Visual novel creators, join your forces! “TyranoBuilder Meetup#1”, a short report

asobu
5 min readJan 22, 2020

(Note: The original article was written in Japanese by Giichi Totsuka on his blog: https://gamesoldier.net/2020/01/20-tyranomeetup/ )

“There’s tons of meetups and events for Unity or Unreal Engine, but nothing for TyranoBuilder!”

As many game creators are worrying about this issue, so we decided to organize our own event called “TyranoBuilder Meetup#1” on January 18, 2020.

The event took place at asobu, a community and working space for indie devs in Shibuya.

It was our first event, so we started small… just 4 participants.
As I (Totsuka) am using the engine myself, I invited devs I met in various events.
Here are the participants:

Kotaro Dendaira

He got the idea for this event. Under the studio name “Furoshiki Lab”, he’s making games and working as a freelance.
He released a free game called “Home Coming” on TyranoBuilder/Script website’s “Novel Game collection” corner. Currently, he’s developing “MEssingMEmory” using TyranoScript and plan to release it on 2020.

MEssingMEmory

Takumi Kato

Kato won the second place of Tyrano Game Festival 2018 with “Koshu Kenwa” (“Public Phone”). He works in a game company (really!?) as day job, and makes his own games using TyranoScript on his free time. His latest work is “Mujin To” (“Desert Island”), which was his entry for Tyrano Game Festival 2019.

Mujin to

Torinochozo

Creator of “SOUND JOURNEY DREAM SEEKER”, a new genre of adventure game that mixes loud reading and music, which was an entry for Tyrano Game Festival 2019.
I can’t tell more about him because he works for a big game company and doesn’t want to be recognized.

Sound Journey Dream Seeker

gtozka (Giichi Totsuka)

I’m that old guy also creating games and dojinshi under the nickname “qbert”. I joined Tyrano Game Festival 2017 with a short visual novel called “Otosan no PC Quest” (Dad’s PC quest) which won an honorable mention.
More recently, I submitted “Oke no Kan” to the 2019 edition of the festival.
This game will be included as “a game in the game” to “Retro Game Aliens”, the full length title I’m currently developing.

Oke no Kan

A pause for lonely Tyrano users

We installed our laptops, plug them to the big tv, then discussed and showed stuff.

Most of the discussions were about the game we were making, like “I’m using this thing or planned to do that”, opening script files “I coded it like this”, “I used that editor to be able to use macros in the script”, etc…

It quite unusual to be able to see a creator showing the inside content of a released game, especially when it’s people you only meet at game exhibitions. As all the participants were not programmers, we were quite on the same tune about the topics and point of interest. We were able to talk about frankly about very basic subjects without feeling ashamed.

I think that other Tyrano users might be very interested to have that kind of interactions and meetups, because most of us are just working alone on gathering infos and skills on that software.

One of my biggest surprise, is the fact I heard for that a lot of visual novel games collections are using a tip system to reward the creator (by sending an Amazon gift card). Personally, I haven’t received anything, so I was just thinking that the feature was not in service…(lol).
Maybe, you need to get a certain amount of download or something I don’t know.

Dendaira is not necessarily thinking of making something much bigger for our next event, but first find a next date. It was clearly different from a very serious and dense study group event, but I found great to be able to feel “I’m really not the only person making games using TyranoScript/Builder”. Just for that, it was worthy.
We’ll inform you about our next meetup!

Bonus

During the meetup, we also studied an action game made with TyranoBuilder. This game was using a plugin called “Timer plugin” made by the programmer of “Buddy Collection” released two years ago on Nintendo Switch and some mini-games we played last year during an event called “Jisaku game daiundokai” .

Nymph Street

For people like who somehow, always tried to avoid learning proper game coding, it became possible to create action games just by tweaking a bit the scripts originally made for visual novels. You just (almost) have to copy and paste some script you can find on the web. It think it should be possible to see some bigger games being made thanks to this plugin and TyranoScript large distribution.

Below, you can see some of the main routine of the scenario file. It won’t help you in any way, but I just wanted to share with you that nice feeling of “being able to see the inside of a game” we had during the meetup (lol).

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More infos on Giichi Totsuka’s on asobu website: https://asobu.dev/member/98?lang=en

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asobu

asobuは渋谷にある独立系ゲームクリエイターのためのコミュニティーハブとワーキングスペース。 asobu is a community hub and working space for indie game creators in Japan. https://asobu.dev/