DevTalk
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| Type | Visual novel development community of practice |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2018 |
| Founder(s) | Stella |
| Key people | Arimia, Vimi |
| Parent | Remort Studios, LLC |
| Subsidiaries | VNDev Wiki |
| Website | https://discord.gg/devtalk |
DevTalk (occasionally styled Devtalk, and formerly DevTalk+) is a vibrant community of almost 10,000 visual novel developers.
Mission
- Provide a space to learn, experiment and develop professional skills related to visual novels.
- Provide a safe place for our vibrant community of creators, supporting racial diversity, diversity in sexual orientation and gender diversity.
- Provide space to meet other creatives and collaborate on making great visual novels, and make the visual novel industry better.
- Provide and connect opportunities, resources and services to visual novel creatives.
- Provide an environment focused on actionable, optimistic problem solving.
Community
DevTalk's Discord server has almost 10,000 users, with specialties ranging from writing & editing, to art &design, to voice acting & direction, to programming, to project management, to game publishing and many more. Prominent experts and complete newcomers alike are welcome!
Staff/Moderators
DevTalk Stars
The DevTalk Stars are individuals who volunteer and contribute to the community in meaningful ways and uphold community values and goals. Stars are selected by staff and other Stars after an internal nomination. They have an optional distinguished chat color and may post unrestricted to the Community News channel.
Stars are trusted with a number of additional management rights to assist in managing the community, should the moderators be absent. Stars are not required or expected to engage in any moderation activities, and their involvement is entirely voluntary.
DevTalk Stars include:
Guidelines
This is a copy of DevTalk's guidelines as of December 2nd, 2024:
- This is your Devtalk.
- Stupid questions are encouraged! Someone else will learn from any stupid question you ask, so don’t be afraid to ask them!
- Be positive and constructive!
- Share your challenges and victories.
- Share your mistakes, and what you learned from them.
- Share your plans, strategies and goals.
- Offer your feedback on what happens in Devtalk. Devtalk belongs to all of us.
- Devtalk is Powered By You.
- Devtalk wouldn’t be Devtalk without you. You are the community’s present and future.
- We encourage all Devtalkers to share progress, big and small.
- Always pay help forward. If you’ve been helped and you’re able to help someone, do!
- Don’t have anything to say, but like what you see? Add a big ol’ heart or lemon reaction to show the love!
- Always Be Civil.
- Respect each other. Criticize ideas, not people.
- Don’t post things that a reasonable person would find offensive.
- Posting NSFW? Just provide a content warning and spoiler mark the image in #lewdtalk!
- No hateful imagery or messages— this includes logos, images, or other graphic that promote or condone hostility or abuse. This includes the defacement of symbols. This includes but isn't limited to messages exhibiting homophobia, transphobia and racism.
- If you have any concerns with something or someone, feel free to bring it up to a mod. If it's with a specific person, try to work it out with them privately and seek help if that doesn't work.
- Until further notice, unethically sourced or dubiously sourced AI generated content and discussion around such is prohibited.
- This is a shill positive community!
- Everyone should understand that other developers are not their target audience, but we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t love visual novels, so don’t be afraid to tell us about your latest and greatest!
- This doesn't mean you should be cold calling people via DMs using DevTalk. DMing strangers and begging for work without context or prompting is spam, and not something we tolerate. Speak to someone in a public channel before DMing them about work!
- Discord server links can only be shared through the #daily-message message rotation. Developer studio servers must have at least 300 members to join the rotation. With approval, special interest communities are exempt from this.
- Game Jams & Visual Novel jams may be advertised here under the condition that a link to the DevTalk discord is visible on the jam's page for the duration of the jam's promotional period, run time, and if applicable judgement time. If there are links to an official jam community, the link to DevTalk must be similarly visible near it.
- Developer tools, & assets product promotion at live events, such as Meet & Greets, needs prior approval from the host of the event and DevTalk staff.
Mascots
DevTalk's mascots are featured in banners, interfaces, and advertisements for the community and its events regularly. They are also Discord bots and operate a variety of automatic and semi-automatic services for the community.
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Lemon -
Cherry -
Plum -
Lime
Features
 | This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. |
DevTalk offers a variety of features to provide value to its users. Some of these include:
- Weekly Discussion Questions
- Jam Meet & Greets
- A productivity tips channel
Events
DevTalk hosts a wide variety of events aimed at supporting developers and aiding the visual novel industry overall.
