I literally cut a chunk out of the game because it felt like padding, even though the writing was good. Making a novel vs making a visual novel, are two completely different things. I've yet to implement camera pans, but it's in the works. I really dig the idea!
I've been into amateur filmmaking and writing for years but when I came up with and fleshed out an idea for a show, my excitement got the best of me and I realized a whole month later I had no way of actually getting a show funded especially when I want it to be freely available. I remembered visual novels exist and realized the show actually functions perfectly as a VN, and now RUclips recommends me this video. I hope to learn a lot so that it's a good VN, despite being my first.
I remember hearing a lot about the trend of taking screenplays and turning them into graphic novels with the intent of getting more funding for a movie than a screenplay would alone. The same sort of principal could easily work for a Visual Novel, but it's worth looking into some of my other videos where I get into how to incorporate cinematic techniques into your game.
Yo, this was a wonderful video for advice on the games. And honestly, a little honored to see you mention Reaplaced as a good example as to how to set the tone and expectations for a game, especially since I was the writer for the game. I think that this for me was because I came from a background of writing a lot of AA fancases, which requires someone to be dead early on to even have a plot. There's a lot of good advice that I'm sure both new and experienced devs alike will appreciate. For me personaly, polish is something that I struggle with a lot. I was blessed enough to have a team that was very good at applying neat flourishes to the game to help set the haunting tone and make the game feel very sleek among other things.
The writing REALLY made Reaplaced stand out! I might have to do a separate video on polish, because a lot of the things that people can do to improve their VNs come down to identifying what they're trying to evoke with their work, and then making sure everything supports that intentionality, and remove anything that doesn't enrich it.
Heyo, Vimi! Awesome to see a video on your judging thoughts for Spooktober 2023 (I directed “protoViolence”!) It’s always a treat to see your advice to aspiring visual novel writers - in fact, I used your cinematography tutorial when I was coding “protoViolence”’s scenes. Your tips on what (not) to do for game jam works are beautifully edited and insightful, and I’m excited to share this with my friends who want to get into VN development. Thank you for making this! 🎉
For the past couple of days, I've been fretting over what hypothetical vn i would turn my story into and figuring out what needs to happen to make my story more exciting and interesting & player interactivity via combat and investigation mechanics (even though I've only written down the broader strokes of the first half of the story and a bit of the ending). Watching this video made me realize that i played more vn hybrids than pure vns themselves so to help me with this, im going to through some of the vns from the game jam as well as Muv Luv, steins gate, witch on the moonlight demo, etc.
Thank you so much for judging + giving tips!! (I worked on music for a couple of games in this jam, hoping you'll judge next year too because I love your notes on everything ^^)
Keep it up man nice videos. I think my view to Ren'py as a game engine changed a lot and it seems more practical and rewarding for me to start "coding" with . I hope I can progress further into the fundementals and furthermore make something visually appealing. So I will be watching your tutorials a lot from now on and am thanking beforehand ❤
I just wanted to come on here and say thank you so much for your videos. All of them have been so easy to understand and follow, I enjoy your tone and thanks in part to them I just finished making my first game jam visual novel that's going up for ranking here in a day. I'm very excited and my family and friends are all super impressed not only with the game but also that I'm the one who made and completed it. I'm giving myself a month to take off from the cramming and going through some courses, but I do plan on jumping into another visual novel jam next month and I'm just so excited. So thank you. And your judging event sounded amaZing! Does the USA have a visual novel event do you know? That would be so cool to go but, alas, flying to Vietnam isn't possible. LoL thank you!
I just wanted to post and update that out of 1115 entries into the game jam I just did with my first visual novel -- I ranked 176 overall and my story placed 5th!! Out of 1115 people. I am so excited and cannot wait to write my next story. Thank you again
16:38 ... In hindsight, maybe us having only a handful of judges when I'm constantly trying to expand and improve the event was an... administrative oversight? We're already getting some inquiries from potential sponsors for the prizes, and I started recruiting judges early. Shooting for 10 judges this year, fingers crossed the burden will be lighter per judge this year.
The issue isn't the work load, the issue is when you play a bunch of visual novels with perfectly fine control schemes, and then you get a game that decides to go rogue and makes an abominable control scheme. It makes it SO MUCH WORSE, because clearly a decent control scheme is possible! It brings me back to the early days of 3d games, where everyone had their own control schemes for 3d camera + control movement, and almost all of them were bad in their own way.
@@MakeVisualNovels I needed to add a visual "pick-me-up" to the last few minutes, and I found it was a nice way to break up the pace so people would be more likely to stick around to the end card. I am always operating on at least two levels
Hi just wanted to comment and say, seriously thank you sm for ur videos 🙏 everything related to renpy and VNs is outdated and confusing, so all your videos giving tips, guides and more has seriously been a big help! Tysm!
