Yorhel was also the creator/developer of ncdu among many other open source projects. He was a big open source advocate. The sites he hosted (vndb.org and manned.org) have automated database dumps and source code fully available. Recommend to check out his website https://dev.yorhel.nl/
This is probably a niche topic on HN, but for those of us who play Visual Novels, VNDB is a massive resource for getting the setup right for older and obscure ones that require odd hardware or configurations. The early days of VNs were all on DOS/V and Sharpx68000 systems with quirky configurations. VNDB catalogs so many of them and things that are "Mostly" VNs for historical purposes.
Without it, we wouldn't have the modern wave of VNs that have become popular today (Hatoful Boyfriend, Doki Doki Literature Club, etc.) nor some of the offshoot genres that have become popular.
I must admit, this is one area I've found LLMs to be surprisingly strong. They're REALLY good at reverse engineering obscure platforms, languages, game engines; and quickly throwing together super hacky tooling.
I was able to reverse engineer the PS4 edition of "New Game!: The Challenge Stage", which was never released in English. I've now fully translated it, added proper text wrapping and additional text boxes where text would now overflow. Along the way I've fully decompiled (with byte exact recompilation) the Squirrel scripts for the entire game, built atop the game engine of a now largely defunct game studio. Prior to this I hadn't even heard of Squirrel scripting language. I had most of this done in under 24 hours.
I'm not in any way a part of the visual novel community. I just did this because I enjoyed the New Game! anime way more than a near(?) middle aged man probably ought to.
P.S. My condolences to Yorhel's friends and family.
I think there is some community around branching browser text stories like (mostly) Twine games that have their own database somewhere?
And then there is always some overlap and discussions around what games to allow where, with each community gatekeeping to some degree what games are allowed in their database or not.
So, for example, I never heard about VNDB and never really crossed paths with VN players online, even if I have been around communities for IF and gamebooks since last century and the similarities are obvious.
thank you for sharing this! I never heard the two website you mentioned while being very familiar with vndb. I guess there will be always another corner of the internet that you don't even know existed.
If you are curious, vndb has a guideline you can see about what can be added here:
https://vndb.org/d2
This website is a remnant of something long gone: simple yet capable HTML websites that just work. I hope it will be preserved, or at least the database made public so it won’t get lost.
It is public, and more! There's even an interface allowing you to run your own queries directly against a synchronized copy: https://query.vndb.org/browse
Without it, we wouldn't have the modern wave of VNs that have become popular today (Hatoful Boyfriend, Doki Doki Literature Club, etc.) nor some of the offshoot genres that have become popular.
I was able to reverse engineer the PS4 edition of "New Game!: The Challenge Stage", which was never released in English. I've now fully translated it, added proper text wrapping and additional text boxes where text would now overflow. Along the way I've fully decompiled (with byte exact recompilation) the Squirrel scripts for the entire game, built atop the game engine of a now largely defunct game studio. Prior to this I hadn't even heard of Squirrel scripting language. I had most of this done in under 24 hours.
I'm not in any way a part of the visual novel community. I just did this because I enjoyed the New Game! anime way more than a near(?) middle aged man probably ought to.
P.S. My condolences to Yorhel's friends and family.
Interactive fiction has https://ifdb.org/.
Gamebooks ("CYOA" to outsiders) have https://gamebooks.org/.
I think there is some community around branching browser text stories like (mostly) Twine games that have their own database somewhere?
And then there is always some overlap and discussions around what games to allow where, with each community gatekeeping to some degree what games are allowed in their database or not.
So, for example, I never heard about VNDB and never really crossed paths with VN players online, even if I have been around communities for IF and gamebooks since last century and the similarities are obvious.
If you are curious, vndb has a guideline you can see about what can be added here: https://vndb.org/d2