England Exchange - Now On Steam

If you can't see the above, there's a link to the Steam page here.

Spend a semester in England pursuing eight different romance interests and try not to get your heart broken!

If you've already purchased England Exchange from the hanakogames website, please contact hanakogames support to receive your free Steam key.

England Exchange

Long time no update (look, 2016 was a rough year) but we finally have a new game to announce!

You play an American college student (choice of male or female protagonist, renamable) who has signed up for a semester abroad in England, where you'll be living in a hostel and meeting fellow students from around the world who have, like you, been drawn to London. Along the way, you'll get a part-time job, run afoul of various cultural confusions, get drunk for the first time (lower drinking age!), go on a Beach Episode trip, go on a lot of dates, encounter a mystery, and maybe even find the love of your life. Or at least a new direction. (But not One Direction. Can't afford those licensing fees.)

There are eight possible love interests. Pairings are 4 BxG, 4 GxB, 2 BxB, 2 GxG. And things may occasionally get a little bit saucy...

More information, a list of datable characters, and free demo versions available on the England Exchange game website.

oxenfree

Played so far: Single playthrough. About 5 hours (this is not unusual from what I can tell)

I'm going to do my best to avoid talking about the plot and JUST talk about the process of playing the game.

This is a narrative-focused semi-adventure game. The 'puzzles' are very light, it's mostly about running around and making decisions to progress through the story, plus a single mechanic with the radio which you use a lot. There are some pseudo-platforming elements, in terms of having to maneuver and jump around to get to the places where you're going, but I don't think it's possible to lose due to jumps or walking off edges or anything like that. The walking is mostly to embody you in the character and pace your discoveries, because a lot of talking and such will happen while you are walking from point to point.

One of the most notable things about the decisions, especially coming from a VN/RPG background, is the power of interruptions. As the characters are talking, you'll get little popup bubbles of possible things you can say. If you don't choose any of the options, the bubbles will eventually fade out and disappear, and your character stays quiet. (This feature appears in some VNs as well, perhaps best known in School Days) How long the options stay available depends on the conversation, since your interjection might not make sense if the point you were responding to passes, but if people are asking you a question they're obviously going to wait longer for you to reply, sometimes with optional extra lines to prompt you a few more times Similarly, when you DO choose an option, sometimes your character will wait for the person currently speaking to finish their line and other times she immediately jumps in to cut them off and/or change the subject.

This makes the conversations much more natural-feeling and tumbling-over-each-other than most video game dialog (RPGs are notorious for having poor pacing with multi-person conversations, like when you have to wait for each character to separately laugh at a joke and click to continue to the next one), which of course also means that it's a lot easier to miss things. If you cut someone off, you'll never know what they were going to say.

This game is probably a nightmare to play if you have any sort of hearing difficulty and/or are not a very fast reader. There ARE subtitles. Mostly. For the major character dialog. But NOT for a lot of the audio cues that are involved in puzzles (they usually have visual cues as well, at least), or a lot of the radio broadcasts, some of which are extra flavor and world building but some of which are fairly important, especially if you're trying to really understand the story. And while the major dialog is subtitled, those subtitles will appear and disappear in a flash if someone's speaking quickly or gets interrupted, and there's (as far as I know) no way to see a log, so if you can't process them, you're going to be constantly missing things. I AM a fast reader so I don't know how much of a problem this presents. Of course, you can just flounder along in confusion, because it's a spooky horror game and you're going to be doing a lot of that anyway.

Gameplay choices in things like this are a double-edged sword. As I mentioned, the walking around and interacting is not really a puzzle to solve so much as it is a method of pacing discovery and giving your characters time to talk, or not talk. You can decide you're fed up with people and press ahead, or you can hang back and give them extra time. The physicality of decisions gives you more room to waffle and be unsure and start to do one thing and then go the other way instead. All of this puts you more in the moment and makes you feel more like you're taking direct actions to move the plot along than a simple VN would. HOWEVER... well, hang on, I'll get back to that.

The other point is that you can't make manual saves. There are countless dialog options and you're always picking one and leaving others behind, but you can't make a save and go back and try the other, you have to go with what you've got. You have one automatically saved game as you go through and that's it. And you have no idea what your decisions actually affect. This does help with the roleplay aspect of pressing you to speak more naturally and not completely fixate on making the 'right' choice at every juncture because you can't... but it also means that you're constantly, constantly abandoning options that you'll never get to see.