Thanks for making this! Tbh I was just wondering whether to participate this year since I was pretty let down by the judging last year. I didn't care for the lack of transparency and some of the judges experiences they wrote about kind of rubbed me the wrong way. A lot of them spoke about not liking horror games or just skimming the games. Which sucks if you're a horror game trying to build suspense. I also felt the criteria for the shortlist didn't make much sense. Things like bugs disqualified you from it but there were several games with bugs on the list. I just think there should be more judges, the judges should be compensated for their time, and it should be required they like the genre a large portion of the games are going to be. Anyway I wasn't trying to be like grr my game should have won change your judging or anything. I just think that with a jam that has a prize like that it should be taken more s- oh shit fillerbunny? Comment cancelled, whered you get that????????????
i've been working on a fan visual novel set in the project moon universe and the videos i've seen from you so far have been a huge help! the project is really just a passion project and rather niche since it's set in an existing franchise (and its going to be kinetic/no choices), but it's my first project i've planned this extensively and gotten this far into development with so i'm hoping it'll help me learn the tools to develop my completely original concepts in the future. i'll be looking through a bunch of your other videos, but i really am glad your channel exists! your videos are engaging unlike a lot of other tutorial videos/channels out there, i find them very easy to pay attention to (which is usually pretty tough for me)
First time coming across this channel, I've recognized the other game from the thumb and decided to give it a go. Not sure if you've actually played it or just added for illustration purposes but I'll have to disagree, it's a pretty good game! Either way your tips were amazing, keep up with the good work!
Funnily enough, I seem to get most inspiration from things I didn't quite like vs things I did. When I don't like something, I tend to focus in on "why" a lot, picking out what worked and what didn't to help me in my own writing. Admittedly, I really want to make an original visual novel as I've already made some small fanfic ones to practice and I think doing a small one for a jam would help kick me into being less afraid to do something original. Do you know the average script length for jam games? You mentioned they were 20 minutes to an hour (though I guess the reality is more what can you do in a month)
I'm not sure about the script length, since there are a lot of design + writing decisions that can make script length differ from reading length. For jam games, aim for making a really good stand-alone tv episode, not a movie.
Ouch. I knew I had a long way to go before I can even thinking of finishing a semi-decent VN, but now the bar seems... well, pretty much impossibly high. Don't get me wrong, the examples you used for demonstrating your points looked phenomenal, and the advice, as usual, was super useful. I try not to get discouraged by all the great art out there :)
Part 1 is why I think the content warning at the start of Doki Doki Literature Club is a great idea when I normally don't care or are annoyed by content warnings like those. The game presents itself for a long time as a cute and fluffy romance VN about poetry nerds, but there's this weird content warning telling you that there's gonna be spicy shit later on, and you spend the whole time wondering when it's going to come into play and how. And then you hit the darker parts and think that's the end of it, only for the game to hit you with a surprise twist right afterwards revealing that there was more to the content warning.
I currently have around 5 games that I am working on, some of those are split in chapters/acts. I noticed that I myself need feedback in order to have my motivation keep on going. But still, I always end up take way too long brakes cause it feels endless to code something/create something you don't know if it is going to be good and rewarding (in a feeling sense). With especially this video I kind of instantly had something in mind I wanna do: I want to create a game, with an ending - My current problem is, I always want to have an open ending, cause I like to keep going on older projects. So with that being said, I try to make a short and compact one this time, set the scope real small - like 20 - 30 minutes and maybe that type of coding fits me better!
I'd love to see a video on you analysing some of the more successful Kickstarters that existed without any pre-established fanbases, like Touchstarved and stuff~ It's honestly really perplexing to me...
When I made March of the Emissaries for NaNo jam of 2024, and one of the biggest critiques was that the buildup took too long. It makes me wonder how many people actually played into the action scenes I busted my ass to make lol
Players always have the option to stop playing, so your primary goal when crafting your games is to keep them as engaged for as long as you can. Different game genres have different strategies for this, but it's worth looking at modern tv and movie structures and pacing as a good point of reference for how to plot out your story (there's a reason I wouldn't go with book plot structures, but that'll be a different video!)
Holy cow. I'm mainly familiar with the Furry VN scene, where big mechanics like walking or even simple stuff like moving the textbox from the bottom center of the screen are just absent. A lot of those things seem very daunting to implement.
