I can't believe it took 4 years to catch this, but I meant $30/1k words. Not 10k. I'm actually pretty sure I added an annotation clarifying this, but it's been since removed for whatever reason and I don't review old videos if I don't have to.
Be realistic with what time you have and skills you possess. No artist skills? Make a blind protagonist. No musical skills? Deaf protagonist. No programming skills? Use Renpy. Dumb/Lazy? Use Twine. All three and unmotivated? Write a novel. No time? Sleep an hour less and create an hour per day. Depressed? Write one word per day and just beat your record each day. The world is filled to the brim with broken promises and unfilled dreams. If you want to do it, then get it done!
The main issue is time. I'm good at art and programming, but only have so much time in a day. To spend days making quality art and then writing the story and then writing the code and assembling. It's going to take quite a bit longer to create. Which if you need a product within a reasonable time; is not ideal.
It's nice to see somebody talking about how expensive such projects can be, especially when it comes to art. As an artist, it happened to me countless times to hear potential customers bitching about prices, and thinking that's just not fair to spend more than 15$ on a character. At the beginning I was kind, explaining how time consuming drawing can be... but as time passed I started getting rude. Now I'm so sick and tired that I simply answer "if you don't like my prices, go somewhere else".
Ugh, I literally cannot STAND people like that. Like. Go into literally ANY art stream and you can see that even basic lineart can take hours of work. If it were any other job, people would be up in arms about someone not getting paid at least minimum wage but apparently artists are supposed to work for scraps??? Like???? What?????
Sadly this seems to apply to everything involving creativity. Because, you know, being creative (good at drawing, composing music, don't even get me started on photography) is a gift, a talent which in no way you need to study or practice for. I mean, it's not like you've spent YEARS practicing (and spending lots of money for your studies and materials along the way) and can still be a pain in the ass sometimes. You're just good at it, it takes no effort so do you even expect me to PAY you, you greedy asshole? ...ok, I'll stop there... sorry for the rant >w
It's disrespectful in my opinion to pay an artist less than double minimum wage on something they spent their whole lives learning, beginner artists I recommend charging $300 a day and professional $500 at the very least.
With art I get it I just find it funny how many free options there are as long as you don't monetize the game. Like I can't count how many game devs I seen use japanese hentai game 3d posers and defualt assets to make place holders for their "free" game on patreon. It works though as long as they do donations and not bill for the game you can do it that way then save up and commission art. Hell I seen some that got lucky did a an ass ton of work marketing and poking around found an artist who did art style the wanted that liked their game and got a discounted rate for a big fat plug. Like I know one that only makes like 400-600 a month they spend half that on new art every time they get new set they order them in 3s or 4s for each character they do a huge post showing it off before its even in game thanking the artist plugging their webpage doing publicity for that artist.
That is crap and you know it Derek I know artists who drawed for 2 years who can make artwork worthy of a visual novel in one afternoon. 300 bucks is crazy. He could do half a games characters basic poses and expressions in half a day. I prefer charging based on each peice as by teh day don't work any one who punches a clock for a living know there are times you may drag things out just to not clock out early, or get a little OT Paying by peice insures you don't just milk it you do quality work at the speed that is best for you. SO by the hour doesn't work I know some amateurs who take 3 hours to do what some gifted people I know same amount of time drawing can do in half an hour. Like I use to have the how to draw manga books and what not, and could do some decent stuff it took me 5 times as long as my pal who started doing it 2 years before just picked it up in 9th grade and by junior year was doing manga for himself just for fun.
For backgrounds, take a good camera and snap some photos of locations. Take it into a cheap or free photo editor and throw some filters on it and touch up a few details.
Been brainstorming a VN for a while now, but i'm broke. Gonna be forcing myself to become a jack of all trades, i guess. I downloaded ren'py and luckily it seems easy enough. I just need to improve my drawing and learn literally anything about music, slap some musical notes together, and pray.
