Aliens in This World

‘Visual novel’ is the Japanese term for an interactive adventure based on choices and talking, and perhaps a few puzzles, rather than on shooting or other gameplay. Most Westerners only know them as the system used by “dating sims”. (Yes, just what it sounds like.) But actually, any kind of storyline can be used.

Or rather, storylines. The idea is to provide a whole little world for the viewpoint character to explore. The character’s choices and interactions with other characters should matter (and affect how other characters react to him), but no single choice should kill him off (as that’s no fun). Sorta like Choose Your Own Adventure books if they had provided real choice.
Anyway, the visual novel industry in Japan is rather puzzled that Americans don’t play visual novels. After all, the text-based adventure computer games (and the Choose Your Own Adventure novels) had a very long run, and this is just a more advanced (and illustrated) form of text adventure. So….

In a rather quixotic yet savvy move, Japanese industry types have made available a free “engine” for constructing your own visual novels. (This means that you don’t have to know how to program; the engine does all that stuff for you. You just have to write up all the storylines, which is work enough.) There’s also some free sample visual novels to download and play, along with tutorials on how the engine constructed those games. They promise in the future to provide some pictures and sound effects for those who can’t draw. Finally, they have a forum which allows folks to upload their homebrewed visual novels, so that they can be downloaded by others.

So… why not try your hand at a few storylines? It looks fun!

(Well, I can’t, since I don’t have a recent enough operating system, but you can!)