The early hook thing is generally good, but exceptions are genre-subversion titles, like Doki Doki, where the "hook" takes like an hour to appear, I believe, or Madoka (though it's not a VN), where the "hook" fully appears first in episode 3. Regarding Rance: Didn't it have a normal control scheme? I don't remember. It's still a hugely successful visual novel, so well yeah.
I am wondering if you could do a video on the financial side of creating and then releasing visual novels on store fronts such as Steam. I have been working on my own visual novel project for 2 years or so using pre-existing assets for the sprites, backgrounds etc. (it’s a long story as to why, and don’t worry I’m not doing it for any profit) and despite getting a lot of positive feedback and 10,000+ downloads I am reluctant to put the extra effort in to make it a separate, full-fledged release. This is primarily down to my concerns about the overabundance of visual novels available so I am worried it would just get lost in the crowd, and also the high cost of commissioning CG's, backgrounds and so on. Just wanted to get your thoughts on that.
My "How to Make Visual Novels" video covers a lot of those basics - it's very money-focused. For you though, I'd factor in that if you have 10k+ downloads and a lot of positive feedback, you can treat your "full release" like a sequel - double down on the aspects your audience loves, and pull back on the things they didn't respond to.
God, I hate it when visual novels won't let me progress with the space bar. Space bar should always equate to "next line of text". One visual novel had the space bar be "Hide the UI" and I kept doing it out of habit and it was so incredibly annoying.
umm sorry for commenting for a question, but why do my ATLs not work after more than one usage? The code is here... resized and reflip are to make sure the sprite doesn't fill the screen. Reflip just to mirror while doing Resized. show h_neutral_sil at reflip2 with move: xalign 1.25 "Leo got up from his bed and looked at Hirami curiously as she went to get something from the door." "It seems to be some called-in breakfast from the hotel's buffet menu." hide h_neutral_sil show h_neutral_talk at resized2: xalign 1.0 H "\"I didn't wanna wake you up after that failed attempt to get your ass up.\"" H "\"Especially since your alarm didn't work. Damn...\"" hide h_neutral_talk show h_angry_sil at resized2 with move: xalign 0.8
(using the translator) congratulations on the video! Hello my friend! Do you have a complete course or Ren'py video lessons for sale? I created a story and was thinking about doing an interactive type of manga, but Ren'py seems like the best option. I'm Brazilian, so the language barrier is the first problem, but your video lesson is well explained, plus Google Translate, I think I can handle it. Thank you for your attention and I look forward to your response!
@@vimi Hello my friend! Do you know how to disable the joystick in Ren'py? I use the joystick as a keyboard and mouse, with xpadder, but Ren'py goes crazy when I do that! That's why I want to disable joystick recognition!
hello. do you know how to implement firebase for android in renpy? because I really need to use the Firebase functions and Renpy in particular doesn't work but it is possible to use it since my game is one of the most ambitious projects in the world.
I don't know, visual novels, as a genre, feels very incestuous. I'd suggest looking at actual literature, and getting your ideas from other forms of media. I mean, well, there's a concept I've been thinking about called "Friendscape" which is about parasocial media. People who read books because the characters feel like friends, or perceive media as though they're supposed to put themselves in the place of the protagonist, instead of process the story as meaningful entertainment. I think we have to ask ourselves what the purpose of a work is; and if it's intent is to replace something real, ditch it. So I think the healthy approach to Visual Novels is creating an amazing interactive narrative, that can branch off, and still be meaningful as a story. Because that's what literature is, and because it's healthy. I don't know if I should post this. It's a bit rambly.
ive always been passionate about reading dating sims, and later on trying to make one i felt like needed to exist, knowing plenty of the places where VNs have succeeded or could've done better. i sadly worked on one by myself entirely solo for around 5+ years (between college and all that) and eventually gave up on it when i couldn't properly transfer my progress on a different computer sometime ages ago. that made me want to give up, besides the little faith i had in myself and the fact i was doing everything entirely solo for free. but i think part of the problem was how long and ambitious i tried to make it. it's been years but i've been interested in starting fresh and maybe hoping one day to pull something off and have an actual queer VN that i would've loved to find and read for myself
Join a jam! There are plenty of queer-focused VN Jams year round, but I think a great starter VNJam is O2A2, which should be coming up sometime this July?
What about Doki Doki Literature Club? It takes a while to realize its not a normal slice of life game but actually a horror game and it's brilliantly done. What's wrong with pretending to be in one genre but then taking a long time to get to the point?
Every Spooktober, there are at least a few games that try to do the DDLC genre pivot, and none of them work out all that well. Part of it is because the particular genre twist that DDLC did has now become cliche, so we can see it a mile away. The reason DDLC succeeded are beyond the story itself, and get into the meta-contextual relationship of "gamers" with the VN genre, buuuut like I told another commenter, I'll probably make that idea into a separate video.