Marcos Medina i know how u feel mate lol I’m the same.. I don’t have the money to hire... -_- but I really want to make one.. so I guess I’ll make due with most of the work.. maybe I’ll sell a thing or two to get character sprites..
Renpy is easy af just get a free online course on coding or a book and you are good to go.For me art (besides backgrounds) isn't that difficult because I've been drawing for a year now it doesnt look the most professional but its alright.The real issue is Sounds,Music and the writting.Maybe you are really creativ person and you can think of amazing stories yourself but I'm pretty sure there are only a few people who can do own sounds and music.I gave up on a VN for my first game and me and my friends settled on a 2D game for our school project.Also Voice Actors, yikes those can get expensive.
I love your video! It's sad to see so many people completely oblivious to the point of this video - it's supposed to be for everybody: a writer, an artist, just someone with a vision and then there are people 'Hurr durr, you can do X yourself'
very informative, nice video. even though, im making a point and click adventure not a VN, it was still nice and informative, especially, since it gives a general idea on the pricing, even though, they can be different but probably, not that different. and yeah, i would totally love to see an episode about team building. good job
Thank you for posting this! I’m a manga artist and author and been wanting to create my own visual novel, all I’ll be paying is editing so it should be great!.
My passion and my strong-suits lie in the writing department. the things that scare me most are the art and audio bits, especially the former. though the prices are to be expected. Honestly, as someone who is still new into game dev, I was considering either a VN or a basic RPG for my first game. frankly, I am still uncertain where to begin.
Me and my friends decided to make a visual novel, because we have all the requirements needed to make one. I'm the artist, so I can handle sprites and backgrounds. Friend 2 is extremely experienced in coding and programming, so she can handle the technical things. Friend 3 is great at writing and directing, so she'll handle the script and sound.
This was really informative (and also slightly heart attack inducing lol.) Thank you so much (Senpai) for sharing this content with other aspiring VN adventurers! :3 I look forward to seeing your other content. ^^
I think you can even cut more cost in making visual novel if you have some 3D modelling skills, you could easily create and render scenes in a 3d program like blender or Maya for example, apply the 2D shader to make it look cartoonistic, use the Vroid studio to make your characters!
This was a quite informative vid, and gives me some clue as to what I am going to have to shell out if I want to start developing VNs professionally -- I'm still very much an amateur at this. I am more of a writer than an artist, a musician or a programmer, but I do know how to write basic Ren'Py code. I'm still a bit new to the choice-based nature of a lot of VNs, though -- Choose Your Own Adventure is my basic frame of reference as far as that's concerned -- and doing routes like a lot of VNs like to do is something I've not had occasion to do yet.
I think you can make a pretty decent VN with a significantly lower budget. You can make background images out of heavily filtered pictures, default text-blocks and icons are not really detrimental to the quality of the game, and it is fairly easy to develop a VN out of all game genres with minimal programming skills, and if you're not too bad at writing and can proof-read yourself, the only thing you'd ever have to pay for would be character design and music. And that's assuming you can't draw nor make your own music, and that you don't have any friends that could work with you. If you take a look at some of the most iconic visual novels out there, you can clearly find some that didn't cost nearly as much as your lower estimation.
Just as a nice little note in the comment section. You can get away with making a visual novel and it looking somewhat nice for the low price of zero dollars if you're ok with some small and big cuts. Audio: 📌Audacity(editing) 📌A free sfx maker on itch(SFX) 📌Mixing and mashing sfx around(Music) Images: 📌Use Blender to make a 3D scene then use blender's camera to take render an image of the area you want and then save it to your pc. You now have a background image. 📌Mannequin(Character/Sprite Creation)(Can be found on itch for free or steam for $15) 📌Visual Effects(Gimp) 📌GUI/UI(Inkscape) Engine: 📌Ren'Py Story: Write it yourself Grammerly I belive(Spelling and word checking)
Extremely interesting! I like to take the time to learn about something new every week, and this most certainly fulfilled that requirement. I'll definitely check out some of your other videos. c:
Wow. Big differences with the cost of visual novels. From what I read the average cost of a VN made in Japan is about 500.000 yen and Supipara cost over 100 million yen ( over 1 million USD !)
