Tag: collab

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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Articles

I played over 100 visual novels in one month and here’s my advice to devs.

arimia

Surprisingly, the title isn’t clickbait. As part of my judging requirements for Spooktober Visual Novel Jam, an annual Halloween-themed visual novel jam I cohost, each judge had to play around 100 visual novels in the month of October. Each of the games were made in 1 month during September by teams or solo devs.

Together with my fellow judges, we’ve compiled a list of advice for visual novel developers based off of trends we saw while playing through the entries and ways to avoid common pitfalls.

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Articles

Where are visual novel developers going to after Twitter?

arimia

Twitter, X, whatever is slowly becoming more and more unusable by the day, ever since November 2022. Several times I’ve heard people ask “where are visual novel developers moving to?”, which is usually responded with “Tiktok” or “Tumblr”. But as of yet, we don’t really have any data on this.

As we get close to the one year mark since Someone took over Twitter, I decided to do a formal survey on this so we can see more definitively what social media developers are moving to.

Some notes before we begin:

  • This survey was anonymous and was shared via my Twitter, Tumblr, and various visual novel developer Discord servers. It was open for about a week.
  • Around 1/6th of the submissions were discarded due to high chances of them being bot responses, with very human responses such as “With the development of the Internet, social media also needs fans to support the development, which is abandoned by The Times for the independent development”.
  • All long-form questions were optional. All multiple choice / checkbox questions were required.
  • 55 developers took the survey, 56 including myself. This is the final count after discarding the bot submissions.
  • Sites like Patreon, ko-fi, and newsletters were not considered as social media platforms for the purposes of this survey.
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Articles

Developer Interview – Scene Direction in Of Sense and Soul

arimia

Hi everyone! This month I thought we’d try something different. I typically write articles based on my own experiences and research, but I want to include more commentary and experiences from other developers. I’ve tried this before with using surveys like for my TikTok marketing article, but this is a step further—today I’ll be interviewing another developer!

ingthing is a visual novel developer and friend of mine who is currently developing Of Sense and Soul, a queer Victorian romance visual novel following a pair of men after a misconstrued newspaper ad.

Of Sense and Soul is a highly detailed, lovingly crafted visual novel that showcases how we can elevate indie visual novels to new heights. Its attention to visuals is something that can be felt throughout every store page and screenshot for the game but is even more breathtaking once you actually play it.

Today I’ll be interviewing the lead developer, ingthing! You may have seen her previously talk on this at Visual;Conference, an annual online visual novel developer conference.

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Articles

Marketing Visual Novels on TikTok

arimia

Social media platforms come and go, and with them audiences shift from one to another. After the Tumblr exodus a few years ago, long-form posting became sparse again and Twitter became the haven—or hell, depending on your outlook—for those users. After Vine closed down, YouTube took in the new-found celebrities of short form comedy.

With the emergence of any new social media, marketers will flock to it to find any way to monetize it. But for the past few years, TikTok has flown under the radar of game dev marketers.

Not any longer.

Today I want to talk about how marketing indie games on TikTok is a lot easier than you might think and why you should give it a shot—it might be life-changing, as you’ll see.

This article will not go over privacy concerns with TikTok and how much of your data it tracks, nor prior reports of LGBT+ content suppression. Please do your own research into the companies and policies for social media apps before diving in, especially ones as large as TikTok.

Before we get started, if you’re new here then hi, I’m Arimia! I own Crystal Game Works, a visual novel studio focused on chuuni LGBT+ games, and I’m the marketing force behind Studio Élan, a visual novel studio making sapphic games. I use Tiktok to promote both of these studios.

Now let’s get started ♥

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