@@vimi I fully get that, however I think that it stands to reason that VNs don’t always have to “get to the point”. Copying a trope is not good, but stifling creativity and innovation isn’t either.
Hold on a sec: 1. “Don’t bury the lead” and 2. “Build your atmosphere” This does seem like good advice, Yet DDLC seemingly breaks both of these rules. I mean It does build up an atmosphere for pretty much most of the playthrough, yet it isn’t for like a solid 30ish minutes before anything actually happens, and even then, all cards still aren’t on the table. Can anyone explain how and why this exactly works?
I started writing a reply, but I feel like it will best work as a video. In the meantime, it's important to recognize DDLC's place in visual novel history, the conventions it intentionally broke, the environment it was released in, its impact on the English visual novel scene afterwards, and how we, as developers in the VN scene, have to adapt.
The first line of Higurashi is, "If I was going to be ripped apart anyways, having my body ripped apart would've been far better." followed by bludgeoning and blood sound effects. Starts right out the gate letting you know it's about murder. Same deal with the example game I gave; it started by saying, "There's a dead body somewhere here", and took maybe half an hour to get there. People CAN totally get away with an out-of-nowhere surprise twist in their game, but it's really hard to do well, and it can only work once. Suspense, done properly, should work every time.
@@vimi And then nothing happens for about 8 hours except games of cards and zombie tag that seemingly go on forever. I mean, what you're quoting as the first line there is "blurb on the back" stuff. We all know something grim is going down in Higurashi eventually but boy does it not rush to show its hands. It's darn near one of the slowest things I ever read and I still only read part one, and I've read a lot of Victorian fiction amongst other things. My point really is that one of the beautiful things about VNs are their ability to break all the narrative rules we think are out there. Fate/Stay Night is another good example. Sure it opens with a prologue and a fire and something about heroism etc but it doesn't drop its actual hooks quickly, it takes hours to drop its character introductions amongst slow paced cookery scenes. One could argue that the prologue was later added on to Realta Nua because of the reasons you state. Apologies, I didn't mean to slam your video so hard, it was Friday afternoon and I was tired ... but I'm not quite sure I agree with you ... or the idea of narrative rules in general. There are lots of different ways to approach storytelling imo and the beauty of the good ones are that they are the ones that surprise you in their approach. That said, you've clearly read way more of them than I have and I'm not making any claims to expertise or anything...
@@BurstError547 I agree with you totally that there are different ways to approach storytelling, and I absolutely love weird narrative games that break "the rules". This video isn't aimed at consumers, and these aren't rules for what makes a VN good or bad; it's tips for visual novel developers to keep in mind as they work on their narratives. "Don't bury the lede", I think, is some solid advice to start from that some of the 2023 Spooktober competitors would have benefitted from.
I literally cut a chunk out of the game because it felt like padding, even though the writing was good.
Making a novel vs making a visual novel, are two completely different things.
I've yet to implement camera pans, but it's in the works. I really dig the idea!
I've been into amateur filmmaking and writing for years but when I came up with and fleshed out an idea for a show, my excitement got the best of me and I realized a whole month later I had no way of actually getting a show funded especially when I want it to be freely available. I remembered visual novels exist and realized the show actually functions perfectly as a VN, and now RUclips recommends me this video. I hope to learn a lot so that it's a good VN, despite being my first.
I remember hearing a lot about the trend of taking screenplays and turning them into graphic novels with the intent of getting more funding for a movie than a screenplay would alone.
The same sort of principal could easily work for a Visual Novel, but it's worth looking into some of my other videos where I get into how to incorporate cinematic techniques into your game.
Hello, friend! I just started writing the first draft for my visual novel and I've been diving into your videos. Thanks for coming back!
🎉🎉
Yo, this was a wonderful video for advice on the games. And honestly, a little honored to see you mention Reaplaced as a good example as to how to set the tone and expectations for a game, especially since I was the writer for the game. I think that this for me was because I came from a background of writing a lot of AA fancases, which requires someone to be dead early on to even have a plot.
There's a lot of good advice that I'm sure both new and experienced devs alike will appreciate. For me personaly, polish is something that I struggle with a lot. I was blessed enough to have a team that was very good at applying neat flourishes to the game to help set the haunting tone and make the game feel very sleek among other things.
The writing REALLY made Reaplaced stand out!
I might have to do a separate video on polish, because a lot of the things that people can do to improve their VNs come down to identifying what they're trying to evoke with their work, and then making sure everything supports that intentionality, and remove anything that doesn't enrich it.
