The Spring Thing is a long-running interactive fiction event, newly revamped this year to focus on celebrating new works and bringing authors and games from different communities together. We haven't seen visual novels take part before, but we'd welcome submissions from people here.
(Our focus is on "text games," but that doesn't mean no graphics allowed-- just that we want to showcase games that focus on strong writing as their primary storytelling medium.)
First off, thank you for coming to the forum. While the visual novel community has been apart from the IF community, I think that's mostly a historical accident, based on where the medium developed. So I think anything that brings IF and VNs together is probably a good thing.
We do run a forum event here during the month of March. NaNoRenO is our yearly development challenge, where the rules are roughly "Make a visual novel during the month of March." I don't think these two events are actually in conflict with each other - I think it's quite reasonable to submit an Intent to Enter to Spring Fling, develop your game as part of NaNoRenO, and then release it as part of the Spring Fling festival. Based on how I read it, people can participate in both events at the same same time - is that your understanding?
Either way, thanks for letting us know about this.
Supporting creators since 2004 (When was the last time you backed up your game?)
Cool! Yeah, it definitely looks like NaNoRenO participants should be fine to submit their games to Spring Thing, too, as long as an "intent to enter" for the game is submitted on the Spring Thing site by March 1st. (And there's no penalty or anything for dropping out if your game doesn't get finished in time to submit.) Hope to see some submissions!
UPDATE: If you submitted to Spring Thing but didn't get an e-mail today with further instructions, please contact me directly at aaron at springthing dot net. It looks like we were having some intermittent trouble with the submission form. Apologies!