There is a higher demand for visual novels in Japan, so they can invest more into their product and charge more for it when it launches. EVNs don't have that luxury.
I've been working on some indie game projects for the last couple months. And as a college student I need money, so I thought a good visual novel would be relatively cheap to make over other games. After watching this, I'm really doubting it'll be as cheap as I hoped. I was expecting a $400 max on art (My game relatively has little amount of art. Most of the story happens within a few areas and has few characters) I may have to acquire the art over time. It's costing a lot less to pay for my other two projects, visual novels cost a lot to make it seems.
I'm sorta in a unique situation where I know how to write, draw and compose music, but I'm probably strongest in drawing. Regardless, I'll try making a short vn to see if I can really do this.
Gosh, this video really help me understand how much money I'll be spending. It is sad to see that there is a lot of people in this comment section that didn't understand the meaning of it and started talking bs. But I thank you for taking some of your time making this video!
@@iankinnell5643 i use renpy but i have recently started using Visionaire studio its for adventure games it also does not require coding but you can as well i turned daz assets into 2d sprites
Wot, i can't believe it's so frkn expensive...I remember back then when i was just want to try make a VN by myself....And...It's frkn exhausted (even tho it's only 5Minutes to 30 Minutes(?) with different scenes. I mean by that, its have lot of different scene, cuz the story requires lot of place....)....So i think...Maybe....It's worth for the priceee ???
1996AprilTheCat hey. I'm half a burger, music. Plus, I need publicity rn, so I do it for free or I don't do it at all! I would do coding too, but I'm not confident yet. If you're really desperate, I'll try not to let you down
$40,000 seems pretty reasonable for a visual novel. considering the potential profits it could make. Since we are at a global market now you would only need to sell 10,000 copies at $5 to make a profit. visual novels tend to sell on average 50,000 copies so you're likely to make 5x your initial investment if it is successful.
Also remember that you could always commission artists from Malaysia which will dramatically reduce the development costs. Many big studios do this. There is one particular studio called "Lemon Sky Studios" that has created artwork for many huge games such as "Mortal Kombat 11", "Uncharted" and "Starcraft"
I’m pretty sure cloud novel can solve most of these problems tho it is glitchy because it run by only one person it easy and has all the stuff you need made by people for free in a public domain their are also game jams where you can chose to work with others there are also tutorials on how to use the website but of course if people want something of higher quality there are going to have to what the video tells you
Thank you so much for all of your helpful videos. Do you know where I would be able to find a programmer to create a simple match 3 minigame for use in a VN? I have no clue where to even begin to look lol
Well i thinked about creating my own visual novel because i now a bit of programming, drawing and my family knows how to play the piano. The problem is that i dunno where to start xD so ill go and watch some tutorials...
If you know how to art and make music and buy visual novel maker on sale you can make one with just 20 bucks. However it takes a lot of hard work and time
Sixpounder The RenPy Lemmasoft forums. It's such a common rate that I'm really surprised that people are so hung up on that number. A composer I am currently working with is charging $75 for 2:30-3 minute songs.
