Has OELVN development peaked?

[Dim Sum]

(Sorry if my minimal lurking led to this wrong historical impression but I see little evidence that this isn't the case.)

Early RenPy days:

Small community but many works were praised. Bad art but good design choices for such games were praised. Any highly recommended game was often incomplete/short but clearly diverse in artwork/quality and concept. Pay OELVN = not "good" OELVN but OELVN with designs that are exclusive. Exclusive English Princess Maker. Exclusive Battle Rpg/VN. Exclusive Graphic Novel/VN.

The bad: Little to no one payed attention. Those who tried to share had little audience. Forums was needed to know the polished RenPy. Many limitations were excusable.

Modern RenPy days:

Many posts both inside and outside recommend "1st time" high quality OELVNs.

Almost all of these OELVNS while punished and obviously took a load of work to do were all of the same art style/general story theme.

Nearly impossible to hear new OELVNS. Top names are Christine Love, Winter Wolves, Alistair++ and Katawa Shoujo.

Even Hanako Games are not as well mentioned though Cute Knight will always be THE english Princess Maker.

The good: Popular gaming blogs talk about the games.

The bad:

The tutorial has only slightly improved. Many old forum tutorials are still forum topics (or have disappeared) and not part of the official tutorial.

Expectations for OELVNs have risen but also saturated. Despite only having a few top titles, said titles constantly get repeated. New users wanting more diversity are forced to wade through such titles unless they extremely monitor the OELVN news. In mainstream blog comments, if top quality OELVN does not satisfy, most recommend Japanese->English VNs and treating both OELVN and professional Japanese VN as equals.

Database conversations/spreading the awareness for OELVNs have died. Everyone seems satisfied with the still general and old looking renpy games list. Either that or no one is motivated to change how the database lists such games except for blog review sites. Conversations of "posters (?)" became a "featured game" in the main site. No idea of the original context of "posters" just spotted some old topics.

Culture creep has started to enter into the general OELVN audience. What used to be open ended is now something along the lines of: Christine Love fans/Christine Love critics overriding most conversations & criticisms about OELVN. Winter Wolves became the most innovative "main" OELVN replacing the old spot by Hanako games creating another sub-group solely focused on Winter Wolves type of hybrid hardcore gaming "on top of" VNs. The last vocal group (within the considerations of what is vocal for a small OELVN community) are the ones who believe the Katawa Shoujo VNs are the only worthwhile OELVNs. Conversations about the "poetry" behind each VN has seemingly died. Story threads "disappear" once a VN gets released.

Finally...

Hierarchy has disappeared:

(For games) What is "good OELVN" rather than "good VN"? Very rarely talked about anymore. Where does Moonlight Walks rank against the modern top mentioned VNs? No longer important. "Moonlight Walks", the most well known early top quality VN, simply *disappears* except in the memories of hardcore OELVN posters who remembers.

(For the engine) Sorry not a program but surprised that there's "no in-between" yet between Novelty and RenPy. Many of the programmer focus appears to be on the portability. RenPy has also lost much of the balance on the "Ren" side. Though programming and artistry was pervasive even in the past, there was still a question of how to encourage diversity and praise every little element of a product. Today it appears to be more of a "PyGame alternative" for producing VNs. Christine Love works have become 75% of the "Ren" and Katawa Shoujo completes the other "25%" (though it usually makes up for this with the view that it is the best polished and executed OELVN thus far).

(For the genre as a whole) Even the forums have no "pack" that contain the classics. No "pack" for when someone wants to easily immersed in different genres. OELVN trend then ends up being a slave to the general professional pop VNs siding mostly towards Mystery and Sci-Fi because that is what the most popular VNs are being done as so the top quality OELVNs tend to also be following that trend.

Even the database created and continues the self-fulfilling policy with this:

By Genre

Mystery
Parody

[CheeryMoya]

(For the genre as a whole) Even the forums have no "pack" that contain the classics. No "pack" for when someone wants to easily immersed in different genres. OELVN trend then ends up being a slave to the general professional pop VNs siding mostly towards Mystery and Sci-Fi because that is what the most popular VNs are being done as so the top quality OELVNs tend to also be following that trend.

Even the database created and continues the self-fulfilling policy with this:

By Genre

Mystery
Parody

Yeah, the database does need a huge overhaul. I think a lot of people use the forums to download the games though, so that place is kinda obsolete. I think redeyesblackpanda's Website Hosting project is trying to make a new database for games though, it's being tweaked and stuff to look clean and shiny. Sorry if I wasn't supposed to let slip this secret, vnovel team >_>

[EroBotan]

wow, I didn't know any of these discussion about Christine Love, Winterwolves, etc... where can I read all of this? ... . the only VN forum I know is this forum .__.

