Fading Hearts, the first-ever commercial original English non-ero bishoujo game has been released. For further info, check out the link.

Anyway, I tried the demo on the site and felt the urge to comment.

A screenshot showing some of the game’s pretty graphics and Rina’s submissive antics.

My overall reaction to Fading Hearts was that it raised a lot of questions.

Why is the game’s name mentioned 3 times in the main menu?
Why do these buttons beep all the time?
Why is there a random NVL segment about some knights?
Why is there no article in front of “bed”?
Why are the names so huge in the dialogue box?
Why is Claire a giant?
How can Rina get all sentimental in the middle of the classroom?
Why do they have a magical girl in this supposedly serious game?
Why is Sophia more attractive to me than Claire and Rina combined?
Why they made it so obvious who that womanizer is?
How was the protagonist able to start working at 12?
Why did the frog segment completely fail to move me?
Why does this thing keep throwing random bits of unconnected info at me?
What is bubble tea anyway?
Why does Claire frown if she is enjoying it?
Why are Claire and Rina so similar?
Why can’t I care for either of them?
Why can’t these girls do anything without a man?

This may sound like complaining, but those are all legitimate questions. I actually love thought-provoking games, but Fading Hearts so far didn’t answer a single one of my questions. Nonetheless, I felt the demo gave me something, and I have to mention the graphics are quite good apart from the huge size of Claire (which bothered me a lot). It also seems to be rather long, so maybe the questions will be answered in the final version – however, in my case, it did not leave excited but discouraged with all of its mysteries. Nonetheless it is a fresh breeze in the EVN industry, I assume, and you can buy it to support it, its makers and the whole idea of professional EVNs for 25$ 20$ in the address linked above.

As the title says. For the sake of your wellbeing, please have one!

This one is a bunch of technical experiments lumped together, and I think it shows. While I probably will not use some of them again, I think I found some nice tricks too. As you might notice, I have also got over my habit of being lazy with backgrounds (at least partly). Yay!

And concerning everything else, I have mostly been too busy actually doing stuff instead of just writing about it, which is a good thing but makes this blog less interesting to read (I assume). If all goes well, there should be some news before next summer, hopefully sooner.

Thanks for reading!

edit: Now also in the header.

Ahh, I was finally able to complete this – I’m sorry for taking so long, especially since mikey did such a great job on this, but I’ve had a lot of personal issues and business. A scary year indeed! In the end I couldn’t find my old work in project -version of the English fix, so I did it from beginning to end this evening – which is probably for the best, since I didn’t need to check what I had done and hadn’t done. :)

The changes between 1.0 and 1.1 include:
- updated to version 6.6.1 of Ren’Py
- better, more fitting colour theme
- typos and inconsistencies fixed
- beautiful new backgrounds
- a lot more readable font
- and more!

All of this kindly provided by the English visual novel veteran mikey for the Slovak translation of Nattsu, but now also available in the English version!

The changes are minor enough that I don’t recommend replaying the game if you already have (unless you have interest of course), but if you haven’t played Nattsu, please download version 1.1 instead of 1.0 if you do. Even if the changes aren’t earthshaking, mikey has done a great job on them and made the new version is a better experience in whole compared to the original one. ^^
Download links here!

I want to once more say thanks for everyone who has been involved in the development of and played Nattsu, I truly appreciate it!

Gahh… I’ve had bad luck once again, as my computer failed me this month, so I haven’t been able to work on anything during the summer. I should get a new computer within a week, and when this happens, I’ll finish updating Project Nattsu with mikey’s corrections. For real. D: Sorry about all these delays… life has been harsh.

On the bright side, it looks like Take Rena Home will be translated to Russian. I hadn’t heard about this until Vatina, who released her first game Angelic Orbs some time ago (go check it out! <3), told me that TRH had been added to the visual novel database. I find the news great and wish to encourage the translators. I’m both very surprised and excited about this. Waai! ^^

To those of you who haven’t heard of it yet, please have a look at The Baka-Trio Webzine. It’s an English visual novel community magazine with articles, interviews, reviews and all other kind of cool stuff. I wrote an article about storytelling for the second volume, which you can find from the link. :)

Thanks for reading and please remember to enjoy the summer! <3

Sorry for not blogging for a few months, I’ve been horribly busy. I can’t promise to be able to blog more before summer (freedom, yay), but luckily my holidays will start within a month, so it actually isn’t a very long time. ^^

Nonetheless, the main reason for this post is that my collaboration project with M12 of Vjutsu, Take Rena Home, has been released. It is a Higurashi fan game, but I’m sure people who haven’t played/seen/read it can enjoy the game to some extent as well, and it doesn’t have spoilers for the original’s story. :) Here’s the LSF thread for the game!

Now that I’ve done my work with this, I can’t promise any “big” releases really soon, but at least I should have the time to actually convert Nattsu’s translation’s improvements to the English version. It’s actually almost done, but I’ll have to check that I haven’t forgotten anything… ^^;

Thanks for reading and I hope you all are enjoying spring as much as I am~!

It’s holidays. No school. I’ve mostly been working on Rena like crazy. -w- One (half done) background, a CG or two, musics, insertation and interface customisation are basically all that’s left… HNNGH! You can probably expect a release in the next few months.