Yeah music varries on quality I seen guides on how to make your own midi music and what not on RPG maker guides, its a pain but some do take advantage of it. Its like a licensed blue collar job takes practice and some are naturals, but most won't do it so you get away with charging more. Like I got bunch of assets for RPG maker for good price way less the 75 bucks for 2:30 seconds but I am licensed to use said music for RPG maker. Like I got a couple 20 bucks for some great cinmatic music must be like 30 minutes or more of music for I think was 25, but I got it on sale for 20. But you got read that fine print I can't use it for anything but RPG maker and I am looking at other engines now such as visual novels and saddly voids my license for the music assets I got.
thanks a lot for this video, advice and precises ideas about budget and cost. As i 'm trying to make a visual novel (and otherwise work as a freelance artist and game developper) i'm doing kind of a "sociological study", meaning i'm reading and asking anything to get a clearer view, knowledges about this situation on various topics (programming, drawing techniques, budget, marketing, how the other freelance succeeded and how many time did this take, by which means and works... Briefly, this kind of video helps a lot
I could answer that b4 even watching the video with a simple answer of nothing, the amount of money it costs depends on how much u want to spend on it as in hiring people to do things u cannot or buying assets, but if u are proficient enough in everything needed ie art, programing, music and storytelling then u can do it all yourself for free with one of the many free visual novel programs out there
3 year experience I'm realism art, am associate degree on the basics of python, and experience with simple animations as well as 8-bit music. Not much, but enough
I know this may sound dumb but I have a doubt....about those hentai visual novel games you can find in f95 they keep using similar art and even the character looks same.....and even the songs I dont think are open source. I am interested in making one but dont know what are the most important things to keep in mind so that I dont get into trouble.
Hey, I'm using game maker studio 2 to make a visual novel. I'd use renpy but i need walk around mechanics and inventory and more control over environmental sprite placement. I need to know how to go about scripting a 'engine' in gml similar to ren'py. Any advice or tutorials? I haven't found much help on designing your own visual novel 'engine'
I would love to make a visual novel or something close to it, the only issue is that I don't have an anime artsyle and it would be set in England not Japan so no one would want to play it lmao
Honestly, art was the biggest hurdle for me when it came to making a game. Now that I've learned how to make my own art via Daz Studio, the only thing that's holding me back is how fast I can type on a keyboard. ^w^
There is a writer I know who I think could make an awesome visual novel. I'm not a creative, but I think it would be fun to fund a project, which I'd have to save money for. 200k words is about 400 single spaced pages, which is a lot. I was hoping for a shorter story of ~6-7 hours, would that impact the price of the game?
........ and ALL this fails if you don't have a good, well-structured story to back everything up with. It sounds obvious but I bet a lot of people making VNs think that beautiful glossy art and a catchy soundtrack will make up for everything else. Nope. Hell, even a lot of Japanese developers rely on good art, but there's not actually a lot of substance in their VNs.
Hi nice video, is there a software like comipo where you can create Jap characters and use them anywhere you like? Say I want to make a visual novel, I need characters & sprites, as i can't draw or hire someone to draw what software would you recommend if you know any? thanks.
Drawing: check Writing: check Music: Need to learn or I'm screwed. then again I could hire someone some are affordable for simple soundtracks. Well looks like I'm going to be saving a lot of money.
Tbh, I have lots of art, I make UI for fun, and lil sprites and everything. I am an artist. My programming skills are poor but my best friends are programmers. My other best friend is a writer and I am studying English so I have ideas for the story. That leaves the music. My ex girlfriend makes music and I did study music in secondary school. I am still not very confident about making a visual novel :( If not monetary cost, then a timely one.
It definitely takes a lot of time. We've been working on The Secrets We Keep for so long that it's since killed my passion for the game itself and I just want the project to be finished.
Hey nice explanation. Thanks for it. I'm currently planning to create a visual novel myself and I was wondering if I could use songs like "La vie en rose" by Edit Piaf, or "Fly me to the moon" by Claire Littley. I really want to use them and several others. Can I do that?
Danm that's so cheap for artists If they spend 10 hours on a pic that's like less than min wage on something they spent their whole loves learning ;__; Thanks for the heads up tho I've had a lot requests from indies for BG art and they seem shocked when I charge $50 an hour when that is considered low for even an illustrator in the 1950s. Rent in my city is around 2 grand it would be impossible to survive on $200 illustrations especially with breaks between projects. With that low of money I'd rather work on my own projects, suppose it's good for new young artists that are still at home tho.
