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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  2mo ago (text post)   729 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for May 12th, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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converting public-domain novels into visual novels

It's my understanding that a purely linear visual novel is more often called a "kinetic novel".

A kinetic novel is a VN that does not present the "player" with any choices at all; he simply reads through a single unbranching story.

The term originates from Visual Art's brand KineticNovel (and all games produced under that brand are examples of this), but it is now also used to describe games by other companies with a similar structure.

Using the term "visual novel", with its connotation of interactivity, may mislead readers into thinking that you have added new branching paths to the plots of these books.

That does seem like the more accurate term, though I'll admit that I hadn't actually heard that one before. I'll probably stick with "visual novel" overall for the site and Github repos, since "kinetic novel" strikes me as being less descriptive and also kind of obscure (though I may be betraying my ignorance), but I could see it being a good idea to include in parentheses on the home page.

(And yeah, I don't have any plans to try and make these interactive, since I don't think there'd be a non-gimmicky way to do it.)

No, it's not obscure, it's a universally accepted term in the VN world.

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