[PyTom]

Honestly, a big problem is that I haven't really maintained the games list in years. I accept new games on a regular basis, but I haven't been able to find the time to give the games db and renai.us the rewrite that it needs.

So if someone wants to take it over from me, that would be a good thing. (I'd be able to host it, or simply pass it off to someone else for hosting in the future.)

EDIT: That being said, I don't think I accept the premise that VN development has peaked. We have more projects than ever, and - to be honest - better projects than ever. (We also have worse projects than ever - that's Sturgeon's law for you.)

It's not 2005 anymore - back then, game releases were so rare that every single one was a big deal. We now get multiple games a week - so many, it would be nearly impossible to play them all. We've left the Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat phase, and are now a "legitimate artform".

The downside is that there are several great games (I use ADRIFT as the canonical example) that aren't getting a lot of play, when they really should. I don't know how to address this, except by encouraging the group plays, review sites, self-promotion, and so on.

[AxemRed]

(For the engine) Sorry not a program but surprised that there's "no in-between" yet between Novelty and RenPy.

There are alternative engines like ONScripter or NVList. Several groups have been creating Javascript-based engines and Cinders is using a GameMaker based custom engine. I'm not sure what you think would be "in-between" Novelty and Ren'Py? VNDS?

What is "good OELVN" rather than "good VN"? Very rarely talked about anymore.

Why would the original language matter at all? A VN is good or bad regardless of language.

[nyaatrap]

Honestly, I couldn't understand all of what you're trying to say (blame my English skill ._.).
One thing I know is I choose ren'py after I tried out almost VN engines in Japan (I'm Japanese). Ren'py is the most well-balanced VN engine totally, at least among the free ones.

About OELVN... I don't know. I just smell something failure of this word at the beginning. Games I'm involved are ones by Neko-soft, but I hardly say they're OELVN. They're just VN for me.

edit: ah, I found the critical difference between Japan and English - The LAW. Japanese VN is originated as an adult material and developed on the edge of censorship. But in English, Adult materials are totally abolished. I don't know how it effects in reality but when English VN reached the same quality to the Japanese ones, something critical may revealed.

[redeyesblackpanda]

I've always found the "EVN is different from normal VN!" argument as sort of an excuse. It's true that the VNs with the largest audience and most resources at their disposal are Japanese visual novels, but in the end, I think they're the same thing, they're just originally written in different languages. I think it's a good thing when we can compare EVN and other VN on the same level, and making excuses has a way of preventing that from happening.

[jack_norton]

Well is curious because I don't make VN since... Heileen 2, so 2009 all my recent games are dating/life sims and RPGs, though they still have a strong story gameplay/VN element.

Commercially speaking, OELVN are still quite underground - I mean even Kotaku/RPS talks about Cinders for example, but they don't review it. Only C.Love VNs were reviewed by the mainstream press, so while I can't know for sure, it might be just the "novelty factor" and it could fade in few months/years, even if from now on everyone will recognize OELVN as a genre. I remember only a few years ago, when I was showing my games to other developer friends they were saying "are those hentai sex game simulators?"

[Obscura]

Has it peaked? I'm pretty sure I have yet to see an older VN match Cinders in its production quality, and that game was released pretty recently. It actually looks like a game that was produced by a bigger studio, and not an indie production house.

[papillon]

I've always found the "EVN is different from normal VN!" argument as sort of an excuse.

Budgets do make a difference, but the language not so much. It *is* true that completely-noncommercial-doujin is different from games made for a profit, though. We have entirely different considerations in mind, and I tend to think it's not right to compare them directly.

The prominence of english VNs has continued to rise, and the 'community' of people who play them is now too large and too diverse to be called a community at all. There are many different kinds of fans, many of which have nothing to do with each other, and trying to come up with any overall characteristics is going to be VERY misleading. I have seen all kinds of crazy statements made by people who think the handful of comments on some subject that they've found is representative of the whole 'community', when many of the facets of these 'communities' don't even know the others EXIST.

There's a growing number of people out there on the web who use the phrase 'otome game' to refer to *all visual novels*, because that's the only kind they've ever heard of! No longer does everyone see some animeish graphics and immediately go "Is that hentai?" English-written games are selling more copies than many English-translated Japanese games. Lots and lots of people are getting involved in trying to make their own games, although as usual many will never be completed.