Disthron Honestly I don't think it stands for anything. We had a discussion in the RenPy Discord a while back where we tried figuring out what it meant and I think it boiled down to a file type back in the early VN days.
Very informative video! Maybe little out of context question but- as an artist/animator who would be interested working on vn projects- where should I begin? Could you please point out some for exp. some websites, forums? Where I should try?
Hey Friendly Senpai! My sister and I plan to make a visual novel during our uni sem break. We're more or less covered for art assets, coding and script writing (I'm a multimedia student and she's an English major student) but we need assistance for producing a suitable soundtrack. Are there any trusted websites you can recommend in which we can find/hire a decent sound artist for a reasonable price?
There is tons of way to make your own free sounds and music. Art there is some stuff you can use for char posing that is free if you do patron and never make people to pay for the game. Its pretty basic way to do it. Like there is a million out there that just use free 3d rendering software with generic models and some even use Japanese hentai game char poses and just make only safe for work chars, or make NSFW images if they are making an adult game. Its the most basic way to get started for free assets. You can also search for royalty free music and background art, and sounds. You can find tons of these all over the net. And thanks to the miracle of Patron a big loop hole your not selling the game you are taking "donations" for your work so you can use assets licensed for free use. And then after you make money from patron you can easily afford to replace the assets as you go. I seen some use nothing but free assets make 2k a month in donations and slowly replace the art over time to help milk it. Like I follow a couple that every like 3 months it updates mostly its just image replacements including animations, and like an hour of new game content. They also do "contests" for writing seen plenty do that for number of different games if you get some followers you can do a "contest" to have people submit characters, and event chains for them to you. With the reward being you thank them in the credits and put a little fine print "Event content for this char was made by so&so12" Some of them with more assets increase submission count by offering cash rewards for contest winners or people selected plus the standard your name and full credits for that content. I mean there is a lot of ways to cheese if you can get enough backers and popularity eventually even getting people volunteering to work with you at a discounted rate. I seen a few do patron route and a talk around deviant art and what not and find some one who likes their work, and get a discount over their standard commission to get their name slapped on it. But in the end many think you can just show up to patron and make it big and pay others to do it all for you, you got work crazy hard for marketing to get the fan base to get these discounts or free work done for you, and have acceptably place holder content using available free use things like illusions char poser studio or other games poser studio features. So early on it is still a crazy huge amount of free work on your end, but if you suceed the pay out is months latter you are making a profit off donations and can start upping the quality of you game peice by peice and then more marketing it for your target audiance, and you get more backers. I seen a couple go from 83 bucks on month one to 3k a month in backers on patron, but I seen others go from 400 first month to 20 month 3 because they did a great presnetation then went to deep into the free content tricks. Like posts for suggestions of what to do next a pole is one thing but when you asking over and over again for what they want you to do, it becomes clear you kind of run out of ideas, and if no one coughs any up for you that are worth taking well every one flees and talks shit about your patron page on every spot you advertised about how you had no idea what you were doing and you expected the fans to write it for you. I saw one do that month two started writing contenst for more content plus started making more and more posts asking for suggestions. It had a decent amount of money but not many fans, just a few genours ones who got pissed real fast when they sorted out the dev was a one trick pony, and while that trick was nice it wasn't enough to complete a game at all.
Big issue also with free route is time you go into to get around making you own music when a amateur takes more tiem then some one commission same with those hgame char posers its an art to so if you suck at it could take you hours for each render to look right for your story, so in the end you could very easily spend 3 to 5 times the effort making these place holders for free mind you then a commission art is would. But some of us sadly are part timers I would love to pay 600 bucks for artwork, but that would cut into my rent and bill money or take me a few months of saving up for... I always enjoyed storry telling and always end up with dead end jobs so to me I got 5 times as hard to try my hand at this. And I am not doing patreon route way to easy to fail. I want to so bad but instead I am doing RPG maker, but I am dinking around with others like Renpy I love idea of VN but first I got get assets together to get art or get place holder art... And I got tons of assets I got forever ago when I had more hours and cash for RPG maker I never used, that saddly all licensed only for RPG maker use.
