Kanami

[DaFool]

So many visual novels, so little time...

http://blog.clone-army.org/?p=257#comments

LOL @ Mihel's comment...

might port the thing into Ren'Py...if I feel like it...

[DrakeNavarone]

I burnt through it real fast last night. It was nice. Not much too it yet, but it was nice. I think the white flash effect (the Phoenix Light... okay, that was awful...) was pretty out of place given the nature of the project. What's been written so far is nice, it has a flow and style to it, which I enjoyed. The art, as expected, is done very well, judging by the small sample provided. Overall, I like it, but it's gonna take more than this to convince me that Kanami will be epic VN he makes it out to be.

[Jake]

might port the thing into Ren'Py...if I feel like it...

Bear in mind that without authorisation, it would be copyright infringement - and Dan may well be reluctant to authorise such projects in fear of jeopardising his relationship with CuriousFactory.

I've offered the same in the past, IIRC the response was something along the lines of "We'll see". I really wouldn't be surprised at all if we never do, and I can hardly blame him.

[DaFool]

Haven't thought about that, thanks.

Better be safe than sorry.

[mikey]

I finally played this and I actually quite liked it. The atmosphere is good, the writing is good, the style is good, the backgrounds are good, and honestly the engine never felt inferior or anything. The text was nice, and so was the texbox.

Well, except for the pause menu, which is Blade default. All those counter-immersive icons, and it's not very intuitive, breaks the atmosphere a lot. The way around it is not to save too often ^_^

Other than that, a great piece of work. Just customize the menu, simplify it and there's nothing to complain. This should probably be a bit about the Blade engine, but it isn't, really - not the overall impression. All you want the engine to do is display text, images and play some music. Blade does that and that's good enough - it's definitely good enough for what Kanami is.

Though if it stays in b/w, with photographic-ish backgrounds and no choices (I assume music will be added eventually), as people mentioned, it's not going to be a killer app, even if it's epically long.

Not that it would be bad, because I think it fits the style, the black/white thing. And it's from a manga, so why deny your roots?

[DaFool]

2 general impressions (and who know how many more comments have been posted on the site)

Note I only played the very first demo, I'll wait for the voice-acted one later. So the first issue of the flashbulb effect when transitioning sprites might have been addressed.

Second issue which is inevitable, is people getting bored seeing comparatively few pictures and more text. Well, too bad. Dan Kim chose to be efficient...as talented as he is, he decides that talking heads isn't really very inspiring to draw (and I agree with him wholeheartedly). It's interesting to filter through the comments and predict who will be converts to the VN medium and who will remain comics-supremacists.

[Counter Arts]

I played first demo but it seemed a little lacking somewhere. Storyline wise. Then again, my standards a bit too weird/high/strange/non-standard. Meh... it's probably a bit too early to judge.

Yeah, a bit too early to judge for my tastes. I really should wait a bit before coming to any conclusions.