In combination with the earlier point, we hit one of the big problems I have with "more immersive" adventure games with choices. They tend to be a PAIN to replay.

I missed a whole bunch of stuff on my first playthrough. Some of it is things where I'd like to see more of the dialog options, some of it is obvious BIG CHOICES within the story where I could have gone the other way and didn't, some of it is stuff where at one point the narrative tension was high and pushed me to actually finish the game but that meant I didn't look around and pick up all the collectibles... etc, etc. There's a ton of content in the game I haven't touched yet with my five hour playthrough. However, I am really not interested in going through all those hours of walking around again in order to get only one more slice of the pie.

From a business perspective it probably makes sense to focus more on keeping the player involved on their first playthrough and less on making it easy and convenient for completionists to see the rest, because they're a much smaller proportion of players and generally willing to put in more work. But it annoys me!

A Princess of Lilies

A Little Lily Princess is now available on Steam



Or on my website, where you can also find short demo versions to try out the engine and gameplay.

Coming Soon

The 'Coming Soon' page for A Little Lily Princess is now available on Steam, so you can wishlist the title to be notified when it is released.

The game will launch first on the hanakogames website for the discounted beta-testing period. That’s the time to get in if you want the chance to make any suggestions for tweaks to the romances! All customers who buy on the hanakogames site will receive Steam keys when the game launches.

Merry Christmas from Hanako Games

From now until Dec 31, 2015 you can save up to 50% on directly-purchased Hanako Games titles! No discount code needed, just add the games to your cart to receive the savings.

This discount covers the following games:

35% off Black Closet 

50% off Cute Knight Kingdom

50% off Date Warp

50% off Long Live The Queen

50% off Magical Diary

50% off The Royal Trap: The Confines of the Crown

50% off Science Girls

50% off Sword Daughter

Any game which is also available on Steam is eligible for a free Steam key if purchased directly.
The Steam winter sale is now on - the discounts are better for most games on direct purchases, but because of regional pricing differences, for some people the Steam prices may be better. Check both places to get the best deals!

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As for upcoming development, we recently announced that we are publishing A Little Lily Princess, which is a yuri game based on a beloved work of British children's literature.

It features six character routes, some of which are purely friendly and some of which are more clearly young romance, and a stat-building mechanic where you expend the stats you've built regularly instead of grinding for a far-distant goal.

This game is still in development and expected to release sometime in the first half of 2016.

Use your detective skills to find treasures...

Black Closet is now available on Steam:



If you already bought the game from the hanakogames website, information on redeeming your free Steam key is available here.

Trading cards are live, so claim your key and get idling to collect your loot. :)


And don't forget, you can unlock the custom campaign mode to turn all your friends into schoolgirl minions!

Back To School Special

Several school and learning-themed games are on sale on Hanako Games until the end of August with the code SCHOOL2015 - visit this page for the list and details.

This is the first time Black Closet has been on sale since launch and is almost certainly the cheapest it will be all year in most countries (Christmas might be a thing, but that's a long way off!) It is not yet available on Steam, but expected to launch there within the next couple of months. People who buy in early will be entitled to Steam keys on launch (and therefore able to idle for trading cards on Day 1)

FLASH! aaa-aaaa.....

For the next eight hours or so, LLTQ is on flash sale on Steam for a ridiculously low price that I will probably never set it to again.



So if for some reason you don't already have it, grab it now.

Rewarding Experiences

I've alluded to the problems with trying to set up an award for (niche especially) game narrative in longer, non-IGF-friendly games, but I thought I'd ramble about the topic a little to make the pitfalls more clear, and maybe some good ideas will come to light.

First off, if there were some sort of prestigious story game award, what sort of games would be eligible, and how would they be defined? I wouldn't really be happy about lumping every NaNoReNo entry into the same awards show as the latest Bioware RPG and the latest mainstream shooter, but I wouldn't want to start out with a VN-only show either. Too niche. So for starters:

- Only computer games in English with a primary or co-primary focus on narrative allowed.

-- This means VNs, digital gamebooks, some RPGs but not action ones, some adventure games but not pure puzzlefests, and some nebulous arty games that people argue about how to categorise in the first place

-- This would be trying to exclude AAA games in other genres, even though they obviously include narrative as a strong component. But how you actually judge that? Who would be making the decisions on whether Assassins Creed was 'narrative' enough to count? Do you try to cut them out by making the awards "indie only" instead, hoping that it's slightly easier to adjudicate? Or do you issue strict genre guidelines to include ONLY visual novels, RPGs, and adventures, and then fight over what games do and don't count as those?

