What got you into VN making?

[Mirage]

1. 2002. Even though at that time I didn't even know the game I was making was VN/adventure games.
2. Lots of stuff. Mainly due to my lack of ability to program so I stuck in creating story based games. Most of inspirations are actually RPGs, so my story tend to be more adventure/fantasy than romance.

In 2005, I watched my friend playing Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side and was interested in creating Dating-Sim/Otome Games.
In 2007, got introduced to Ren'py when my games were listed in Renai.us
In the same year, my interest in creating VN increased tremendously. Now hoping to finish whatever hyperbole I stick myself into.

[vaanknight]

whoa, well for me it is:

1. I've been an otaku since I was a child, I was let's say... 12 years old or so (1997) when I really got into anime and all its media, but I started to play dating sims and whatnot when I was 15 or 16 (2001), I began with anime themed flash games in NG.

2. I just randomly found the Ren'Py site on google, I don't remember what I was looking for, and when I read the words "VN making engine" I got automatically interested. I didn't really took seriously wanting to make my own VN until I wanted to make something special for my freckled wonder's birthday, and that's what I've ben doing for the past couple of months :]

I have already lots of ideas for my next VNs, so I'm here to stay methinks.

[curry nochi rice]

1) When did you first get into making visual novels, dating sims, and other related games?

March 19, 2010... using novelty. I got hooked on developing games after i realized that most anime series I'd watched were games.

2) How did you get into it. Were there any works that influenced you, people that told you about it, or the like?

Tell you the truth, "Welcome to the NHK." inspired me to do so. I thought amateur game developing was a far-fetched dream until I saw this anime.

[LinWest]

1) When did you first get into making visual novels, dating sims, and other related games?

Last summer I started writing my failed fire emblem 9 dating sim. I did it just for lols, but the paths got way too out of control for one girl to handle. It's here if you're interested. I then started my Kyo Kara Maoh doujin game that in theory would be much simpler. It simpler, but story wise its lengthy. I've also done an artsy choose your own adventure game that I haven't finished yet, and another game I'm writing for. I'm oh so close to finishing it all of them. I feel like I'm just going to release like three at once. haha. See my lengthy story below for the how I got interested.

Thank god for renpy, or I'd be doing all this coding in flash.

2) How did you get into it. Were there any works that influenced you, people that told you about it, or the like?

Well, in the 90s, choose your own adventure books were all the craze. I loved the goosebumps choose your own adventure books particularly since I was already tearing the entire collection of goosebump chapterbooks. Zelda: Ocarina & majora's mask were coming out around this time too, so they made books for those as well. I actually wrote my first "visual novel" script when I was like twelve. I made a choose your own adventure text game for zelda in MS powerpoint. It was a hundred slides or something ridiculous. My friends thought I was pretty cool. I also played around with text based games in MS DOS game maker, but got bored with that because it was all text. Then I fiddled around in RPG maker and tried to make dating sims in this one program.. fantasy game maker? Or something? It's not out anymore, but it basically was a text based game maker that you could put visuals in. (I wanted to make a yugioh dating sim haha.) I did all that in grammar school/middle school even though I didn't know exactly what a visual novel was.

I also have always loved writing and drawing, so I'd look for ways to incorporate both. Do during the latter of middle school/high school I spent time doing a lot of webmanga, fanfiction until one fateful day while reading newtype magazine I saw an ad for Animamundi... I didn't get to play it until 2006 when Hirameki was already plummeting, but it quiet literally changed my life. At least my interests anyway.

I had already been drawn to the gothic subculture, so I liked that aspect of the game. I also had been recently reading about comparative religion, writing archetypes, and different mythologies for research for some of my fantasy webmanga. Animamundi blew me away! It introduced me to something even more awesome than fantasy novels and myths: occult and esoterica. Which is the heart of all fantasy material. Alchemy, Kabbalah, astrology, Paganism, the mystery cults, numerology, chiromancy, symbolism, tao, black/white magic... I don't practice any of these, but damn, can I tell you what summoning circle they're using in any given anime.

