VN and puts in payment points, then someone from NovelStream just has to approve it and it's online.

I would expect in a situation like this that the T&C includes clauses like "if we go under we don't owe you anything", "client assumes all risk" and so on, because I would expect that otherwise they couldn't really afford to run the service.

You think Etude just used come animated gifs to make those effects?

On an unrelated note, whereabouts in the trial did you see moving sunbeams? I'd be interested to see them, the only ones I saw looked pretty static. Not that there weren't lots of other impressive visual effects in that game, mind.

I suppose he can defend himself like that if the contracts are set out that way. I thought a financial incentive would work to encourage developers to give Novel Stream a whirl. I don't know about other people but looking at the current demos. When I look at Novel Stream, I'm thinking is that it all? Is this all Novel Stream is capable of? A company with a fairly basic engine that could be gone at anytime. I don't think people will be convinced to use Novel Stream unless they can at least see that they can get creative with the games they make on it. Why use Novel Stream? There's always flash.

As for the sunbeams, they can be found almost everywhere. They don't just simpily dissolve in and out, they beam in from the top left corner in random order which suggests this isn't some visual trick and more program related. If I see a game with all the effects shown in that demo being run on Novel Stream that would impress me greatly and I'm sure it will impress a lot of other people too.

[Jake]

I suppose he can defend himself like that if the contracts are set out that way. I thought a financial incentive would work to encourage developers to give Novel Stream a whirl.

Something like that could also potentially give people the incentive to DoS your system, though...!

As for the sunbeams, they can be found almost everywhere. They don't just simpily dissolve in and out, they beam in from the top left corner in random order which suggests this isn't some visual trick and more program related.

Yeah? I'm going to have to go back and have another look, then - I think the only time I saw sunbeams was from the top-right corner, over the CG of the girl curled up amongst the dry leaves...

[Charuru]

Not sure if relevant:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010 ... y-sale.ars

[Topagae]

Heh, that's why it's good to be in the online game business.