Free Visual Novel Design Engine Released

Ayaka Hahn writes to tell us that they have just released a free game construction kit designed to make Visual Novels easy to construct. The "Blade Engine" was based on a professional Visual Novel engine being used in Japan with the hopes that it would spark greater interest in this medium in the west. From the press release: "In the West, there is a stereotype of: "Visual Novel = Dating Sim Game = Hentai", but that is wrong. Visual Novels CAN be Dating Sim games, Ren'ai games, Bishoujo games but also can be Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Adventure and Horror Fiction games, or anything that the user's creativity comes up with."

Comments

Most people are useless idiots...

[aersixb9]

Although it's always nice to have more tools for software creation and/or building...these so called visual novels will probably be made by a bunch of idiots, and therefore will be worth less than the time it takes to read / play them...Perhaps these people's time would better be spent creating non-clonable goods instead of easily cloned, nonunique software? Only a few can create superior software products, and because software is copy-able there's no need for hordes of idiots to manufacture it...unlike traditional products, which require hordes of idiots to manufacture...

no mention of platform?

[Speare]

I might be missing something, but I found NO mention of the platforms this game format supports out of the box. The Buredo ("blade" in Japanese syllables) folks should mention it SOMEWHERE before people bother to download stuff.

The first sample story is a Windows EXE, but from the tutorial files I just browsed, it doesn't look like it would be particularly hard to make a Un*x/Linux/OSX version out of nothing more than perl-sdl or pygame. The story script is essentially a big text file and graphics and sound assets.

Hmmmm

[$RANDOMLUSER]

This might be an interesting way to (user) document GUI appliactions. Take your screenshots and write your script.

Re:Wha?

[xigxag]

Making it easy for idiots to make their own won't improve things.

Your comment was going well until that point. The Blade Engine is akin to blogging software for visual storytellers. Simplifying the process of creating AVGs will give an opportunity for people with good storytelling but poor programming skills to create interesting works. Sure, there will be a huge amount of crap, just like with blogs, but overall more is better. That's the whole raison d'etre of the internet.

Elitists are free to ignore self-published graphic novels, just as I'm sure there are plenty of people who read only "established" news sources on the web and don't bother with blogs of any kind, or in the real world plenty of people would never be caught dead reading a "zine,"which themselves multiplied after the advent of cheap photocopying and (later) DTP software.

Novels

[glwtta]

Graphic novels, Visual novels... you know, these people must actually understand the difference between their, lets say, "limited" creations and what is traditionally referred to as a 'novel'. Otherwise, it seems, they would not insist quite so ardently on calling them 'novels'.

==Lame

[StikyPad]

"In the West, there is a stereotype of: "Visual Novel = Dating Sim Game = Hentai", but that is wrong.

It is?

Umeda is a self-confessed otaku, one of Japan's growing legion of men obsessed with anime, comics, action figures, and videogames. And when Umeda claims otaku status, it's no idle boast. "Here's the real evidence," he says, producing a certificate and ID that confirm his standing as "otaku elite." He earned this rank by getting a very high score on a rigorous National Unified Otaku Certification Test last summer. The exam was something of a Japanese obsession, despite having been available only as an insert in Elfics magazine, which features cheesecake drawings of scantily clad, underage girls on the cover. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/posts.htm l?pg=5

Re:Wha?

[xigxag]

No one will ever convince me that completely destroying the "signal to noise" ratio of a particular creative field is somehow a good thing. Why on earth is it "better" to have this gigantic, suffocating mass of mediocrity?

I see where you're coming from, but my feeling is that what's noise to me might be signal to others, and vice-versa. Beethoven took some of his great symphonic themes from "mediocre" musical ditties of his day. Cubism arose in part because European artists gained exposure to "mediocre" African art and took it in unforseen directions. Warhol made art from tin can logos. The important thing is being able to connect and have access to the ideas. From there, what you do with them is limited more by your own inner creative mojo than by overexposure to crap.

Insofar as noise is a problem on the internet, I find that it is due to advertising, not the fault of independent creative works, no matter how banal they may be. Of course YMMV, and I respect that.

(Now you've got me wondering if even advertising is unmitigated noise. Perhaps penis enlargement ads will one day be viewed as primitive art by some future civilization. My only consolation is that I'll be long dead by then.)