Heyo, Vimi! Awesome to see a video on your judging thoughts for Spooktober 2023 (I directed “protoViolence”!)
It’s always a treat to see your advice to aspiring visual novel writers - in fact, I used your cinematography tutorial when I was coding “protoViolence”’s scenes. Your tips on what (not) to do for game jam works are beautifully edited and insightful, and I’m excited to share this with my friends who want to get into VN development.
Thank you for making this! 🎉
YES! Your entry was a really strong one, and was really well paced throughout. I'm glad my cinematography tutorial was helpful!
I'm adding these as a reminder in my design document. The tips are a great tool to make sure I know what to keep working on and what the next step is.
watching other games was like a HUGE impact to see how big the world of visual novels is and how little I'am and need to learn.
I thought it's a niche market
beary the hatchet mention! i was the head artist on that game thanks for shouting us out :]
It was great! I talked to another member of your team at GDC, so they knew this shout out was coming!
For the past couple of days, I've been fretting over what hypothetical vn i would turn my story into and figuring out what needs to happen to make my story more exciting and interesting & player interactivity via combat and investigation mechanics (even though I've only written down the broader strokes of the first half of the story and a bit of the ending). Watching this video made me realize that i played more vn hybrids than pure vns themselves so to help me with this, im going to through some of the vns from the game jam as well as Muv Luv, steins gate, witch on the moonlight demo, etc.
oh, you're back ! pretty good timing, i was binging your channel haha
Thank you so much for judging + giving tips!! (I worked on music for a couple of games in this jam, hoping you'll judge next year too because I love your notes on everything ^^)
Keep it up man nice videos. I think my view to Ren'py as a game engine changed a lot and it seems more practical and rewarding for me to start "coding" with . I hope I can progress further into the fundementals and furthermore make something visually appealing. So I will be watching your tutorials a lot from now on and am thanking beforehand ❤
I just wanted to come on here and say thank you so much for your videos. All of them have been so easy to understand and follow, I enjoy your tone and thanks in part to them I just finished making my first game jam visual novel that's going up for ranking here in a day. I'm very excited and my family and friends are all super impressed not only with the game but also that I'm the one who made and completed it. I'm giving myself a month to take off from the cramming and going through some courses, but I do plan on jumping into another visual novel jam next month and I'm just so excited. So thank you. And your judging event sounded amaZing! Does the USA have a visual novel event do you know? That would be so cool to go but, alas, flying to Vietnam isn't possible. LoL thank you!
I just wanted to post and update that out of 1115 entries into the game jam I just did with my first visual novel -- I ranked 176 overall and my story placed 5th!! Out of 1115 people. I am so excited and cannot wait to write my next story. Thank you again
I would like to see a visual novel made in powerpoint
There are a surprising number of youtube tutorials on making games within Google Slides. I won't be making one of those.
@@vimi Are you saying you are not up to the challenge?
@@flibflob2785 The juice isn't worth the squeeze.
fair enough
To be fair, I know of a friend who made a RPG in PowerPoint for a NGO. At this point I feel everything is possible.
16:38
... In hindsight, maybe us having only a handful of judges when I'm constantly trying to expand and improve the event was an... administrative oversight? We're already getting some inquiries from potential sponsors for the prizes, and I started recruiting judges early. Shooting for 10 judges this year, fingers crossed the burden will be lighter per judge this year.
The issue isn't the work load, the issue is when you play a bunch of visual novels with perfectly fine control schemes, and then you get a game that decides to go rogue and makes an abominable control scheme. It makes it SO MUCH WORSE, because clearly a decent control scheme is possible!
It brings me back to the early days of 3d games, where everyone had their own control schemes for 3d camera + control movement, and almost all of them were bad in their own way.
I know, I'm just remarking on how often the imagery of fire, death and torture accompanies some of the more taxing parts of judging. :)
@@MakeVisualNovels I needed to add a visual "pick-me-up" to the last few minutes, and I found it was a nice way to break up the pace so people would be more likely to stick around to the end card.
I am always operating on at least two levels
I LOVE your videos. Each one is developer gold. Thank you for all the knowledge and wisdom shared - I hope you keep making these for years to come!
Hi just wanted to comment and say, seriously thank you sm for ur videos 🙏 everything related to renpy and VNs is outdated and confusing, so all your videos giving tips, guides and more has seriously been a big help! Tysm!
Thanks for making this! Tbh I was just wondering whether to participate this year since I was pretty let down by the judging last year. I didn't care for the lack of transparency and some of the judges experiences they wrote about kind of rubbed me the wrong way.
