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Hey there. Ever wanted to make a visual novel? Now's your chance!

The NaNoRenO game jam starts in March! Make a visual novel from scratch in a month. The event is for anyone who wants to participate, but there are plenty of resources and tutorials for beginners and some very active communities that support new devs during this month! Would love to have you join us!

itch.io/NaNoRenO2025

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Announcing the Amare Games Festival 2024

Amare Games Festival 2024

Join us in April for the 2024 Amare Games Festival, a celebration of love and diversity in story-focused games!

For this festival we invite you to create or update a game that you believe falls under the Amare Genre tag!

What is Amare?

Why a festival?

Jams are an awesome way to get the creative juices flowing and challenge yourself to create a game in a short amount of time. However, there are already a lot of amazing projects in progress, so it's important to celebrate those and give people the opportunity to focus on setting and achieving goals with their existing projects as well.

Examples of Submissions

A new game.

A new demo or Vertical slice.

A new chapter update to an existing game.

Adding new features or content to an existing game.

The festival has fairly relaxed rules, but in general, we would like all participants to keep these in mind:

Rules:

You must Release or Update during the festival period. Work can be commenced before the start of the festival.

Please clearly label demos or first episodes as such. - This is to help us organise the entries

Please clearly state the exact update or new content that was added during the festival.

Submissions can be Free or Commercial.

NSFW must be properly labelled, but is fine as long as it adheres to Itch.io's TOS

No hate speech, (i.e. speech that promotes hatred, violence or discrimination against groups of people based on ethnicity, religion, gender, age, disability or sexual orientation.) or content that is patently offensive or intended to shock or disgust viewers.

Content Warnings are needed (Here is a link to help you with those if you need it!)

We currently do not support AI-generated games or games that make use of generative AI writing and art. Until legislation is put in place to ensure ethical training models that respect artist and creator copyright and regulate transparency on the use of AI in creative content, we will not allow the submission of games that utilise generative AI.

We kindly ask that you tag your game with the 'Amare' tag here on itch.io. This will ensure people who are watching the tag instead of just the jam page will see your game.

Join the discord to find others who are looking for festival partners, and to talk with other Amare Devs!

Sign up for the Festival on the Amare Games Festival Itch Page.

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Once a year, Punxsutawney Phil crawls out of a hole in the ground to tell you how far away Spring is. Not long after, sake-bento also crawls out of a hole in the ground to tell you how far away NaNoRenO is. And the answer is: SOON.

NaNoRenO 2024 starts March 1st. Join the annual game jam where you make a visual novel from scratch in a month!

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people who make or want to make visual novels... what's something you want to see or need? could be a resource, a collection of specific resources, etc.

there's already an ongoing effort to assemble resources, guides, and more for VN devs as a wiki over here.

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I'm holding a short, anonymous survey for visual novel developers to see what social media sites they're currently using and how Twitter changes have affected them.

the results will be compiled onto my blog as well as another post here.

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visual novel fans...

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One Week to NaNoRenO

NaNoRenO 2023 is nigh! Make a visual novel from scratch in a month! Join the jam now!

[sakevisual]

NaNoRenO 2023 is nigh! Make a visual novel from scratch in a month! Join the jam now!

[sakevisual]

Want to Help Support Tiny Bytes?

Have you been enjoying our Tiny Bytes newsletters?

Consider funding us on Patreon so we can continue writing these weekly newsletters. Right now we're 74% towards our goal of funding Tiny Bytes: XOXO, and with your help, we can continue writing this newsletter and consider writing more!

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Yousei console port in progress.

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Final Word Count 2022

Words Written: 53k Words Deleted: 14k

I've been tracking my word count for years, but this year, I decided to start tracking my deleted words as well. Every time I remove a passage from my writing, I cut+paste it into a separate document instead of deleting it entirely. It's been kind of eye-opening to really track how much gets cut. It's also been nice to be able to still "count" it to my word count so that I don't feel like I'm moving backwards every time I edit. I don't have any hard goals for next year yet, but I do hope that I can get these numbers up just a little bit in 2023.

Thanks for another year, gang!

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Questions Needed!

Heyo fellow game devs! Have you ever wanted to know more about the business side of working with voice actors? Hiring, payment, contracts, finding, etc? I'm doing a talk about that at VNConf in January!

If you have any specific questions, feel free to drop them here. Would love to make sure I cover the stuff you're most interested in.

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Did someone say it’s romance day? Here’s another romantic option from our WIP Confectionarius. Meet Kyulin! She’s a elf who likes baking, and… maybe you?

Kyulin l’Tournia (Elf | Recruitable Chef | Romanceable) Specialty: Fruit A beginning baker fresh out of culinary school and looking for her first job. Enthusiastic, if not a little short-tempered. She’s new in town, but everyone seems to know her name. Weird.

sakevisual.com/confectionarius

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You can probably date this one.

WIP: Confectionarius

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Wow, Kangai. You sure worry a lot.

WIP: Shinsei

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Otome Gamer Shirt!

Check out Alfy's Otome Gamer shirt!

You can get your own through our Redbubble shop!

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Time to show off(?) some programmer art. I am notoriously bad at drawing anything with reasonable perspective.

The current map for Magical Bakery Confectionarius. Most of these buttons don't go anywhere yet, and some might be gone by the final game if I decided they don't work within the scope of the story. But here are the places you might be able to visit!