I mean if anything once I get a real thing out I may try patreon seen one guy do that did a meh, game then started a patron as it didn't sell as well as he liked did a game using all free public use stuff used the donations to finish a 2.0 revamp of his first game. It worked but in the end people loved his free game more, so he makes more off updating that now then does off his other games he has on the market. Like right now he is still using char poser packs and generic free use background images for his free game, and makes 2k a month income off it.
Most artists expect adequate compensation for the time and energy put into their art, especially high-quality art that requires more attention to detail. Whether or not this applies to you, specifically, is irrelevant.
@@thefriendlysenpai in the middle of forming a detailed paragraph i realized i wasnt aware how long it takes to draw something just because how fast time flows by, ow
$5 - $10 per 1K words sounds like abuse for writers. Honestly, I encourage writers to charge more for story-driven texts. $15 - $20 or even $30 per 1K words sounds reasonable given there is a lot of work behind the scenes than just writing. There is a lot of pre-editing before sending it to revision, research, drafts, etc. And 1K words by themselves are a huge amount. Especially in a visual novel in which dialogue requires a lot of important words per speech for the player to be able to connect with the characters. Each character has their own "voice" or speech patterns, personality, there is just so much work that gets overlooked. $5 to $10 is not nearly enough for the work done.
I frequently do editing and writing work for VNs, and I don't disagree with your points. There is a lot more work involved in editing than a lot of people think. However, the numbers provided were just averages found from the more commonly used forums where people set their own prices.
![[Visual Novel] Character Drawing Process & Tips](/img/1.gif)
I can't believe it took 4 years to catch this, but I meant $30/1k words. Not 10k.
I'm actually pretty sure I added an annotation clarifying this, but it's been since removed for whatever reason and I don't review old videos if I don't have to.
"art will be the most expensive part"
me, an artist: hehehe,,,,yes,,,for the price of.... f r e e
LUL
I have spent an awful lot of time and money learning to draw the art for my VN and all my CGs still look like retarded frogs
Be realistic with what time you have and skills you possess.
No artist skills? Make a blind protagonist.
No musical skills? Deaf protagonist.
No programming skills? Use Renpy.
Dumb/Lazy? Use Twine.
All three and unmotivated? Write a novel.
No time? Sleep an hour less and create an hour per day.
Depressed? Write one word per day and just beat your record each day.
The world is filled to the brim with broken promises and unfilled dreams. If you want to do it, then get it done!
I'm ignoring the last part but I like this strategy.
i feel hurt by the renpy statement
@@B_Site same lmaoo
Thank-you!
=_= what's wrong with Twine?
Good thing I'm a music and art student with a background in computing
Bad this is you dont have time....
The main issue is time. I'm good at art and programming, but only have so much time in a day. To spend days making quality art and then writing the story and then writing the code and assembling. It's going to take quite a bit longer to create. Which if you need a product within a reasonable time; is not ideal.
Weird flex but ok...
Ι'm the opposite , xD. A Computer Science student that also dabbles in music on the side
So did you make game or gave up?
It's nice to see somebody talking about how expensive such projects can be, especially when it comes to art. As an artist, it happened to me countless times to hear potential customers bitching about prices, and thinking that's just not fair to spend more than 15$ on a character. At the beginning I was kind, explaining how time consuming drawing can be... but as time passed I started getting rude. Now I'm so sick and tired that I simply answer "if you don't like my prices, go somewhere else".