A lot of them spoke about not liking horror games or just skimming the games. Which sucks if you're a horror game trying to build suspense. I also felt the criteria for the shortlist didn't make much sense. Things like bugs disqualified you from it but there were several games with bugs on the list. I just think there should be more judges, the judges should be compensated for their time, and it should be required they like the genre a large portion of the games are going to be.
Anyway I wasn't trying to be like grr my game should have won change your judging or anything. I just think that with a jam that has a prize like that it should be taken more s- oh shit fillerbunny? Comment cancelled, whered you get that????????????
STRANGELY ENOUGH, I picked it up at a secondhand shop in Japan. It was 1000yen, they had it listed as "pink bunny", and it was a steal!
This is really helpful, thank you so much for making this video!
i've been working on a fan visual novel set in the project moon universe and the videos i've seen from you so far have been a huge help! the project is really just a passion project and rather niche since it's set in an existing franchise (and its going to be kinetic/no choices), but it's my first project i've planned this extensively and gotten this far into development with so i'm hoping it'll help me learn the tools to develop my completely original concepts in the future. i'll be looking through a bunch of your other videos, but i really am glad your channel exists! your videos are engaging unlike a lot of other tutorial videos/channels out there, i find them very easy to pay attention to (which is usually pretty tough for me)
PROJECT MOON!!!
First time coming across this channel, I've recognized the other game from the thumb and decided to give it a go. Not sure if you've actually played it or just added for illustration purposes but I'll have to disagree, it's a pretty good game! Either way your tips were amazing, keep up with the good work!
missed this upload but great video :) always love when you drop a new one
I've played my fair share of visual novels, and I'm in the process of planning my first one right now, so this video should help a lot
Funnily enough, I seem to get most inspiration from things I didn't quite like vs things I did. When I don't like something, I tend to focus in on "why" a lot, picking out what worked and what didn't to help me in my own writing.
Admittedly, I really want to make an original visual novel as I've already made some small fanfic ones to practice and I think doing a small one for a jam would help kick me into being less afraid to do something original.
Do you know the average script length for jam games? You mentioned they were 20 minutes to an hour (though I guess the reality is more what can you do in a month)
I'm not sure about the script length, since there are a lot of design + writing decisions that can make script length differ from reading length.
For jam games, aim for making a really good stand-alone tv episode, not a movie.
@@vimi The tv episode vs movie is a great comparison. Cheers!
Ouch. I knew I had a long way to go before I can even thinking of finishing a semi-decent VN, but now the bar seems... well, pretty much impossibly high. Don't get me wrong, the examples you used for demonstrating your points looked phenomenal, and the advice, as usual, was super useful. I try not to get discouraged by all the great art out there :)
Part 1 is why I think the content warning at the start of Doki Doki Literature Club is a great idea when I normally don't care or are annoyed by content warnings like those. The game presents itself for a long time as a cute and fluffy romance VN about poetry nerds, but there's this weird content warning telling you that there's gonna be spicy shit later on, and you spend the whole time wondering when it's going to come into play and how. And then you hit the darker parts and think that's the end of it, only for the game to hit you with a surprise twist right afterwards revealing that there was more to the content warning.
I currently have around 5 games that I am working on, some of those are split in chapters/acts.
I noticed that I myself need feedback in order to have my motivation keep on going.
But still, I always end up take way too long brakes cause it feels endless to code something/create something you don't know if it is going to be good and rewarding (in a feeling sense).
With especially this video I kind of instantly had something in mind I wanna do:
I want to create a game, with an ending - My current problem is, I always want to have an open ending, cause I like to keep going on older projects.
So with that being said, I try to make a short and compact one this time, set the scope real small - like 20 - 30 minutes and maybe that type of coding fits me better!
I'd love to see a video on you analysing some of the more successful Kickstarters that existed without any pre-established fanbases, like Touchstarved and stuff~ It's honestly really perplexing to me...
This has hyped me in continuing my visual novel!
Oh. I didn't expect Враже footage. Love this song❤
When I made March of the Emissaries for NaNo jam of 2024, and one of the biggest critiques was that the buildup took too long.
It makes me wonder how many people actually played into the action scenes I busted my ass to make lol
Players always have the option to stop playing, so your primary goal when crafting your games is to keep them as engaged for as long as you can.
Different game genres have different strategies for this, but it's worth looking at modern tv and movie structures and pacing as a good point of reference for how to plot out your story (there's a reason I wouldn't go with book plot structures, but that'll be a different video!)
Holy cow. I'm mainly familiar with the Furry VN scene, where big mechanics like walking or even simple stuff like moving the textbox from the bottom center of the screen are just absent. A lot of those things seem very daunting to implement.
