Megatokyo Visual Novel

Visual Novel Community Visual Novel Talk
#1

So it seems that Piro fellow is gonna use Kickstarter to fund it:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fre … novel-game

If he gets half a mil, he adds quasi-hentai in it. Most of the other stretch goals have been met.

On an opinionated note, I hope he actually delivers it within our lifetime. I know he has life problems and medical issues, but that online comic of his gets royally neglected for updates.
I know I’m not one to talk, because I procrastinate nine ways to Hell with my own projects… but I’m not going on KS to finance them either.

For all the money he’s gonna raise, it be poor taste to make donors wait 3+ years for it, because of IRL drama.

#2

I dunno, I checked out years and years ago and haven’t even thought about the strip in years. He’ll get the half mil probably by the end of the week, though.

#3

So people are paying over 20k for some wannabee manga to be adapted into a visual novel?
His art hasn’t improved at all since he started. The idea he wants 500k for porn and an additional 2k for characters is hilarious.
What’s worse is people funding this.

#4

KS is like any good 'ole popular voting system: the kids with the better PR or well known name, tend to win over the ones who might be more deserving. However, to quote an old saying, “it’s their money.” Me? I did drop a few dollars into it. This is likely to be the biggest VN cash raiser on KS for the foreseeable future, and seeing how the creator is a self proclaimed superfan of ren’ai, I’m curious to see what a fellow devotee can do. However I do think Errant Heart - A Visual Novel has better overall potential to be a great VN.

It will be very interesting to see how much money the Megatokyo project raises, and what the end result looks like. The $200,000 range is about where “low end” professional Japanese VN budgeting start, and if they raise half a mil, my expectations would be high. I agree that Piro’s art isn’t something I’m a fan of, but there’s more to VN’ing that good art – it just really helps. All western made VN’s will inevitably be compared to Katawa Shoujo, because all things considered, it’s an outstanding title. Can Piro match or exceed it? We shall see…

#5

I wasn’t a big fan of Katawa Shoujo but I suspect this will be a lot worse, and I suspect that because 90% of a VN is the story and the story here is just adapting from the webcomic for the major parts. VNs are not a medium you adapt to- because you never adapt to more expansive mediums and there isn’t a more expansive medium than the visual novel. You can go book->movie, video game->book, video game->movie, anime->movie, manga->anime, VN->manga, VN->anime etc. but you generally can’t go the other way successfully because condensing a story to tell it in a more limited medium is a lot different from expanding it. Besides, what is supposed to make us think this guy can write a VN?

#6

I liked parts of it, and while some segments could have been done better, I thought it turned out great for what it was.
We’re talking about a VN based off a joke in a Japanese doujin, that was kit bashed by a group of people with no money, with a production crew that had untested synergy and no previous work history with each other, given out for free. And it didn’t turn into vaporware.

Didn’t lose anything for finishing it… Sure, time is money and all that jazz, but I’ve paid money for stuff that was a lot worst… and made by Japanese professionals.

Absolutely nothing. Which quite frankly, scares the shit out of me, when I consider how much money he’s gonna raise. Then again, funding something on KS gives the funders ZERO insurance for anything decent coming out of it. I would see a nightmare scenario, of this thing raising $500K, and then having horrors like no voice acting and shitty music. Because it’s going to use Piro’s art (or at least his art style), we’ve got no expectations of great illustrations. However he does know what an authentic VN looks like, so I suppose it’s better than nothing.

However I do agree with you on everything you’ve said. This has [u]ALL[/u] the ingredients for a [u]MASSIVE[/u] failure.

But then, I only donated enough to get a copy of the game when ever (if ever) it comes out, so I’m not gonna get mad if it does turn out to be a disappointment. Those people dropping $500, $1000, and whatnot… wow… they’ve got confidence in Piro, and I hope he delivers for them. I don’t want to see someone’s dreams fail – especially when making an indy visual novel – and I like to think that Piro knows what he’s getting himself into and planned to see this out to the end in a right way.

#7

To me one of the big warning signs is that he created something so big that he said ‘well I’m gonna have to split it into multiple parts and do them one at a time’. Planning a multi-part epic thing when you haven’t released even one yet? Might as well get involved in a land war in Asia …

#8

Forget about no voice acting, what about BAD voice acting? I doubt I’m the only one that:
[list][]prefers no voice acting much much more than bad voice acting[/]
[]totally expects bad voice acting if this project has voice acting[/][/list]

Simply because talented English language voice acting is expensive - although if the project budget is half a million dollars and the same person is both writing and arting it…

I agree with this too; for me personally, if I plan a project to be too large I’ve basically killed it from the outset. The best games I’ve developed were ones that I designed to be small and simple but grew during development. I don’t know if this applies to other people but considering how many ambitious projects die…

On the other hand, splitting a project up is also a way to mitigate against this - if you have to ship something by a certain (closer) date there’s motivation to get the work done now.

#9

The funny thing about the Katawa Shoujo devs is that they try to distance themselves away from Japanese eroge. Terms like “keyshit” are popular amongst them, hilariously.

#10

I saw that quite a bit on the blog in the lead up to its release - a surprising amount of contempt for the genre, ridiculous (and often largely untrue) generalisations about eroges - which made the fact that Katawa Shoujo was a pretty generic approach to eroge pretty funny. I’m still quite impressed with what they managed to come up with but the attitudes involved, holy shit…

Besides, apart from ?? all of the ‘keyshit’ is better than Katawa Shoujo =P

#11

Oddly enough, the more posts I read from Piro about his VN, the less confidence I have in him. Probably just my own personal arrogance… I really hope that’s all it is… because his project has raised enough monies to fund a “commercial quality” eroge. However, it seems he didn’t have any idea of what he got himself into. Nonetheless, I’m hoping for the very best, and pray for his major success.

His fundraising burned itself out some time ago (in terms of raising $10,000+ a day), so it’s slowing to make the 300,000 mark now. I think it will reach that, given that many KS projects get a 10% (or more) bump at the last 48 hours.

#12

I’m a bit puzzled that he has a staff of 8 people working on this, despite doing the art and writing himself. They don’t seem to include voice actors and I really don’t have any clue why the remaining tasks would require that many, unless he’s got five colourers or something.

#13

A couple programmers, a couple testers, marketing, sound effect artist, background music. I can see it getting up to 8 people.

#14

It’s over now. He raised $299,184 in the end. Assuming 10% of the payments fail to process for whatever reasons, that still leaves him $270,000 or so.

I’m curious where all the money will go, seeing how artwork and VA’ing are the largest chunk of costs for a VN. Even if an additional 25% of the fundraising goes to the KS goodies (which is the dumbest thing about KS’ing – so much goes in the fundraising prizes), he’s still got commercial quality VN cash.

#15

I’ll wager now that he won’t produce anything close to a commercial quality title with it; and not just because, for some reason, when you go West, voice actors are suddenly 10x shittier and cost 10x as much. In general though, eroge companies are so used to their shoe-string budgets that they know how to wring every bit of production value out of it. Besides, even with very professional colouring and even if they do a really high quality job in every other aspect, I think piro’s art may drag the overall quality of the project down a lot.

#16

Here’s the website where you can follow the project development.

http://vn.megatokyo.com