Hanako Games

How does Hanako's development cycle work?

#1 by Qazace - Dec 26 2013

I'm part of the surge that tried out Long Live the Queen after the Steam sale. I bought Magical Diary afterwards and found myself to be very intrigued by the visual novel genre!

So I've read into Hanako's blog and Twitter and its' interesting to see what you have to say, but I haven't heard much about the technical aspects of their game development. I'd like to hear about those things. For example, what tools/languages are used? What are the technical challenges that go into developing a visual novel? How long is the development cycle for a typical game? Any other info would be great I've done mobile games before, so I'm very curious! I'd love to try my hand at this genre.

Re: How does Hanako's development cycle work?

#2 by hanako - Dec 26 2013

Most of our recent titles are done with RenPy or customised forks related to it. I used to work with a couple of other things in the past but at the moment it's the most convenient for collaboration (as Spiky is a linux geek and I use windows, we need stable cross-platform tools or we drive each other crazy)

I tend to only put out about one game a year, but the time delay is mostly for content creation, not technical work. Writing and art take a long time. For a basic visual novel, though, there's not much code that needs to go into it unless you want to add fancy visual effects. For something like Black Closet, however, there's a lot going on under the hood. Still, it's all data-management. Since I tend not to do anything with real-time action, the coding challenges are different.

Re: How does Hanako's development cycle work?

#3 by Ohana - Dec 27 2013

If you are interested in Visual Novel development in particular, you will find a thriving development community (primarily focused around ren'py but other engines are discussed as well) on the lemmasoft forums

You can also find other people who might be willing to work on your project with you. Most will expect reasonable compensation for their work.