Visual Novels

[ThisAdamGuy]

Anyone here have any experience making visual Novels? It's something I've been interesting trying for a while now. What can you tell me about it?

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Only at the conceptual stage. Used to have some good 3D graphic software, but did not have the patience to do more than create a few of the characters I would need and one of the sets, so scrapped it.

If I could do (decent) artwork by hand, I might have gotten somewhere with it (one of the two stories I toyed with doing this for is the first "book" of True Blue | Royal Road - had two characters for that one; the other one was for a long-dead APA story that wound up being an adventure in a Champions game I ran instead of a visual novel; that had the one set and three characters done).

No longer have the software, nor a computer that can run it, sadly.

 

[MarekSusicky]

Anyone here have any experience making visual Novels? It's something I've been interesting trying for a while now. What can you tell me about it?

It is really easy to do with renpy, if you ever dabbled in programming it's a breeze, but I couldn't find anyone to make cute anime girls, and AI was still bad at that time so it failed as my side project

As usual it had magic, gender-bender and mystery! But the sound and image side is very important. Like critical.

You can try first few hours of gameplay in the browser here: Magic Academy

 

[jrell]

Ren'Py is considered something of an industry standard of sorts when it comes to VN. It does require a bit of programming knowledge, but it's nothing overly complicated—just a matter of learning the syntax for displaying images and text, which you can pick up in just one evening. No math or complex algorithmic knowledge is needed. If you have a knack for art, you'll be more than fine.

When it comes to 3D graphics, it really depends on your PC's capabilities and the amount of VRAM you have. And how fat is your wallet, of course, since some 3d assets are quite expensive. The most popular tools for this are Daz3D, HoneySelect, HoneySelect 2, and Virt-a-Mate. They all allow you to do nsfw if that's what you're into (VaM, for example, is focused on it). You can do a more traditional approach and learn Blender, where you can do pretty much anything, but it will take a few years to learn on a decent level.

 

[Akaichi]

Been trying to make one for a while now using Renpy, it requires a totally different method of writing, but it is totally worth it!

You will also need a programmer, good artist, a director and a composer.

No need for 3d, you can use 2d sprites alright and even AI if your target audience would not mind.,

Edit : Try playing some good VNs (MuvLuv, Fate stay night, Saya no Uta... Forget about that last one.... )

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Daz3D,

The two systems that were merged to create that (Poser and Bryce) were the ones I was using. Have tried to use the current version but have to relearn everything from scratch, and the hard part was really making good textures.

 

[Corty]

Anyone here have any experience making visual Novels? It's something I've been interesting trying for a while now. What can you tell me about it?

TyranoBuilder Visual Novel Studio on Steam

The EASIEST and FASTEST tool to make your own multi-platform visual novels! Quickly create your own games for Windows / MacOS / iOS / Android / HTML5 / CSS3, even if you know nothing about game programming or scripting!

store.steampowered.com

This was the most friendly one for beginners like me. Too bad I have almost 0 time to continue the project, not with work & writing.

 

[istryj]

Anyone here have any experience making visual Novels? It's something I've been interesting trying for a while now. What can you tell me about it?

My personal opinion is that a significant part of visual novels is neither a book nor a movie — it’s a stage play. That’s what they most closely resemble. This might be important for understanding how to simplify your work when writing a visual novel script. Creating something worthwhile will cost both time and money. There’s a lot of tedious, uninteresting work: dialogues don’t fit into their boxes, choices are bugged, a background disappears, a character wasn’t added, the game won’t run, and so on. If you’re not a fan of visual novels, this will kill your interest in the project.

I’ve probably seen around a hundred attempts at starting amateur novel development — 90% never reached release, they didn’t even get to working code. And the ones that did come out weren’t that great. It’s not easier than writing a book if you don’t know how to streamline the process; it can be expensive and may never pay off. Take a look at itch.io to see how that works out financially.

P.S:I made two simple novels (and I needed help from a programmer and a musician) and two more complex ones got “stuck.” It’s not a fun job at all.

 

[HouseDelarouxScribbles]

My personal opinion is that a significant part of visual novels is neither a book nor a movie — it’s a stage play. That’s what they most closely resemble. This might be important for understanding how to simplify your work when writing a visual novel script. Creating something worthwhile will cost both time and money. There’s a lot of tedious, uninteresting work: dialogues don’t fit into their boxes, choices are bugged, a background disappears, a character wasn’t added, the game won’t run, and so on. If you’re not a fan of visual novels, this will kill your interest in the project.

I’ve probably seen around a hundred attempts at starting amateur novel development — 90% never reached release, they didn’t even get to working code. And the ones that did come out weren’t that great. It’s not easier than writing a book if you don’t know how to streamline the process; it can be expensive and may never pay off. Take a look at itch.io to see how that works out financially.

P.S:I made two simple novels (and I needed help from a programmer and a musician) and two more complex ones got “stuck.” It’s not a fun job at all.

You are right that it is a stage play, all the way down to needing stage directions! (laugh)

I wrote the original Conspiracy Girls as a free demo on Steam, then made >Madness of Madison Delaroux on steam, a little over a year later. There's a huge difference between both and it really boiled down to experience working things out for real. I have experience making stage plays, but stage plays have always been a big team effort thing, visual novels you can get around a lot of things so long as you know who you are and what you are going for. I write and direct, so that comes very naturally to me. I can't draw, so I hired an illustrator. Music was really baked in with the Copyright Free Music crowd, especially Alexander Nakarada whom I listened to a lot and it fit in with the European/Mediterranean vibes I wanted to go for.

My inspiration for making visual novels is very obviously Umineko, down to the colored truths and even how transitions work between scenes. Umineko is a visual novel that works so close to a stage play that it even has 'theatre-going' as a theme. Even now I watch youtube and movies really closely for ideas on how to work transitions and effects better. The original Umineko was also hilariously low budget compared to the finished product you see ten years later with full voice acting. It had Ryukishi's terrible art (soul), there was no voice acting and pretty much all the backgrounds were photos with filters, a trick which I picked up to reduce costs.

Coding was hard, there are a lot of 'special' things that I really wanted to do like having extra menus for cellphone calls and glossaries, but had to cut all those in the final really buggy product because of time. (it had to release in October) VNMaker comes with a very full suite of functions compared to Tyranno but these days most VN maker communities don't really exist now. Its not like RPGMaker where one guy made all the plugins and left it open for people to buy and use. A lot of the effects and motions I had to make myself by hand using copyright free resources as a base.

I don't think I will go back to VNMaking, its a lot of work for one person and was only doable during the flu days. These days shooting a short video or messing around in the videomaker Capcut to tell a story is far more doable, AND Capcut has a lot of modern tools that VNMaker doesn't have, so I got really excited when I learned about it. It really is the same thing, VNMaking and making videos, I like having a lot of presets and options I can mess around with and build on off of there. You don't get that in VNMaking because most engines aren't very complete with what you need.

 

[HiroXV]

Yes, I worked on some visual novels that I ended up never releasing. Unironically, Renpy was never my first choice, for some reason I don't really like that software, it's simple and it gets the job done but it's not for me.
I used Tyranobuilder, and Novelty, hell, even RPG Maker, lmao.
Still, I never ended up finishing one, I can do a bit of art and there is a bunch of free music, so one day I'm for sure going to make one, but for now it's not a priority.
Ironically though playing visual novels was what got me into the world of writing and reading, so maybe I should write something to give it justice. If you can write, hire an artist and get some free music, you just have to choose one software (to tell the truth they are all pretty intuitive), get a simple manual and you're good with it after s bit of practice.