Category: Articles

Articles

How to Finish your Indie Visual Novel

arimia

December comes and rolls by again like clockwork. It’s the capstone month, the month for tidying up loose ends and getting ready for a fresh start in January. You wrap up what you’re working on and release your game to the world – you did release your game this year, right? Right?

As I procrastinate finishing Canvas Menagerie—which releases in 4 days as I write this—I wanted to talk about the incredible miracle of actually finishing and shipping indie games.

starting is hard…

Taking the first step to start a new game is a tough one. Do you start with concept art? Outlining? Character bios? Mood boards? There’s really no bad way to start making a game other than not starting. However you want to go about it- as long as you make that first jump – is up to you.

…but finishing is harder.

They say the last 10%—well, really the last 5%—of development is the hardest, and it definitely feels true when you’re in the thick of it. Play testing, bug fixing, small edits you pushed off to later—it all adds up.

What’s worse is that you start running off of fumes rather than fixation and can lose steam—and love for the project—the longer it drags on. How can we avoid burning yourself out before the project is released?

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Articles

Developer Interview — Developing Slay the Princess

arimia

A little over a year ago, Steam players were tasked with a simple order—slay the princess. They took up the call to action in droves, diving into the depths of one of the most branching and intertwined visual novels to release in years and pushing it to well over 12,000 reviews. Now, a year later, Slay the Princess has received a massive expansion called The Pristine Cut, bringing it well past 16,000 positive reviews on Steam.

Today I’ll be talking to Tony Howard-Arias and Abby Howard, the developer duo at Black Tabby Games about their work on Slay the Princess and Scarlet Hollow!

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Articles

I played another 50+ visual novels in 1 month and here’s my advice to devs.

arimia

Again, not clickbait!! I played over 50 entries for Spooktober Visual Novel Jam, a Halloween-themed visual novel game jam, where I’m a judge. Every visual novel in the jam was made in 1 month, with judging taking up about 3-4 weeks during October.

As a follow up to last year’s article I played over 100 visual novels in one month and here’s my advice to devs, I’ll be talking about some of my favorite entries and what we can learn from them!

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Articles

How to Make a Visual Novel Solo

arimia

Making an entire visual novel is hard enough, so could you imagine making one by yourself? Solo visual novel development is hard, but not as hard as you might think.

As a visual novel developer myself, most of my games are made solo – you can see my portfolio here. But how do we define “solo”?

Typically, a game is made “by yourself” if you’re not only the primary contributor but the only person with a say on the project. Using creative commons materials (like free to use backgrounds, music, etc.) and getting input / advice from friends doesn’t disqualify a game as being “solo made”. Even commissioning others, such as hiring a musician, can still be considered “solo made” if they don’t have a say in the rest of the project and are just being hired for an asset(s), whereas hiring a programmer can negate this because they work with every department (writing, art, sound) to bring it together. The primary factor is typically if they have a creative say in the project.

With the definition out of the way, how do you actually make a visual novel by yourself, especially if you can’t do every aspect a game requires? I surveyed over 30 other visual novel developers and together we’ve assembled some advice for you!

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Articles

Comparing the Visual Direction of Tsukihime VS Mahoyo

arimia

The classic April Fool’s joke as old as time is now our reality—here in the West we’re finally able to play not only Tsukihime officially in English but also Witch on the Holy Night (Mahoyo). It’s a dream come true for many visual novel fans to not only have one Type-Moon visual novel officially released in English, but for multiple to be available after years of pleading.

The version of Tsukihime you can now buy from Walmart is the recent 2021 remake of the original game, removing the erotic content and updating the artwork and story, making it feel fresh again. But this remake wouldn’t exist in the capacity it does now without the prior work, Mahoyo. Today, I want to look at the visual direction similarities and differences between these 2 stunningly cinematic visual novels.

This will be a mostly spoiler-free article, but I will be talking about the general premise of both stories. If you’re a fan of modern fantasy stories with magic and such, try them both out! You can even play Mahoyo on Steam.

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Articles

How to Sell Visual Novels at Conventions

arimia

Or, “how do you table at an anime convention and actually get people to stop by your booth and actually get interested in visual novels????”

Picture this – me, someone who’s never been to California nor flown alone arrived to the Hyatt at the San Francisco Bay, being greeted by several online friends I’d known for years but never met in person. After a great time walking around the surrounding Burlingame area and meeting back up with the rest of our group, we had to actually put in some work for the day.

That is, setting up our booth for the convention starting the next day.

We unpacked box after box, taking turns standing around with our hands on our hips and heads tilted wondering “how the hell are we going to set all of this up?”. I decided to make it my job to set up our keychain display. All I had to do was get a copy of each keychain we had and pin them up – we even had a box from prior conventions that had a single copy of (most) of our keychains, for displaying. But as I opened more boxes, I found more and more keychains…

After threatening to change the password on their Vograce account, I found we had 10+ boxes of merchandise for niche visual novels that we were trying to sell at a vtuber convention. Not an anime convention, not a gaming convention, a vtuber convention! Going to bed that night, already tired, I was sure there was no way we would make a profit…..

…And yet, we made more on Friday than they had for the entire convention in 2023. By Sunday, we had made more than double that, having sold items to over 100 customers with most purchases around $40 each. We weren’t selling fanart, we were selling a majority completely original art.

We lived the dream of a lot of indie developers – we sold physicals of our indie games and people bought them. But how did we do it??

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