Five Tenets

Above is a chart that effectively summarizes my personal standards in judging works of the various subgenres of this fandom.  For others it may vary (I expect ideally for most it will be a straight 5 for all aspects of production), but as long as I believe I'm meeting this minimum baseline for my works and the works I collaborate in, I will generally be satisfied with the outcome.  The point is that there's a guide for me to know when enough is enough, to ship something, and move on to the next project taking with me the lessons learned.

In case this wasn't self-explanatory already, some explanation of the legend is as follows:

VN - Visual Novel.  A basic story with choices and branches.
KN - Kinetic Novel.  I'm including here works that have kinetic-novel like tendencies, such as non-renai and stories with minimal path branches.
Datesim - Basically anything that includes schedules and event-based scenes with various love interests where the point is just spending time, not advancing a plot.
Hgame - needs no explanation.  As you can see, the only criteria is if you can get off on it or not.
JRPG - By programming I meant to include 'Battle System' and customization.  Some games such as Resonance of Fate hooked me just on the mechanics alone.
GUI - The overall design of the interface, which aids in immersing the player.  This is an aspect that cannot be overlooked, although sometimes there's a charm with a basic ONSCRIPTER layout that leads one to believe you're reading a small little gem.

The chart looks like some sort of graphic equalizer, so an analogy is in order:  when I'm listening to rap, I prefer to pull the 100Hz slider bar all the way to the maximum, push all the other bars all the way to minimum, and turn on the "V-GROOVE XXXXXBS SUPAH BASS" and let the subwoofer take front and center.  But if I'm listening to --- uh, I dunno, Yanni -- I want a more wave-pattern like graphic equalizer arrangement to highlight all the different subtones of the music.

So similarly, depending on the genre, there are certain aspects of production I pay more particular attention to than others.  To me, these strong parts essentially form the 'backbone' of the project, strong enough to carry the weight of the whole thing, while other aspects serve as support.  I won't want to maximize the quality on each aspect since I will burn out, taking into account that I only work usually by myself or in small teams (oftentimes I only work with one other person at a time).  The only time I really went all-out was in the main project this blog is named after, and I ended up managing people and answering emails than actually producing content.(Oh btw the 3D and BGs are complete).  In addition, for the works that I co-produce, I almost always use all-original assets, even if I may achieve better results by grabbing off-the-shelf assets.  It's the only way for me to improve since I want to exercise my skills in all aspects of production.

I'm probably one of the few fully independent EVN creators remaining, since I look left and right and I see groups where the alliances and battle lines have already been drawn.  So I'm free to work with anybody as long as they don't piss me off (or vice versa); the problem is somehow I feel left out once in a while.  And I'm especially envious of people who appear with godly skill as if from nowhere.  As I suspect they're usually classically trained in the arts or have some degree in English literature or something, so we don't have to see their works back when they still sucked (since it's kept within the curriculum).  Well for somebody who started totally from scratch just for this medium, I don't think I'm doing that bad... I'm past the halfway point of my obligatory 10,000 hours so I can see the finish line, though it's still a bit hazy.  My ultimate goal is to have a game on vndb that isn't ranked "so-so" or "bad".

The next blog post should be a release announcement for an H-game.  This should get interesting.