my various projects and thoughts
Yeah so here’s my real article for February.
Time and time again, I’ll open up Twitter (already a bad move) and look through my feed- when I want to look for new visual novel projects, I look through Lemon’s feed, as she retweets stuff for visual novel developers.
Every so often, I’ll see something along these lines…
Or maybe something like this…
Or possibly even something like this…
To me, all of these tweets serve the same purpose—
Tuesday Morning has one of the most generic corporate newsletters I’ve ever had the displeasure of signing up for. However, Tuesday Morning is a more unique company than something like Olive Garden emailing you about endless pasta bowls coming back. Today I’d like to deviate from my normal articles and look into your brand and shaping your channels around it…
Continue reading “Tuesday Morning’s Newsletter Sucks”
Lots of us grew up with shounen anime and manga, whether it was something like Yu-Gi-Oh! or Pokémon or Naruto which in turn inspire our own stories. We want to make games that evoke the feeling that you’re reading a story straight out of Shounen Jump. For that, we’ve created a new tag- #Battle Action Fantasy.
This tag initiative was spearheaded by myself, Arimia, alongside 4noki and Pumpkin Spike with help from papaya.
We created this tag because we wanted a better descriptor for chuuni shounen & seinen-esque games that are reminiscent of battle shounens specifically. Games that would be included:
These games can include female leads, queer characters, and more. Games without action scenes or fantasy elements would not fit this tag.
This tag is for anyone making a story-driven game that’s inspired by shounen & seinen anime & manga. If your story feels like it could’ve been serialized in Shounen Jump, then this tag is for you!
We got this term from バトル・アクション (Battle Action), a category used in Japan for a lot of action-oriented shounen manga. By adding “fantasy” to it, it makes it more clear that these are strictly fantasy-oriented works rather than something like a beat-em-up.
We understand the term can be a bit vague- what about chuuni works or other works that can somewhat fall under this? At the end of the day, we want this tag to be for anyone making fantasy games who’ve been inspired by action shounen anime & manga.
Some examples of battle action fantasy games include most JRPGs, Fate/stay night, and more. Your game may be a more comedic take on shounen tropes or something darker and more sinister. It can even be intended for non-male audiences, such as stories like Queen’s Quality. The ultimate answer on if your story will fit this tag: would it make sense to be serialized in Shounen Jump?
The tag is #Battle Action Fantasy on itch.io. If you’ve made any shounen-inspired action fantasy game, please add the tag to your games!
To encourage new games using this tag, myself, Pumpkin Spike and 4noki will be cohosting a game jam for shounen-esque visual novels in the month of June! The jam is still a few months away but you can find some more information about it on itch.io.
If you have any questions about this tag or the jam, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or Discord.
— Arimia
Marketing is hard, but you don’t need me to tell you that. If you’ve attempted any kind of long-term project, whether it be a Kickstarter, a commercial game, or just a big undertaking, you’ve probably said this line:
I need a marketer.
every developer ever
I said that very line 5 years ago when I was making my very first commercial visual novel, That Which Binds Us. But when I said this, I didn’t really understand what I was saying.
We all need to do marketing for our projects if we’re making them for any reason that’s not just “I want to have fun”. But, the thing about marketing is that it’s a broad category encompassing several different fields…
Saying “I need a marketer” is equivalent to saying “I need an artist”. Pretty much anyone is going to tell you to be more specific! Do you need a background artist, a character artist, a concept designer, a GUI designer, something else? Just like there’s multiple fields of expertise in artists, there’s multiple areas of marketing.
So today, let’s get a better understanding of what these different marketing fields are.
Continue reading “what to know before hiring a marketer for your game”
2022 has come and gone before I even realized it. It’s still December, right?!
Looking back on 2022, in order to actually review it I have to go back to 2021 to see how the stage was set…
Continue reading “2022 Year in Review”
There’s three things you can bet on in life- death, taxes, and social media sites fading into obscurity one after the other. Eventually, every social media site will have its sundown. People said MySpace would always be the biggest platform and that AOL would be the standard.
Things change. World events happen. Billionaires get greedy.
To preface this, I was already writing this article in regards to account termination on social media platforms, effectively shutting off that line of communication for you. But with Twitter teetering ever closer to the brink of collapse each day, I’ve changed this up a bit.
Continue reading “Volatility of Social Media”