Ugh, I literally cannot STAND people like that. Like. Go into literally ANY art stream and you can see that even basic lineart can take hours of work. If it were any other job, people would be up in arms about someone not getting paid at least minimum wage but apparently artists are supposed to work for scraps??? Like???? What?????
Sadly this seems to apply to everything involving creativity. Because, you know, being creative (good at drawing, composing music, don't even get me started on photography) is a gift, a talent which in no way you need to study or practice for. I mean, it's not like you've spent YEARS practicing (and spending lots of money for your studies and materials along the way) and can still be a pain in the ass sometimes. You're just good at it, it takes no effort so do you even expect me to PAY you, you greedy asshole?
...ok, I'll stop there... sorry for the rant >w
It's disrespectful in my opinion to pay an artist less than double minimum wage on something they spent their whole lives learning, beginner artists I recommend charging $300 a day and professional $500 at the very least.
With art I get it I just find it funny how many free options there are as long as you don't monetize the game. Like I can't count how many game devs I seen use japanese hentai game 3d posers and defualt assets to make place holders for their "free" game on patreon. It works though as long as they do donations and not bill for the game you can do it that way then save up and commission art. Hell I seen some that got lucky did a an ass ton of work marketing and poking around found an artist who did art style the wanted that liked their game and got a discounted rate for a big fat plug. Like I know one that only makes like 400-600 a month they spend half that on new art every time they get new set they order them in 3s or 4s for each character they do a huge post showing it off before its even in game thanking the artist plugging their webpage doing publicity for that artist.
That is crap and you know it Derek I know artists who drawed for 2 years who can make artwork worthy of a visual novel in one afternoon. 300 bucks is crazy. He could do half a games characters basic poses and expressions in half a day. I prefer charging based on each peice as by teh day don't work any one who punches a clock for a living know there are times you may drag things out just to not clock out early, or get a little OT Paying by peice insures you don't just milk it you do quality work at the speed that is best for you. SO by the hour doesn't work I know some amateurs who take 3 hours to do what some gifted people I know same amount of time drawing can do in half an hour. Like I use to have the how to draw manga books and what not, and could do some decent stuff it took me 5 times as long as my pal who started doing it 2 years before just picked it up in 9th grade and by junior year was doing manga for himself just for fun.
Good thing I can draw
LOL Ann Nifödova rooooood
Ann Nifödova and why exactly are you this salty? Did they do anything to you or did you just have a bad day?
Nice art is fun and amazing
For backgrounds, take a good camera and snap some photos of locations. Take it into a cheap or free photo editor and throw some filters on it and touch up a few details.
i was thinking of using roblox-
or just get free stock images and just edit it.
@@rapha2028 I use GMod.
Been brainstorming a VN for a while now, but i'm broke. Gonna be forcing myself to become a jack of all trades, i guess.
I downloaded ren'py and luckily it seems easy enough. I just need to improve my drawing and learn literally anything about music, slap some musical notes together, and pray.
Marcos Medina i know how u feel mate lol I’m the same.. I don’t have the money to hire... -_- but I really want to make one.. so I guess I’ll make due with most of the work.. maybe I’ll sell a thing or two to get character sprites..
Renpy is easy af just get a free online course on coding or a book and you are good to go.For me art (besides backgrounds) isn't that difficult because I've been drawing for a year now it doesnt look the most professional but its alright.The real issue is Sounds,Music and the writting.Maybe you are really creativ person and you can think of amazing stories yourself but I'm pretty sure there are only a few people who can do own sounds and music.I gave up on a VN for my first game and me and my friends settled on a 2D game for our school project.Also Voice Actors, yikes those can get expensive.
@@DhoaCS Wow! You've been drawing for a whole year?!? Da Vinci, move over! ;)
as an artist i can say your prices calculation are very fair!
Oh, good!
Me: *wants to make a visual novel*
*sees this video*
Wow I’m glad I’m an artist and a musician cause dam that’s a crap ton of money.