The early hook thing is generally good, but exceptions are genre-subversion titles, like Doki Doki, where the "hook" takes like an hour to appear, I believe, or Madoka (though it's not a VN), where the "hook" fully appears first in episode 3.
Regarding Rance: Didn't it have a normal control scheme? I don't remember. It's still a hugely successful visual novel, so well yeah.
I love that Corpse Party comes to mind right away at 1:34 lmfao... man it was such a great game though.
I look forward to every video you post!
awesome content as always!
16:31 best visual novel right there
Such a good video - thx for making it.
I'm not really trying to make an interactive visual novel game but these are good writing tips nonetheless.
VND IS HERE
I am wondering if you could do a video on the financial side of creating and then releasing visual novels on store fronts such as Steam.
I have been working on my own visual novel project for 2 years or so using pre-existing assets for the sprites, backgrounds etc. (it’s a long story as to why, and don’t worry I’m not doing it for any profit) and despite getting a lot of positive feedback and 10,000+ downloads I am reluctant to put the extra effort in to make it a separate, full-fledged release. This is primarily down to my concerns about the overabundance of visual novels available so I am worried it would just get lost in the crowd, and also the high cost of commissioning CG's, backgrounds and so on. Just wanted to get your thoughts on that.
My "How to Make Visual Novels" video covers a lot of those basics - it's very money-focused.
For you though, I'd factor in that if you have 10k+ downloads and a lot of positive feedback, you can treat your "full release" like a sequel - double down on the aspects your audience loves, and pull back on the things they didn't respond to.
@@vimi Thanks, I'll give it a watch.
God, I hate it when visual novels won't let me progress with the space bar. Space bar should always equate to "next line of text". One visual novel had the space bar be "Hide the UI" and I kept doing it out of habit and it was so incredibly annoying.
Can you please make an updated version of drag and drop?
umm sorry for commenting for a question, but why do my ATLs not work after more than one usage? The code is here... resized and reflip are to make sure the sprite doesn't fill the screen. Reflip just to mirror while doing Resized.
show h_neutral_sil at reflip2 with move:
xalign 1.25
"Leo got up from his bed and looked at Hirami curiously as she went to get something from the door."
"It seems to be some called-in breakfast from the hotel's buffet menu."
hide h_neutral_sil
show h_neutral_talk at resized2:
xalign 1.0
H "\"I didn't wanna wake you up after that failed attempt to get your ass up.\""
H "\"Especially since your alarm didn't work. Damn...\""
hide h_neutral_talk
show h_angry_sil at resized2 with move:
xalign 0.8
(using the translator) congratulations on the video! Hello my friend! Do you have a complete course or Ren'py video lessons for sale? I created a story and was thinking about doing an interactive type of manga, but Ren'py seems like the best option. I'm Brazilian, so the language barrier is the first problem, but your video lesson is well explained, plus Google Translate, I think I can handle it. Thank you for your attention and I look forward to your response!
No courses, but my channel has a few hours of content to check out!
@@vimi thanks for answering. I wish you great health and success!
@@vimi Hello my friend! Do you know how to disable the joystick in Ren'py? I use the joystick as a keyboard and mouse, with xpadder, but Ren'py goes crazy when I do that! That's why I want to disable joystick recognition!
@@alonsotglima9494 www.reddit.com/r/RenPy/comments/tmwmn0/disable_gamepad/
@@vimi Thank you very much for your help and forgive me for the inconvenience!
He's backkkkkk
Videos on Visual Novels?
Subscribed!!!
Finally vimi is back ... Means he is not death ☠️💀😂
hello. do you know how to implement firebase for android in renpy? because I really need to use the Firebase functions and Renpy in particular doesn't work but it is possible to use it since my game is one of the most ambitious projects in the world.
Good tips
inescapable could learn from several of these.........
Don't stop record ❤
do you have a discord server ?
I don't know, visual novels, as a genre, feels very incestuous. I'd suggest looking at actual literature, and getting your ideas from other forms of media.
I mean, well, there's a concept I've been thinking about called "Friendscape" which is about parasocial media. People who read books because the characters feel like friends, or perceive media as though they're supposed to put themselves in the place of the protagonist, instead of process the story as meaningful entertainment. I think we have to ask ourselves what the purpose of a work is; and if it's intent is to replace something real, ditch it.
So I think the healthy approach to Visual Novels is creating an amazing interactive narrative, that can branch off, and still be meaningful as a story. Because that's what literature is, and because it's healthy. I don't know if I should post this. It's a bit rambly.
"the end is never the end" looks like cheap "a bag of milk inside..." ripoff
11:52 what's that game?
