Ren'Py Visual Novels

So a while ago we were asked on our forums why we never featured any games done with the open-source Visual Novel engine Ren'Py... which I pretty much dismissed in my mind with "prfff... those are not games anyways" :D
But well... a small competition over at the very nice Linux Gaming News blog asking which game engine actually had the most Linux compatible (and often at least freeware) games released so far, got me thinking about this again as with literally hundreds of games available on-line, we shouldn't simply dismiss this genre outright, I guess.

Screen-shot from the Ren'Py game Katawa Shoujo

Luckily, I do watch Anime from time to time, so I wasn't completely "out of the loop" so to say and thought "if tentacle p*** didn't kill me, I am up for anything" (except for 4chan's /b/ :D ). And at least in Japan, Visual Novels are a pretty big thing, with "next-gen" console releases, high quality movie adaptions and millions of players/readers (as an rather good example "Stein's Gate" could be mentioned).

However Visual Novels do have a certain prejudice attached to them, that most are all about school-girl dating sims or worse e.g. so called "eroge" surprisingly often also meant for a female audience, including boy-boy scenes o_o
And after digging into the scene a bit, I have to admit those prejudices are somewhat correct *slowly wanders off and wonders why he even bothered*

Screen-shot from the FOSS Visual Novel @Camelia Girls

But, that doesn't mean there aren't some good/interesting ones (for example this one), and the Ren'Py engine allows for some pretty awesome interactive storytelling (also on your Android powered device)... so lets not judge a tool by some of its user.
Besides that... it is perfectly feasible for a one man (or woman) team to succeed in creating a great Visual Novel, which can't be said for most other game genres. So if you have an awesome story to tell, and writing a book isn't your thing... well maybe making a Visual Novel is (the programming involved is rather simple... no worries ;) ). Interested? Well head over to the LemmaSoft Visual Novel development forums and dive right into this rather strange sub-culture :p

Adventures, art, design...

New art for Adonthell

There has been slight activity on Adonthell's mailing list: James Nash, an artist of the team, announced some new art to be soon added. Good thing too, considering the graphical quality of the engine demo game "Waste's Edge" (I'm only 120% sure, but "Adonthell" is the name of the engine and "Waste's Edge" is the title of the small adventure game that often gets served as "Adonthell".)

Waste's Edge, in case you forgot how... classic it looks

Adonthell 0.4.0 alpha 2 has been released half a month ago, luckily with build instructions, the INSTALL file directed me to them and I was actually able to build it. Unfortunately it seems to be an engine-only release - I don't see any demo to execute. FIFE (which by the way recently switched to the LGPL) at least includes it's tropical island tech demo.

Speaking of adventures/RPGs and their engines, Steve commented on the open source adventure games situation. Compared to RTS or FPS, the situation is: "there aren't any." At least not of the point-and-click kind of type. Steve says the reason is that making adventure games isn't fun - since the story/surprise/suspension of your work won't work on you.

There is however the Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine, an apparently simple-to use visual interactive fiction engine. It sure is and all and the engine's logo is the obligatory girl entangled by a tentacle monster python snake, but I'd rather prefer a decent point-and-click engine and community. I simply am a sucker for more interactivity and less text and more animations and less relationship novels and more (audible) speech and less *blush* in adventure games. It's great to see that the open source gamedev community appears to be useful for lots of prepubescent girls though!

Back on the adventure games issue: Tranberry proposed, that instead of creating games, game developers should create game frameworks for non-developers. O_o Of course it makes sense from the perspective, that it's no fun to know the story of the game for the game programmer, but on the other hand someone will have to know the whole story and won't be able to play the game as a player, this way or another. I think he's correct though that the role of the game designer should be separated from the role of the programmer for great justice better game quality. Excluding some naturals I guess.

BTW: Tranberry is the guy, who created the friggin-awesome looking current style for the JCRPG blog (see old style for comparison.)

Ulroth Axe, one of the kick-ass awesome models from OpenFrag

Again back to the game design issue: Creating the story and assembling the game's code and media should be done in a specific order. I am the fan of the "functionality-first, story-second"-method. OpenFrag's dev team is walking such a way at the moment, as I was told on #openfrag yesterday. In the beginning of the project, there were discussions about the story, but it became too complicated and now they concentrate on getting the orcs and swords and the slaughtering and bloodsheds to work and will worry about story later! Awesome!

Metropolis game menu

PS: Something seems to be happening regarding Micropolis' port to *nix systems... But I'm not sure what. I can start the game menu, but fail to actually play it. See screen.

Where are my buildings?

PPS: Anonymous just told me to deactivate NumLock, which helped :) But I am unable to see anything besides the map. O_o

PPPS: Gah, all the info is in the comments, if you want it. ^^