Various programs

    Hello Everyone!

    It may have seemed like I may had went off to play SC2 night and day again, but it's not true! I have done some things this past week + one day. 

Checked out a bunch of software:

All this checking out other software feels like reinventing the wheel, it was interesting to see the working environment of the games created in these environments.

Live Maker: http://www.livemaker.net/

It is the most popular choice these days 

in the Japanese scene for creating a visual novel.

It is pretty easy to use. Even a dunderhead such as myself

was able to make some stuff appear on the screen in a mere 15 minutes 

by following the (pretty explanatory but in Japanese) tutorials.

Yep, here be graphics and text.

I didn't resize anything, so things are kind of floating and cut off.

(but easily fixable in your favorite image editing software)

The left side is a graphic organizer for the game.
The blue box is one of the nodes from the visual organized being edited.
On the bottom left you can see the program can also update itself.

I like the idea of a visual organizer,
but unfortunately it's unable to display text in any way other than full width.
Ｆｏｒ　ｔｈｉｓ　ｒｅａｓｏｎ，　Ｅｎｇｌｉｓｈ　ｌｏｏｋｓ　ｒｅａｌｌｙ　ｗｅｉｒｄ　ｉｎ　ＬｉｖｅＭａｋｅｒ．
It also cannot display any graphics other than it's own GaleGraphics format.
(PNG, JPG, GIF, and BMP can be converted into .GAL
using a second program included in the distribution of LiveMaker)

CatSystem2: http://cs2.suki.jp/

It looks promising, but I'm still in the process
of reading the (rather extensive) manual.

Lanovee: http://lanovee.e-frontier.co.jp/

Looks promising, right??

    Lanovee's special feature is that it offers a TTS (text to speech) engine called "moe voice system", which will read the lines said by a female character to the gamer so that the game maker doesn't need to recruit voice actors to voice act the script..

Yes, kind of like Hatsune Miku.

o_o hey, wait a second, I'm pretty sure I had the same idea several years ago of using TTS instead of voice actors. I was probably not the first one to think of it, but it's nice to see a vnovel maker that uses TTS.

I downloaded the demo and tried it out, but the demo was failing to work left and right (I think it was a locality issue, so hopefully it can be fixed), and it did not match what was shown in the tutorial video.

Oh yeah, and it's 9800 yen retail. (That's about $100USD)

Comic Maker: http://www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~mix/comicmaker.htm

 

The "Visual Novel Making for Dummies" program of Japan.

Indeed the interface is (probably too) simple, 

 

but it's also tough to figure out how to do some basic things, 

such as displaying text in the actual text box

instead of somewhere at the top left.

 (believe it or not, it took almost 2 hours to get this far. OTL)

LemoNovel: http://www.le-mo.jp/lemo/products/LemoNovel/

This is probably the easiest visual novel tool out there.

The scripting language is unbelievably simple,

and it accepts all sorts of graphics and sound formats, 

...except PNGs :( it doesn't support alpha channel graphics.

The downside (or upside?) is that the resulting published game is a flash game.

Novelty: http://visualnovelty.com/

Been checking this software out for years.

I don't think I really need to write anymore about this software, 

since it is in English and you can check it out yourself ;)

Adventure Game Studio: http://www.bigbluecup.com/

 Since all visual novels are adventure games,
I thought I would check out the adventure game scene.
While I love the games produced using AGS,
I'm not totally convinced this is what I'm looking for.
Pro: It was super easy to make a walking character and to make an image map. Also the community was the most friendliest, funnniest, and helpful bunch I have ever met on the internet.
Con: No non-alphabet character support. 漢字は禁物。

November production schedule and more plot brainstorming:

The plot is like a gigantic tangled ball of yarn, and storytelling is untangling that mess.

    I didn't want to say anything until I had something concrete (=playable game) to show, but there is a plan right now to get something out by mid November. That is, assuming I don't move any time soon. I've been anticipating to move since August, so it's a little tough to settle down and begin to work on something. Hopefully I'll move soon so that I can settle down and really focus. At this rate, I might have to unpack a few things that I've already packed up in anticipation of moving. Oh, how I miss my watercolors!