The Final Prize is Soup
ive always been passionate about reading dating sims, and later on trying to make one i felt like needed to exist, knowing plenty of the places where VNs have succeeded or could've done better. i sadly worked on one by myself entirely solo for around 5+ years (between college and all that) and eventually gave up on it when i couldn't properly transfer my progress on a different computer sometime ages ago. that made me want to give up, besides the little faith i had in myself and the fact i was doing everything entirely solo for free. but i think part of the problem was how long and ambitious i tried to make it. it's been years but i've been interested in starting fresh and maybe hoping one day to pull something off and have an actual queer VN that i would've loved to find and read for myself
Join a jam! There are plenty of queer-focused VN Jams year round, but I think a great starter VNJam is O2A2, which should be coming up sometime this July?
What about Doki Doki Literature Club? It takes a while to realize its not a normal slice of life game but actually a horror game and it's brilliantly done. What's wrong with pretending to be in one genre but then taking a long time to get to the point?
Every Spooktober, there are at least a few games that try to do the DDLC genre pivot, and none of them work out all that well. Part of it is because the particular genre twist that DDLC did has now become cliche, so we can see it a mile away.
The reason DDLC succeeded are beyond the story itself, and get into the meta-contextual relationship of "gamers" with the VN genre, buuuut like I told another commenter, I'll probably make that idea into a separate video.
@@vimi I fully get that, however I think that it stands to reason that VNs don’t always have to “get to the point”. Copying a trope is not good, but stifling creativity and innovation isn’t either.
You should make a visual novel to prove me wrong.
@@vimi I definitely won’t be submitting it into your creativity goes to die competitions lol.
@@moodyhumor as long as you make it
The fact that the best selling visual novel games are all pretty long is baffling to me. We need more shorter games that are better
Huh. So that's what a "visual novel" is.
Hold on a sec:
1. “Don’t bury the lead” and 2. “Build your atmosphere”
This does seem like good advice,
Yet DDLC seemingly breaks both of these rules. I mean It does build up an atmosphere for pretty much most of the playthrough, yet it isn’t for like a solid 30ish minutes before anything actually happens, and even then, all cards still aren’t on the table.
Can anyone explain how and why this exactly works?
I started writing a reply, but I feel like it will best work as a video.
In the meantime, it's important to recognize DDLC's place in visual novel history, the conventions it intentionally broke, the environment it was released in, its impact on the English visual novel scene afterwards, and how we, as developers in the VN scene, have to adapt.
@@vimi 100% agree! And, hell yeah! I get to be in a video!🥳😎😎
"There is only one recipe - to care a great deal for the cookery."
- Henry James
So you watched five minutes of something that usually takes hours to get through and bullshitting on whether something is good or not.
Well your first critique about dropping the hook and people not wanting to wait 20 mins pretty much rules out Higurashi from being a good game.
The first line of Higurashi is, "If I was going to be ripped apart anyways, having my body ripped apart would've been far better." followed by bludgeoning and blood sound effects.
Starts right out the gate letting you know it's about murder. Same deal with the example game I gave; it started by saying, "There's a dead body somewhere here", and took maybe half an hour to get there.
People CAN totally get away with an out-of-nowhere surprise twist in their game, but it's really hard to do well, and it can only work once. Suspense, done properly, should work every time.
@@vimi And then nothing happens for about 8 hours except games of cards and zombie tag that seemingly go on forever. I mean, what you're quoting as the first line there is "blurb on the back" stuff. We all know something grim is going down in Higurashi eventually but boy does it not rush to show its hands. It's darn near one of the slowest things I ever read and I still only read part one, and I've read a lot of Victorian fiction amongst other things.
My point really is that one of the beautiful things about VNs are their ability to break all the narrative rules we think are out there. Fate/Stay Night is another good example. Sure it opens with a prologue and a fire and something about heroism etc but it doesn't drop its actual hooks quickly, it takes hours to drop its character introductions amongst slow paced cookery scenes. One could argue that the prologue was later added on to Realta Nua because of the reasons you state.
Apologies, I didn't mean to slam your video so hard, it was Friday afternoon and I was tired ... but I'm not quite sure I agree with you ... or the idea of narrative rules in general. There are lots of different ways to approach storytelling imo and the beauty of the good ones are that they are the ones that surprise you in their approach. That said, you've clearly read way more of them than I have and I'm not making any claims to expertise or anything...
@@BurstError547 I agree with you totally that there are different ways to approach storytelling, and I absolutely love weird narrative games that break "the rules".
This video isn't aimed at consumers, and these aren't rules for what makes a VN good or bad; it's tips for visual novel developers to keep in mind as they work on their narratives. "Don't bury the lede", I think, is some solid advice to start from that some of the 2023 Spooktober competitors would have benefitted from.