Then I found ncdu, and haven’t looked back since. So it saved me a lot of time
Thank you and RIP
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.
I second the condolences, tremendous loss for the people who knew Yorhel, as well as for the VN and open source communities.
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.
That's only because they are only "similar" on the surface. It feels like saying "football, volleyball and basketball are similar" just because they are all team games played with a ball.
If you are curious, vndb has a guideline you can see about what can be added here: https://vndb.org/d2
But only people who are really into computers read them, so they like to use game terminology to talk about them.
(also, none of the creators of "VNs" call them "VNs".)
By the 2010s many JRPGs such as the Hyperdimension Neptunia series and Danganronpa pretty much stole all the visual elements of visual novels and mashed them up with gameplay from other genres.
Phoenix Wright is the only one of those Westerners really know about.
https://bimgs.jlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/RIP-Yorhe...