That and it showed me what a quality visual novel should be. I have never found anything that has lived up to it. Fanwork I've done for animamundi and my My Animamundi fansite which I haven't updated in forever.... (But i forgot the username I made the account with -_-) I've also played the translated version of SIlver Chaos, which was fun, but not as intelligent or involving as Animamundi.

And so, I found my way here through googling. I now spend my college days making dolls, scriptwriting, and drawing when I can.

[sake-bento]

Gonna answer both questions in one go, since they're related.

Well, I was coding adventure games in BASIC back when I was 12 or 13...can't remember. I spent a good deal of my childhood fluctuating between wanting to make computer games for a living and wanting to be a professional actress (turns out you can do both!). The spark that really got me wanting to make a good game was Myst. It was a revelation to me in terms of the power that computer games have to tell stories and pull in "regular" people who aren't normally gamers. I learned about dating sims when I entered high school and didn't think much of them, but I got lot more interested when I found out that the My HiME anime was being made into a VN by Circus (sometime in college). I also discovered a lot of my favorite shows like Comic Party and Da Capo were based on VNs. A friend brought me copies of AIR and Narcissu, and I thought "I bet I could do this!" I puttered around with converting my short story, Forget Me Not, into a VN on Blade Engine before I eventually migrated to Ren'py and made Ripples.

[\Nish/]

1) When did you first get into making visual novels, dating sims, and other related games?
Around 2004? When I played The Princess Maker series. And then I played Ever 17 and that basically made me into a fan.

2) How did you get into it. Were there any works that influenced you, people that told you about it, or the like?
Yeah, other visual novels, and related anime like EF influenced me a lot. Also this forum and all the games from here.

[Adorya]

1) late 2006

2) long rpg/vn veteran, FSN was the trigger for "you can make a media that combine reading and awesome animated sequence", Touhou was the trigger for "you can do it all alone".

Someday with enough time and motivation...

[IceD]

How did I got into visual novels? it is a long story...

Basically, everything started when I become interested in anime and manga as well as japanese culture, which was, uh... very long ago and I don't remember the precise moment clearly now - I was watching anime since I was a little kid (yet, didn't know it has such a name and that it's a japanese animation) . I've heard a bit about VN's in the days when they might become one of the rarest and oddest things to be seen in our country but didn't paid them much attention. That was, untill I watched Neon Genesis Evangelion. This movie made me want more of Gainax's amusing stuff, so I simply searched the nets, and out of nowhere bumped into some info about a... game (such misinterpretations still happen to this day ), named Girlfriend of Steel which was basically an original story expansion, set somewhere in the middle of the NGE, and it wasn't available in any other form. I didn't knew much of japanese those days, so was a bit sad I won't be able to read anything, so I set everything aside. But when I came back later on, there already was anenglish translation out! It was hard to get that vn but I finally managed to put my hands on it... Was quite amazed, even if the novel was surely outdated the day I read it. But it was great and left me wanting more. I started to stumble upon more info about vn's, done some research and it turned out that there is a quite large english fanbase. I also found Insani's homepage, which broadened my horizon about visual novel translations and show it is possible, after all. Narcissu was the next novel, which I've read and... That's how I feel in love with visual novels.

I was always interested in IT and computer games. I always wanted to have a future as a video game designer/writer/artist. I love visual novels for their originality and form, that incporporated story along with beautiful art, sounds, music and gaming/interactive elements. I thought it would be great to have something polish made like that. I found Ren'Py and LSF community out of my curiosity and interest in possible game engines, that would enable me creating vn's in a reliable way, when everything I tried in the meantime failed (including manual programming - guess I'm a weak excuse for a programmer). Now I'm happy and I really appreciate I found LSF Thanks.

[yummy]

When did you first get into making visual novels, dating sims, and other related games?

I think I started to get into creating something like Pytom, around 2003-2004.

How did you get into it. Were there any works that influenced you, people that told you about it, or the like?

