Articles

How to Make a Visual Novel in a Weekend

arimia

Making a visual novel is already hard, so how do you make one in a game jam where you have a set deadline? Or worse, how do you make an entire visual novel in only a weekend? What about when you have to use certain themes in the game and can’t go fully freeform?

Game jams are such a great way to get started making visual novels—I first got my start with Ludum Dare 10 years ago, as of this August. They force you to downsize a lot, to focus on what matters and most importantly, have a tight deadline hanging over your head that you can’t push back. Some game jams, like my upcoming Otome & Josei Jams, allow users a much longer timeframe of 2 months and don’t restrict on themes. Others like Ludum Dare only give you a weekend (though there are other formats now) and require you to use a user-voted theme that’s only made public when the jam starts.

With the tight deadlines and possibility of restrictions, how do you make a visual novel that quickly? Is that even humanly possible??

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Articles

Talking to Your Visual Novel Players

arimia

Whenever you reach out to a company’s support line or interact with their social media, you’re engaging in their public relations personnel. These people are trained in customer relations and depending on their exact job, they’re usually well versed in different aspects of marketing.

But for indie game devs, we don’t have the luxury of having one person to answer emails & Steam support, one person to manage social media, one person to reach out to press, etc…. So how do we end up talking to players?

what is public relations

Public relations are essentially the communication (relations) between an entity and the public. In this case, it’s how you (and your studio) communicate to players.

There’s a lot of venues for this, including but probably not limited to:

  • social media comments
  • direct messages
  • emails
  • fan mail

Press relations are how you “voice” your studio to others. Don’t overthink this- it’s just how you talk to people and how those words come off to them.

For large companies, it’s not often that users can directly talk to employees (you don’t follow grocery store employees on social media and ask them about deals, do you?), but for indie studios it’s something that can happen often. While not every interaction may be with a potential player, there is more room for your teammates to talk to players.

So who on the team will be the designated person to communicate with players and how will they do it?

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Articles

Tips for Marketing Visual Novels in 2024

arimia

Social media and algorithms are changing weekly. It’s hard to keep up, and it’s my job to keep up, so how are regular creators supposed to understand all of the nuances that change all the time?

I could make new posts about updates to strategies for Twitter or TikTok or whatever, but that wouldn’t cover the full scope of things visual novel developers should be aware of when tackling marketing in 2024. So today I want to try something new- think of it as a collection of tips and mini advice for marketing visual novels going into 2024, ranging from social media to Steam to best practices and more.

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Articles

Advice for Leading Visual Novel Game Jam Teams

arimia

One type of article I’ve wanted to do again is surveying my fellow developers on a topic and compiling the answers. There’s a lot of insight to be gained from reaching out to others who’ve worked in different environments and have different outlooks on life and I don’t want to only share my own views here for these types of articles.

Last November I created & released a survey aimed at people who had led game jam teams for making visual novels. It’s a hard skill to grow, as leading other people and finishing a game in a set amount of time is a very particular skillset. So, I wanted to ask other creators about their advice to people who take on this endeavor. Some of these responses were left anonymously while others provided their contact information.

I was able to get feedback from 34 other visual novel developers, so let’s look at what they had to say!

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Articles

Developer Interview — Crowdfunding & Creating Our Life

arimia

After my last interview with the developer of Of Sense and Soul, I wanted to reach out to more visual novel devs to hear about their experiences and how they approach the craft. Today I’ll be talking to Katelyn, the lead developer at GB Patch Games!

GB Patch Games have been developing games for almost a decade now with their current project being the Our Life series, a visual novel series that focuses on letting the player highly customize their experience, from the protagonist to their relationship with the love interest and more. The first Our Life: Beginnings & Always game released in November 2020 with one love interest. Now they’re working on Our Life: Now & Forever, which offers two love interests and even more character customization and options.

Their most recent Kickstarter for Our Life: Now & Forever raised over $295k from 5,677 backers, making it the 7th most successful visual novel Kickstarter of all time. It’s easy to see why Our Life became so big—it’s a nicely crafted relationship simulator with aspects not seen before in Western visual novels like such a high amount of character customization, being able to set (and change) your relationship with the love interest (or even just staying friends with him), a wide variety of choices that change how the characters grow, and more.

So today I’ll be talking to Katelyn about her process for creating the series and running the Kickstarter!

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Blog

2023 Year in Review

arimia

2023 has come and gone—it feels like it was just a week ago that my grandma was complaining that Thanksgiving and Christmas were too close together, and now it’s January. I spent the last 2 weeks of 2023 sick (I still am), which made it go by like a blur.

2022 was a fresh slate for me, with a new job, a new home, and new projects. 2023 was a year of finding a new rhythm—figuring out how I work best and molding my work time around that rather than trying to make myself go against the flow.

Working from home is truly a blessing and a curse. I do think that it has more positives than negatives (especially right now as I’m able to work while being sick and don’t have to take time off), but navigating around the negatives is tricky. The main problem I’ve faced, aside from lack of interaction with non-family, is that it’s harder for me to focus on work when I end up spending almost all of my awake hours at my desk, either for my fulltime job or for VN development or for relaxing.

I’ve had to mix things up, usually taking my laptop to other parts of the house or even working outside of home some days. Even if it’s only for a few hours, it helps reset the fatigue of being at my desk all day every day. It doesn’t always work, and one problem I ran into for most of the year was being unable to focus on writing. Art and scripting are more “mindless” for me, I can do them with a video or voice call in the background, but writing is something I’ve always struggled to concentrate on.

This year was my first year attempting NaNoWriMo, though a more casual version of it. A few other devs were also entering NaNoWriMo to work on their projects so I hopped on too. I wanted to use the hype of the event to push myself to focus on writing, and it worked! My goal was to hit 30k total words in the month across multiple projects—which is about what I write in half a year—and I hit it.

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