Jams
DevTalk is the official host for a variety of jams with various purposes and parameters. Some were created directly by DevTalk as a community, while others have been merged into DevTalk after their creation. Still other jams are not hosted by the community, but are considered "supported jams", for which DevTalk hosts meet & greets and otherwise promotes them.
Jams hosted by DevTalk include:
- Spooktober Visual Novel Jam is DevTalk's largest jam, and is the largest visual novel jam overall by several metrics. It is a judged, competitive jam with a large prize pot. Developers are given the month of September to create spooky, horror, or Halloween-themed visual novels, and a variety of awards and prizes are given.
- One of Any Asset Jam, or O2A2, is a 10-day long, "anti-crunch" jam in July where participants are restricted to 1000 words and one of any type of visual novel asset. The jam aims to create an environment free from scope creep and make it easier for developers to quickly release a small game. Many also consider the asset restriction to be an interesting creative exercise.
- Winter Visual Novel Jam (or WinterJam) is a cozy, low stress jam in December where participants create winter-themed visual novels.
- Sealed With A Kiss Jam (SWAK) is a one-month jam in January where participants create "fantastical romance" visual novels which feature at least one kiss. The first iteration is scheduled for 2025.
- Make Visual Novel Assets Jam (MVNA) is unique in that participants create visual novel assets rather than full games. It runs for two weeks in February, and the first iteration is scheduled for 2025.
Supported Jams
DevTalk also has several "supported jams", which are not formally hosted by the community, but for which DevTalk runs supporting events and promotions like Jam Meet & Greets. These include NaNoRenO and Otome Jam.
Educational Events
Although Visual;Conference is not run by DevTalk, the community supports it each year, dating back to at least 2019.
A live-streamed speaker event has been announced for Summer 2025. At least some of the talks featured will focus on audio in visual novels.
The community hosted Dev Talks, a mini-conference for visual novel developers, in 2022.
History
Inception & Early Evolution
What is now the DevTalk community began as a section of the Visual Novels Discord server (formerly known as the r/visualNovels Discord server). A "devtalk" channel was created on February 5th, 2016, as a place for visual novel developers to discuss their work without conflicting with other conversations. On March 6th, 2017, an additional "devclub" channel was added for casual discussion between developers.
Lemon was created by Stella in late August 2017, and what is now the DevTalk Discord server was originally a test server for her functionality. The invite link was originally posted in the devtalk channel of the Visual Novels Discord on March 24th, 2018, along with Stella's request for users to help test Lemon's features.
Over time, a community of visual novel developers began to gather in the new server, which at the time was called DevTalk+ to distinguish it from the original channel. The first post in the Announcements channel was on July 8th, 2018, and channels such as artspam, writing, gaming, role-select, and recruitment channels were created a few months later in November 2018.
DevTalk collaborated with Visual;Conference 2019 to bring a large number of new members to the server, arguably kicking off the current iteration of DevTalk as a community. The months that followed saw the addition of many features which are now staples of the server. These include meet-and-greets before visual novel jams, DevTalk Stars, weekly discussion questions, and Plum. Channels such as devclub (then called Burn Box), suggestions, daily victories, and community news were also added during this time.
The first Spooktober Visual Novel Jam was hosted in October 2019. It, along with NaNoRenO in the prior March, were the first two major jams DevTalk ran events for, beginning a long history of jams either hosted or explicitly supported by the community. The first DevTalk town hall occurred in December 2019.
2020 onwards
The use of the + at the end of the DevTalk name gradually decreased during the year of 2020, and eventually, the community's name was officially changed to DevTalk.
O2A2 Visual Novel Jam and Winter Visual Novel Jam both ran for the first time in 2020. Winter Jam was officially supported by DevTalk in its first iteration. On the other hand, O2A2 was discussed in the community in 2020, but was not officially promoted until 2021.
DevTalk's Discord server reached 2,000 users in April 2021, and 4,000 users in mid-late 2022. The first and only edition of Dev Talks occurred in April 2022, and the VNDev Wiki was launched in June 2022.
Spooktober became the largest visual novel jam ever (as measured by both participants and entries) in 2023, and maintained that title in 2024. The DevTalk Discord server reached 9,000 users in early August 2024.
The first Sealed With A Kiss Jam was announced in November 2024, and is scheduled to occur in January 2025.
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