That's an excellent question. At first I didn't intend at all to create a visual novel.
I had this manga project I had been documenting on for a while, by the time I was still studying japanese at the university. I didn't really know about visual novels until I met with the music from visual novels actually. The music from Kanon was awesome and I remember I searched frenetically where it came from.
I think that's also one of the reasons I studied japanese ^^

But what really got me into creating visual novels was the fact I had no sense of storytelling when it came to drawing manga. To me, the visual novel media came at the right time because I thought the presentation just looked like a storyboard, while you left the character animation to the reader's imagination. I also liked the fact that you could add music with the script.
Some sort of mix with pre-animation, a book and a movie storyboard.

Then I began to search on the internet for a script engine and at that time there weren't as much choices as now.
There was Onscripter which was a real pain to make working, another obscure japanese engine (not Blade) that I never managed to make working, RPG maker and Ren'Py. There were few games already made with the Ren'Py engine that I found quite interesting and I remember I really liked Tales of Lemma (short, fun atmosphere, simple).

I was also translating manga for friends and joined a french scanlating group at that time, and one of my teammates recommended me some titles. Almost most of them were filled with lots of mature themes, ranging from family issues, drugs, violence, mental illnesses, persona non ingrata...
That made me change completely my point of view about this media, because I thought it was only a cultural niche, unable to move past the anime and manga culture frontier.

I think the LSF forums helped me a lot into finding how to make things, and the community is always eager to help, even for trivial things to complex blocs of code. I still think that's what kept me into wanting to make a game.

Hmm now that I'm talking about it... I remember I got a vaporware to finish ^^;;

[Doggy Nino]

1.I started to become interested in VNs around 2007 I think...I saw tons of games out here so I decide I want to make one as well. I had always loved anime since I was a little kid! I thought it would be a interesting and time consuming project for me to work on since I'm very lazy!

2. Well I had already had played a couple VNs at the time so it was very cool to see how people put a lot of time into making these amazing games. I had always thought about making my own games but I never really thought about doing it. Most of the time I would just draw comics at random and write stories. Then i thought of an idea to take one of my favorite RPG games and turn some idea of fanmade game. At first I though it was completely some just crazy idea in my head...but then I thought this could be a real chance to show my art and creative side that's pretty much how I got started!

[Topagae]

I got into VN making because in my quest to FIND VN's I saw that my game site, Newgrounds, had some. They kinda blew, so I figured I could do better.

That was two years ago, we're making progress, but things move slow when you don't get paid to do this stuff and gots a wedding to pay for a bills to pay...

Edit: Wow, someone thought "My" game site meant I own newgrounds. No, I meant that is was "My" site because it's my favorite site for games. Good times at newgrounds.

[VenusEclipse]

1) My first dating sim was Harvest Moon for the SNES back in...199-something. It wasn't really a pure one but you know what sort of game it is. I never knew these kinds of games existed. I really never knew what Visual Novels were until I researched Kanon (2003) because it was interesting to me.

2) I played games with "event based" cutscenes where there's a bg and a character talking to you. They were fun. Tokimeki Memorial (for boys) was the first that got me into it. I don't remember which version it was. It was only four or so years ago that I really know what a Visual Novel was. Phoenix Wright inspired me. Nummyz flash games inspired me. I tried Flash, and other game making programs but they were just take too long. I wish I discovered Renpy when it was released. It was exactly what I was looking for.

[Topagae]

You know, I played Harvest Moon back in the day, but as a kid, I never really cared much about the dating sim aspect of it, only that my dad liked it better when I got hitched up with one of the annoying girls. Of course I got hooked and I've played just about every Harvest Moon since.

[Samidarenina]

1. I´ve been having experience with hobby game making since 2002 which is actually quite funny considering the age I was at that time xD
Visual Novel making started to appeal to me last year around this time.
2. I´ve actually discovered VN´s after reading the manga adaption of Tsukihime. I found out that it was made after a game which in turn woke interest in me. I´ve read a considerable ammount of them since that time.

Sami