Autumn break was this week, and I’ve been very relieved to be able to rest a little, since I had been super-busy with school. I still have some work to do actually, but I’m trying to finish that today. Not too much time for making VNs, but at least some – I’ve been focusing on Rena’s backgrounds, some of which are painful to make because of their complexity. But it’s great practice. ^^

I’ve also been making a lot of art not related to VNs – some realistic drawing practices and a small story… Though if I end up finishing the story, I might as well translate it into English and make it a VN. :D But I don’t know about that yet, since my inspiration for small projects like this has a tendency to drop suddenly. We’ll see. :)

Thanks for reading! I’ll try to write more often, really, but school has been seriously harsh… -_-

So, school has began for me (it began about half a month ago, actually), and I’ve been extremely busy with it since I’m in high school now. At the moment, I’m resting a day because of my flu, but I’m planning to go back to school as soon as possible, probably tomorrow. I’m trying to get good grades and we’ve got horribly much homework, so doing all that homework well and with care takes a lot more time than it did in junior high, where I usually did my homework in 5 minutes at most. Now, it might take up to 2 hours a day, and it also takes 1 hour for me to go to school and another hour get back home from there, so you can probably imagine why I haven’t found much time for writing this blog. ^^; I think I’m getting used to this kind of life though and I’m starting to have time for different things, but this far it has been a little hard.

But apart from the horrible workload, high school has been a lot of fun too. I love my class already! Everyone seems so open, positive, kind and creative, I was almost schocked in the beginning. I guess the fact that we all have common interests in this art-specialized high school helps it. The teachers have been really nice as well, the whole school has a great spirit. I’m glad that I applied for this school and got in. :)

Back to the  subject of this blog – I’m trying to find more time for gamemaking, even if it’ll be hard! Thanks for reading, I’ll be writing sooner next time.

So, I’ve began writing another project – a very short kinetic one, this time. It’s kind of shoujo ai and will hopefully be finished this year, but there isn’t much I could tell you without spoiling, as it is a short story. Here’s a quick sketch of the protagonist on lest – she’s a meganekko, a girl from a rich family – someone many would consider lucky, but who doesn’t really see herself like that. :3 Fufu, I guess this will be enough information this time, the rest you shall discover if you play the finished KN! ;)

Other than that, I’ve been rather busy lately, unable to work very much, but I’m trying my best. Today I discovered that I’ve got a little fever and a flu (though I’ve been feeling a bit like it for the past few days)… -sigh- Such bad luck in the last weeks of the holidays. ;_;

Also, I’ve been trying to improve my English by reading some heavier English literature lately, though I have to admit it has been a little painful at times. However, I’ve got a lot of motivation for it, as I want to be able to write as well as possible myself. If there’s a word I can’t read, I obviously can’t write it either. Thus, expanding my vocabulary is neccessary. I’ll fight for the sake of learning! >:3

Thanks for reading! ^^ I’ll try to update this blog a little more often, I promise!

Moe – such a famous and widely used term among the otakus, yet so hard to describe and define. There is no right and wrong in the moe world, but in this blog entry, I shall voice my own opinions and feelings concerning this topic, as hard as it is.

I think that in the end, the character isn’t moe, but rather, awakens the feeling of moe, which is also one of the reasons why moe is this controversial. Kittens are cute, it’s quite undeniable in the end: They are little, innocent, soft and fluffy, so pretty much anyone considers them cute. However, I bet a lot of people disagree with each other about what is moe. A lot of us love ideal bishoujos, other are to tsunderes, a few to yanderes, some into loli. My opinion is that what moe is depends on the person, his/her past, beliefs, taste – quite a few things.

However, what is essential in moe is that you can love, forgive and relate to the character, no matter what he/she is like. I think yanderes are a good example here, as it’s hard to feel moe about the character if you think whatever makes him/her a yandere isn’t justified. I think Kotonoha Katsura is moe. To me, Katsura is a girl who loves her boyfriend more than anything else and gets mentally deeply injured to the point of (temporarily?) losing her sanity as she hears about less fortunate things. In the end of School Days the anime, I can’t say I’d do what she did if the same happened to me, but as a girl in a relationship, I bet I’d be shocked and depressed to the point of at least considering those things in my mind. Many think yanderes are bad or immoral, but it really depends on whether or not you can forgive them for what they did. (Of course, only having forgiven them isn’t equal to seeing them as moe.)

I also think anyone who is open and willing to feel moe can have feelings for moe characters. The generalization of the moe audience consisting of 20-30 year old desperately lonely, single otakus is cruel. I’m a girl or a young woman (depending on how you look at it), in a happy relationship, and I adore moe characters. You always think those Konata/Kagami wallscrolls end up in the apartments of male nerds, but some of them are actually bought and worshipped by cute teenage girls (with experience – ahh, she’s such an adorable person… One of those few cases where real life persons seem moe). It is true, however, that young men are more often open to moe and the series with the most moe characters usually are aimed at them when looking at other aspects of them.

Even though it’s rare to look at things this way, moe isn’t only limited to otaku merchandise and otakus, but it can touch anyone and be in anything humane, even real people. Real people, however, are a difficult case of moe because of their humanity. We are wonderfully complex and imperfect, which makes us one of the most beautiful beings on this planet, but it unfortunetly makes it hard for us to feel moe about each other: We have actual pasts and experience instead of quickly invented possible plot devices from our childhood, so it’s very hard to find someone you can really relate to, and even then, it’s unlikely that that person is moe in other aspects. Nonetheless, there are people that have been moe to my eye.

Quite a different opinion, now isn’t it? Anyway, thanks for anyone who has actually had the patience to read this. Also, a little Nattsu sketch to make it a little more light to read. ‘:3