Things change.

And with so many people and so many ideas, how is anyone going to agree on what the 'best' game is, or whether things have 'peaked' or not?

[Dim Sum]

wow, I didn't know any of these discussion about Christine Love, Winterwolves, etc... where can I read all of this? ... . the only VN forum I know is this forum .__.

This is I think the poster site for all the Christine Love entry and Katawa Shoujo: (the comments, not the article)

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/03 ... ove-story/

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/01 ... /#comments

There are other sites like destructoid but that's like the mainstream list of comments for OELVNs in general that I have found.

Most Winter Wolves praises are found here: (though recently they've been quick to pick up Cyanide Tea but before that they were also praising Christine Love)

http://jayisgames.com/tag/visualnovel

Christine Love was also able to do a sale based on a price tag that many originally said they would pay for if Hate was priced at that.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/209370/

There are alternative engines like ONScripter or NVList. Several groups have been creating Javascript-based engines and Cinders is using a GameMaker based custom engine. I'm not sure what you think would be "in-between" Novelty and Ren'Py? VNDS?

Novelty is not an alternative engine though. It's a graphical engine aimed at an even less programmer oriented audience than RenPy was (but with it's power) and RenPy as someone said is the most balanced of the engines.

An in-between to use a game maker analogy would be a LUA to RenPy's python and Novelty's Rpg Maker/Ruby though the analogy doesn't quite fit. If that doesn't make sense (since I don't know my programming) how about a Choicescript with Pictures as a potential over-simplification of an in-between?

Why would the original language matter at all? A VN is good or bad regardless of language.

It's not so much the acronym that matters but the difference between the delivery and the overall culture.

OELVN as a culture differed because the American culture had a different take on genres than other cultures.

This isn't set in stone but where past OELVN culture lacked in quality or polish, it had better more accessible experimental short story VNs at least compared to what most English gamers (especially PC) received.

I can't say I've immersed in the past either but there used to be a time where the Lemmasoft forum "as a general group culture" would see through the depths of a small game. It could be a black and white game and the community would see it and discuss it as a good piece of art.

In some ways, to use PyTom's analogy, back then (though it may be hard to feel that way about the past because nowadays the state is better for RenPy)...back then... the culture treated the products as half product of engine/half art form and the result was that many posters wrote about VNs that normally you wouldn't pay attention to because some posters would be quick to mention these names despite their flaws. It was as if due to the lack of light novels, OELVN became just as much a VN engine for a future full blown professional VN as much as the English speakers' niche for where to put concepts that normally they would do a light novel in. At least the better games were talked of like this. (I'm also not sure if the comment is correct because I'm ignorant of the light novel culture in Japan.)

That produced an effect where the only problem was the audience but, if there were an audience, they would have read or heard about all the different OELVN within it's own space. This made it easier to spot and check new works. There would be little line between "so bad I won't ever pick it up" to "at least it's good enough to review". The "Ren" of the genre, the creativity, the audience was in full blown.

To be truthful, I don't think there was a radical shift in culture. Just that the programming aspects of RenPy far outflood the conversations about the games. Even the games tend to be repeated: "This is the OELVN title I would recommend: <insert modern title>".

There doesn't appear to be a criteria anymore for someone who wants to be introduced to Moonlight Walks to be introduced to it as an introduction. Most things are about how the full colored works "work" and most of the genres are mystery, sci-fi, romance. Main ones. No more mention of the possibility of someone who wants to know about quality ghost love stories in RenPy. It was the unique trait of the past OELVN culture.

I am surprised though that Adrift was heavily ignored. That's the most common game featured on the main renpy site. Someone in a topic also mentioned recommending it as an initial game. I had assumed Adrift is among the latter half of pumped up names. Just slightly lower than Alistair++.

I don't have the solution either but I also wonder why certain things from a non-programming perspective weren't adopted such as the packs style introduced in other open sourced games like Battle for Wesnoth where, despite it being hard to get in to the pre-installed group, there were several scenarios bundled within the installer itself. It made for a better historical perspective of what was being done. RenPy still had the one game. You wouldn't get an idea of a featured game from within the installer unless you return to the site. Most of the guides are still about the syntax. There's none of the motivational tutorials or exciting stuff that were being introduced in the forums.

