It depends on your audience. If you are making a Visual Novel for the VN audience, you’ll want to use Ren’Py or a similar engine like the commercial Visual Novel Maker. There are other engines and solutions as well as cobbling something together home-brew in Twine or a similar creation utility. Ren’Py is very friendly, easy to learn, and purposely does all the things you expect a Visual Novel to do. If you want character art and backgrounds, this is probably the way to go.
I have played IF that was very much like a VN but a serious visual novel is going to have at minimum a baseline of visual media. Some just have character portrait pictures by the dialogue, many use paper doll sprites that appear when that character is speaking. These may be fairly static, have a few variations of expressions, or some are cleverly designed by the artist with different face layers and body positions to offer the most flexibility for animation. Moving sprites are quite impressive but a lot of work. Many games offer CG art slides that are like collectibles.
I’m not a huge fan of VN, but I enjoyed Doki Doki Literature Club which is quite complicated and accomplished using Ren’Py.
I like renpy but it’s harder to do the strategic war and tactical elements along with some of the game play aspects I want to do in my game . From my understanding you can do but it is a lot easier in an actual game engine. Also I don’t think it can do the map aspect like how in crusader kings you have the map and you can place your troops . I’ve seen visual novels do it but they were always made in stuff like unity etc
Also my visual novel wouldnt be aimed at fans of the Japanese style ones that don’t have any game play. It be aimed more at fans of the very text heavy narrative driven story rich indie pixel art games we have in the west . Examples Eastward, undertale , unavowed, then for pixel art visual novels va1-hall, coffee talk ( but unlike these two have more game play aspects ).
I’m gonna initially start small on a game that takes 2-10 hours to play. A game based off xenophonon anabsis then move on to a larger project I really want to do. The anabsis project will have less than ten locations be under 100k words and will most likely be very linear with limited or no branching .
Godot has ink support – there’s actually a port of Ink that runs on native GDScript, and a more performant addon that directly uses the C# Ink library. I’ve played around with it and it works fine, but probably the best proof that it’s mature enough to use is that Inkle themselves are making their next game in Godot.
I’ve particularly found Godot’s UI system to be way, way more sensible and better than Unity’s mess of original affordances and third-party add-ons that were acquired by Unity. I also find GDScript generally nicer to work with than C#. If I was making a 2d, UI-oriented game (like a visual novel or Narrat-style RPG) and I didn’t think an authoring system like ren’py or Narrat met my needs, I’d be using Godot.[1]
But also, right now, I would simply not start new projects in Unity, because I simply do not want to put my faith in Unity inc; but that’s more of a consideration for people doing commercial work than if you’re building something as a hobbyist.
w/r/t mobile: right now mobile is simply not a functional market for indie games. Android has always been a nonstarter for premium[2] games but iOS was good for a while. Nowadays iOS is also terrible, because app store visibility is impossible to get for indies and conversion rates are abysmal. The main platform to target with small narrative games right now is PC and possibly Switch 2, but right now putting a game on Switch 2 is out of reach for most without the aid of a publisher.
I am, in fact, making a 2d, UI-oriented game in Godot right now. ↩︎
As in, games that you pay upfront to buy and play. ↩︎
@Sequitur is mobile a mess due the massive amount of content someone has to shift through just to find something decent. On Android I can’t even trust reviews anymore because so many of these ppl pay for fake reviews . I can’t speak to Apple but Android has an abundance of non functional shovel ware I’m shocked anyone manages to get discovered.
Apple from my understanding had higher standards and you actually had more cases of paid apps something I hardly see on android. On Android top games are always filled with ads,micro transactions and other crappy free 2 play mechanics.
Indeed. The horrendously annoying forms of monetisation on Android is driving the problem worse and worse. It would be much simpler to have just paid-upfront apps. And possibly a separate demo app. But like you’ve said, it doesn’t work like that anymore.
I’m planning to try something new (or perhaps old); Games for a dollar! up-front, no silly monetisation coins or ads. just $1. On each platform (Android, iOS, OSX, Windows, Linux).
How is this possible? For the last few weeks I’ve been working on a diagram-to-code transformation tool. And it’s looking better and better every day. Right now, i have almost enough working for my first game.
On Android, the expectation has basically always been that a game is worth $0 + an unbounded amount of money in in-app purchases. Selling premium games on that platform has always been a nonstarter. I think Voyageur made like three figures, gross, on Android (compared to 2 orders of magnitude more on iOS) and that was ten years ago. It’s surely worse now.
On iOS, store visibility is just a nonstarter unless you are a handful of publishers/big studios who already get great store visibility. It’s incredibly risky to publish anything on it, even more so than on Steam. The App Store is designed to front-load the very most successful games and nothing else, there’s nothing like Steam’s somewhat more robust suite of discoverability features, and mobile gamers are also much less connected to games media/culture than PC gamers, which means they rarely find games other than through the app store.
I agree with this completely. But i actually think it’s worse now. Whether you’re on iOS/Android or PC/Steam/Itch, you’re not going anywhere at all for indie products in terms of discovery. And of course any form of paid promotion is an overall loss at this scale.
So does that mean everything is a non-starter?
It would seem so, but I’m going to try an idea:
Endeavour to make it quicker, easier and cheaper to make products.
Maintain good quality by making them small and sweet.
Have a unified “system” codebase that’s easy to update and test.
Products super-cheap at retail (~$2 with very frequent $1 sales).