-- Should freeware games be excluded, in order to keep the field size manageable, or just restricted to certain award categories?

-- What about games that aren't originally in English? What about freeware games that have been fan-translated, sometimes with or without permission?

-- Should games only be eligible if the original author actively submits them for consideration? That might limit the field, but it might limit it too much. An award's not very meaningful if it's only chosen between the games of the five people who were interested.

That's just some basic questions about the games themselves that would be up for awards. A much bigger problem is - who would judge it?

It is not practical to have a small panel of paid judges who are obligated to complete every game and compare them. Think how many hours some of these games take to complete! Think about paying a reasonable salary for 3-5 judges, at the very least, to play them exhaustively. Think how LONG it would take them, too. And, of course, a small group of judges, even esteemed judges, is obviously going to bring in their own set of biases that would make the award less representative of general opinion.

To get a wider range of opinion, you need a wider range of judges. But if it's pretty difficult to pay 3 people to play 20+ games, it's impossible to pay 200 or 2000 to do it. And, especially if all games released are eligible for awards, you just can't even begin to hope that everything will be played and evaluated. And of course, not only can you not afford to pay 200 judges, you might not even be able to get 200 free copies of every game to give out, especially not for a new contest.

So what does that leave you with? Calling out to the gamer populace to vote on the games they've personally played, and just sort of vaguely hoping you can get enough people to speak up and play fairly that you'll get a good spread of results? Well... it is sort of how the Hugos are supposed to work, after all.

If the judges are 'the gamers' rather than specially recruited judges or hand-vetted volunteers, then you need an organisation to make SOME attempt at verifying the identity of the judges and stopping people from signing up multiple times, as well as a barrier to entry to try and restrict this to people who are actually interested in the subject and not boredly clicking a webpage. This of course requires that you have created this central Gamers Association and someone is maintaining the membership and keeping track of the money (which will probably be used to pay out the awards), but one might find it a little hard to get thousands of people to sign up and pay money to get the chance to vote on their favorite video games. Or maybe it's easy, I don't know!

Now, once you've started making things into a popular vote based on nominations from this wide base, you run into the issue of campaigning. Should game developers and/or interest groups be barred from trying to push the voters to vote one way or another? And if so, how? Or is that totally fine, because that level of dedication should be rewarded? Are there other rules that can balance the possibility of one group trying to steamroll?

Of course, if this sort of awards thing were being organised there'd also be a lot of work that would have to be put into determining the categories, in order to reward different kinds of narrative instead of JUST having the 'best game' which will probably be swept by the popular thing. Categories might include things like
- Worldbuilding: setting, lore, consistency
- Player Agency: how much can the player shape the direction of the narrative?
- Multiple Endings: who does the most with the interactive ability to tell more than one story?
- Humor: obvious, but deserves its own category as its a writing thing often overlooked in awards
- Emotional Rollercoaster: not so much 'best drama' as 'most lasting impact'. what game's story most kicked you in the gut, or made you fall hopelessly in love with a sprite?
- Best Character: this is probably a more meaningful option than Best Dialog
- Best In Genre: to separate RPGs from VNs and so on (although there'd be an overall best as well)

And there'd probably need to be some rules restrictions limiting the number of categories a title could be up for final consideration in.


Again, this is all just the result of me thinking about it for a few minutes, and you can already see what a messy undertaking it could be, trying to manage it.

And even if I founded something like this and recruited 2000 people to judge it, people would probably complain I had an unfair advantage by virtue of being the founder, so I'd never be able to get awards, and what good is that? :)

The Royal Trap - HD Release

There's a new version of The Royal Trap out with bigger graphics and better background art!

Sneak, spy, and stab your way through a maze of court intrigue to find the truth, protect your reputation, and find romance!

Also available on Steam:

Roundup

Several little things going on at the moment...

The Valentine's Weekly Bundle is still going on over at Humble, which covers a variety of visual novels as well as the option to upgrade for a love pillow... from Hatoful Boyfriend.

The lovely Deji created some fun art for the upcoming Black Closet:

The game is still in beta, but is very nearly complete. I'm really busy right now but I expect we can officially launch it sometime next month.

And, as mentioned, Sword Daughter is now on Steam (and some people are paying very odd prices for the emoticons, but who knows if that will last?)

Sword Daughter - Now on Steam

(Chibis by Simon Adventure)

Sword Daughter is now available on Steam!