It seems more and more designed like a game programming language and the forum topics appear to reflect that. There's still products with stories being discussed but most of the general discussions have shifted away into general forum posts about writing, general opinions, bare plot points that are not yet in an actual finished RenPy. Gone are the myriad of discussions about how Moonlight Walks was this innovative mini game whose endings matter. There seems to be no more of an extension of that from a purely artistic sense. It would be like a group of poets or painting admirers used to talking about the romanticism or the art design or the flow and discussing it in that context to slowly becoming just a general digital art forum (backed by a specific program) where the art is all about the overall end quality or the lines have to be anatomically correct or the story is all about how it entertains us rather than the intricacies of how the multiple endings were pulled off, how the choices in this one impacted the game despite the game lacking choices, how someone should find a way to correct this pattern of work or how someone should be phrased for making a good design choice and allowing a bad art to easily feel good "as a novel".

...and without that, the concept of discovering OELVNs have also lost their history and therefore the ease of just lurking and listening to a name is rarely heard except for the widely mentioned ones...and even the widely mentioned ones are mentioned "as they are" and no longer on some artistic merits.

Everything seems to have become "industrialized". If you were to try to find the artistic motivations of a creator without following them personally, you'd have to chance upon a google for this:

http://www.1up.com/features/interview-c ... -inclusive

Not that there's anything wrong with that. If anything it shows a sign of how RenPy is becoming more popular...but at the same time, doesn't it seem like it's heading towards it's own doom and breeding a group of gamers purely focused on what's being said about a specific game and not branching off from there? Not branching off into trying to hold some standards or introducing newcomers into an easier way to find out about lesser known titles and lesser known themes?

It does seem like the "N" or the "Ren" part is peaking to become more and more like most groups of indy games or mainstream games. While, yes, the "Py" or the "V" part is still continuing but it's continuing and running off and leaving behind half of the part that made it a unique form of storytelling.

Albeit I'm talking more as a culture. There's nothing preventing anyone like Christine Love from inserting feminism in her works or Cyanide Tea from introducing a Slice of Life suspense but without this development, it would be harder and harder to find the lesser known quality titles because no one is really analyzing them anymore.

[nyaatrap]

BTW, Japanese VN has already peaked. Its future is in despair heh

(ah sorry, this topic attracts my interest, but I can't read all well with my alcohol-ed 3 AM foreign brain ..)

[AxemRed]

There are alternative engines like ONScripter or NVList. Several groups have been creating Javascript-based engines and Cinders is using a GameMaker based custom engine. I'm not sure what you think would be "in-between" Novelty and Ren'Py? VNDS?

Novelty is not an alternative engine though. It's a graphical engine aimed at an even less programmer oriented audience than RenPy was (but with it's power) and RenPy as someone said is the most balanced of the engines.

An in-between to use a game maker analogy would be a LUA to RenPy's python and Novelty's Rpg Maker/Ruby though the analogy doesn't quite fit. If that doesn't make sense (since I don't know my programming) how about a Choicescript with Pictures as a potential over-simplification of an in-between?

NVList uses Lua for scripting, ChoiceScript looks -very- similar to VNDS in terms of complexity and functionality.

[Dim Sum]

Sorry for double posting but it's starting to get too long and just so no one accuses me of not trying to make my point succinct, I'm going to use an external unrelated to VN template taken from here:

http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2010/02/ ... -here.html

Highest Rankings by Category:

Game World: Starflight
Character Development: Omega
NPCs: Ultima V
Encounters: Pool of Radiance
Magic/Combat: Pool of Radiance
Equipment: Omega
Economy: Omega

While yes, VNs are still underground and yes budgets do matter - it's not all about the games or the physical finished products. Just as a novel isn't just about a thick book with pretty covers and vampires and Shades of Gray.

For example, someone in the Planet Stronghold forum said this:

Sorry for being late to the party, but this game is really something special to me.
I won't write too much about myself, but suffice to say I love RPGs, but recent crop of PC RPG has devolved too much into cinematic cutscenes peppered with light gameplay elements. During one of my regular haunts on my favorite RPG discussion forum (RPGCodex) I came across a thread that recommended me to check out Winter Wolves Games. I was initially skeptical. The Sunday Morning cartoon art didn't agree with me since I'm not young anymore. Other posters dismissed it as 'a western attempt at emulating Japanese RPG and Bioware Romance.'

We all had a good laugh. We call it 'the decline', yes we were a bunch of old and bitter gamers in that forum. And that's how the story was supposed to end.
But I decided to go one step further and download the demo. I kept grinning as I read line after line, the setting was probably as generic as it can get. But something clicked together when the combat started. Statistics. Attacks per round. Damage range. Resistances. Weapon damage types.

