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Free Visual Novel Design Engine Released

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the for-all-your-dating-sim-needs dept.

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."

1 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. It is not the first open-souce visual novel engine by guardiangod · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I will try to ignore the whole "visual novel == hentai with tentacles" arguement. I play/read visual novels (or AVG as they are properly called) so I will be biased.

    That having said, there was a pretty famous incident that involved GPL and a Japanese AVG game makers. Apparently the company used Xvid codecs for their animation clips for their popular games (ranked top 10 ero-game in 2005) without releasing the engine source code. When someone pointed out the GPL, the company promptly released the whole engine code (without the comments unforturnately). The engine was designed with win32 API in mind, btw. But it still counts as something

    Off topic: I was amazed that a Japanese hentai game maker respects the GPL more than, say, SCO, a multi-million dollar company; Then again, comparing SCO to a hentai game company would not be fair- to the game company :) .