The game includes all your typical steam-powered bells and whistles, like trading cards, collectible backgrounds, and achievements. (If you already own the game, you will need to play through it again to unlock most of the achievements, but this should be easy enough to do with the section map.)

Speaking of which, if you bought the game direct from my website and want a Steam key, please email me with your order information and I'll happily hand one over. Please do ask by email rather than by forums, it makes it so much easier to keep my key list organised.

Roundup

(See, Google, you did very nearly kill my blog with your unwanted changes. It's such a pain to use, I almost never do.)

So, uh, haven't posted in a while. A few things going on.

The "lesbian student council secret police" game Black Closet is now in alpha-testing. Because of all the randomly-generated mysteries, it's a pretty complex game to test. The art is still in progress, but even when the art finishes, this will probably be held in testing for a while to try and stomp out as many bugs as possible. If you want to join in (and get the game for a discount) visit the Hanako Games forums.

The other game I'm working on, codename Fantasy Gamebook Adventure. It is a GxB game, and the first game I'm labeling as a 'Hanabira' product, which means that I personally did not write the plot.... because this is a licensed adaptation of an actual gamebook from the 1980s. We're keeping the title under wraps for the moment, but if you really, really want to find out, there is a clue hidden somewhere on this website.

What is that website, you ask? Why, it's the launchpad for a time-traveling superheroine, of course! (Not written by me, written by a friend of mine.) There are no current plans to make a Paradox Girl dating sim (in which you would, naturally, date yourself) but, um, you never know. Really, there are no plans for anything like that, it's just that I think it would be funny.

You can probably guess I've been too busy to make much progress on the procrastination front. However, I did get a chance to play through fault: milestone one now that the English version is finally out.

And speaking of Steam, the winter sale is on, so you can currently claim discounts on any of our titles:






Of course, that's not the ONLY way to get a discount this season... there will be more details announced soon on our newsletter/twitter, so stay tuned.

... phew! The benefit of not blogging here often anymore is that I have more to say when I finally do?

Trick or Treat

For Steam users, Magical Diary is on Halloween sale! Dress up as a witch and kiss demons (is that a trick or a treat?)



For non-Steam users, we're running a Halloween free game giveaway - you're almost out of time to enter, so hurry up!

Hella Yuri

For the fun of it, I'm building a curation list of games on Steam with lesbian content.

If you know of any I've missed or want to correct any of my information there please leave me a note!

Leading Ladies

Interested in some different approaches to narrative in video games? Check out this week's Humble Weekly Bundle, which is dedicated to female protagonists (sort of) and features adventure games and stat-sim/VN style games as well.

Humble Bundle Weekly Sale

Why 'sort of'? Well, The Yawhg lets you choose an avatar, so it's not necessarily female or a focused, detailed character, and Valdis Story (may possibly? I've heard conflicting reports) only lets you unlock a playable female character after you've beaten the game once. Details, details... but I try to be clear with you!

This week's bundle is also backing Girls Make Games, so your purchase helps fund scholarships in game development.

Date Warp wallpaper

For the Steam release, I commissioned a bunch of extra art to create trading cards and wallpaper. However, you shouldn't have to be a Steam user just to see the new pictures! Here's one of the new collectible graphics for Date Warp:

Time is fleeting...

Lost in time and space - can you find the way out?



After many delays, the new version of our sci-fi adventure Date Warp is finally available on steam, now with new science UI and additional bonus content! (Plus, of course, achievements and collectible Steam trading cards.)

Check it out now - for science!

Digging in the Bargain Bucket

I don't really do Steam sales if I can help it (being a rabid anti-DRM freak). On the other hand, I'm part of the system, and I manage to obtain small amounts of Steam Wallet funds from the trading cards that materialise on my doorstep without my having to pay for them, so I may as well send those funds back to other game authors, right?

So this leads to the confusion of trying to figure out what to do with it.

I won't buy anything that costs more than $2. I don't have very much free money, after all.

I won't buy anything that I could get on GOG.com, because if I could get it there I'd far rather get it there. (I've already bought a handful of random gog games this summer sale...)

I won't buy anything that there is zero chance of me playing. Ugly 3D games are a no.

I prefer not to buy from a featured/flash sale because those are not the games that need my stray quarter. :)

I do read reviews - if it's broken or there's some other reason that it's a bad idea, I'm not going to do it.

This doesn't leave a whole lot. Right now I'm eyeing an adventure game that has 'meh' reviews and a little exploration platformer.