This is gameplay.

I went further on and discovered access to 16 combat skills and 8 non combat..and saw the application of those in scenarios. Relationship responses that somehow made sense. And Phil. Oh, god, Phil. I can't stop laughing. This guy...he reminds me so much of someone I know. This is actually good.

This is really good/

Thanks guys. I bought the game. And spread the word. Hopefully people can learn to judge a book beyond its cover. I know it's a little late for praises. But it's a good game, I am eagerly awaiting the sequel even if I'm not done with the first game yet.

For the Empire!

I can't say I've ever played the game past the demo but there used to be a time when the OELVN culture would quickly pick up on this aspect and you'd match your VN needs with a title without needing to wonder long and hard about this.

Albeit it was a few posters trying to search for that one quality VN to share and it's not like cultures produces the actual VNs but it balanced out and made for a natural advertising of all spectrums of OELVNs and in turn everything had more meaning. It was like visiting Amazon and getting your pick of 1 star, 2 star and 3 star besides the 5 star and you needn't need to motivate the reviewer side to "write reviews and reply and discuss against those reviews". The culture saw OELVNs as a form of extended communication of the art contained within a VN. It wans't just a piece of VN with new features or one quirky set up. Some of the things I read I would never have considered as worthwhile downloading if I hadn't read it from some posters. Some of the things didn't even read like things a reviewer would put in it. There were just people talking about the "experience" ...and talking...and talking...and talking without taking anything for granted. Nowadays it's hard to find even one in-depth impression of that.

P.S. I don't think peaked means production would stop or quality will flatline. I apologize if I used the wrong words. I meant something more like a period of stagnation where constant mass production exist but the price is that the pursuit for something to be more of a "novel" is less pursued and the "novel" is simply dress coating for what really is an embedded game engine that mostly relies on dialogue text boxes to move the gameplay/story along...kind of like a cheaper version of 3d RPGs with text box choices or an Interactive Fiction without the Novel aspect except for the name. The after effect being that VNs move on but not by any of it's unique traits...simply by being a generator with a lottery ticket for the lesser known games to become popular while most of the top games are the ones most mentioned.

...then again, I may have simply confused the issue more. I guess half of this has extended to stating how culture impacts direction (supply creates demand) and how fanbase directs future games (the proverbial convince others to pay attention to lesser known game vs. have a space where the group can gather together and convince themselves to play thus convincing outsiders of it's notability thus producing a more educated audience that will just as much have a hardcore cult following for a smaller time game than a bigger budget game no different from the demand breakthrough for the RPG genre during the PSX era)

...then again, I may be just out of my league the more I reply so I apologize if I just leave this topic. I just wanted to see whether my small observation was right or wrong. I miss the days where some in the OELVN culture talked game world, characterization, meaning, why a VN was special to them.

[Obscura]

Albeit I'm talking more as a culture. There's nothing preventing anyone like Christine Love from inserting feminism in her works or Cyanide Tea from introducing a Slice of Life suspense but without this development, it would be harder and harder to find the lesser known quality titles because no one is really analyzing them anymore.

Oh, okay, you're talking about changes in the OELVN community. That's kind of a huge difference with what your post title suggests, which is about OELVN development, no?

I think one of the issues, as Papillon mentioned above, is that VN-players as a whole are extremely fragmented to begin with. I guess in its initial stages, people in this forum bonded together simply over the sheer fact they were creating games with a new engine, but as you can see, more growth has also led to more variety, and now players new to the OELVN scene actually have a choice about what kind of game they want to play as opposed to playing a certain type of game because it was one of the only few available. If there are only 5 games available, I'll probably take a crack at, let's say, a GxG fantasy hentai game because that's all I've got to play. Right now, that's just not gonna happen when there are other types of games being developed, and a GxG fantasy hentai game is probably the furthest thing possible from my own tastes .

Thus, I don't think you're gonna get much of a community discussing all the new and smaller games, aside from the "Let's Play" thread on these forums. (Which I really appreciate, by the way. Haven't been able to participate yet, but I do like reading the reviews.) The community either has to grow significantly--so each separate kind of genre has its own population base of makers and fans--or shrink, so there are no more games to play aside from a handful, and people will be forced to play those out of the sheer lack of alternatives.

Or there's the third option: people make more VNs that appeal to all the gender groups and predilections. Seriously not the easiest thing to do. (Though I'll be attempting to do so in my next game, however. )