I'm just a programmer :(
It's amusing the amount of people that just missed the point of the video
It's honestly half the reason I never continued with this series >>
Understandable, but a pity for those who would have gladly watched it. Even so, thanks for the informations provided still :)
Why does everyone in the comments tell us “aH i cAn Do iT mYseLF thEn”
Because they've grossly underestimated how much time it would take them to make a quality VN on their own lol
The Friendly Senpai
Definitely. Iv’e been working on one for 3 months now and iv’e started the profogue this week
I love your video! It's sad to see so many people completely oblivious to the point of this video - it's supposed to be for everybody: a writer, an artist, just someone with a vision and then there are people 'Hurr durr, you can do X yourself'
very informative, nice video.
even though, im making a point and click adventure not a VN, it was still nice and informative, especially, since it gives a general idea on the pricing, even though, they can be different but probably, not that different.
and yeah, i would totally love to see an episode about team building.
good job
Thank you for posting this! I’m a manga artist and author and been wanting to create my own visual novel, all I’ll be paying is editing so it should be great!.
You have some...unique... comments in here
Thanks for the breakdown, it kinda makes things clearer for me. Have a great day m8!
I'm gonna be honest, I don't even read comments half the time. Some people are fucking weird.
@@thefriendlysenpai mood
oh my god...... 32k, my dream visual novel can never be realized..........
My passion and my strong-suits lie in the writing department. the things that scare me most are the art and audio bits, especially the former. though the prices are to be expected.
Honestly, as someone who is still new into game dev, I was considering either a VN or a basic RPG for my first game. frankly, I am still uncertain where to begin.
Me and my friends decided to make a visual novel, because we have all the requirements needed to make one.
I'm the artist, so I can handle sprites and backgrounds. Friend 2 is extremely experienced in coding and programming, so she can handle the technical things. Friend 3 is great at writing and directing, so she'll handle the script and sound.
UsoppFanGirl How is the project going?Just curious
Any updates?
Updates my dude. Whether its did not go well or well. Tell us
Omg this helped me so much, i always looked for this information, thank you so much for this!
♥♥♥
Fascinating overview! As a comics/storyboard artist, writer/editor and journeyman Flash animator, it certainly piques my interest.
I just found your channel. So happy, a place to learn how to start \o/
This was really informative (and also slightly heart attack inducing lol.) Thank you so much (Senpai) for sharing this content with other aspiring VN adventurers! :3 I look forward to seeing your other content. ^^
I think you can even cut more cost in making visual novel if you have some 3D modelling skills, you could easily create and render scenes in a 3d program like blender or Maya for example, apply the 2D shader to make it look cartoonistic, use the Vroid studio to make your characters!
This was a quite informative vid, and gives me some clue as to what I am going to have to shell out if I want to start developing VNs professionally -- I'm still very much an amateur at this. I am more of a writer than an artist, a musician or a programmer, but I do know how to write basic Ren'Py code. I'm still a bit new to the choice-based nature of a lot of VNs, though -- Choose Your Own Adventure is my basic frame of reference as far as that's concerned -- and doing routes like a lot of VNs like to do is something I've not had occasion to do yet.
Vey nice and informative video. Thank You! :)
I think you can make a pretty decent VN with a significantly lower budget. You can make background images out of heavily filtered pictures, default text-blocks and icons are not really detrimental to the quality of the game, and it is fairly easy to develop a VN out of all game genres with minimal programming skills, and if you're not too bad at writing and can proof-read yourself, the only thing you'd ever have to pay for would be character design and music. And that's assuming you can't draw nor make your own music, and that you don't have any friends that could work with you.
If you take a look at some of the most iconic visual novels out there, you can clearly find some that didn't cost nearly as much as your lower estimation.
Sure, if u want to make an ugly low quality visual novel
fr though, thank you for this! this was super helpful
Lemme find out that Justin Bieber has a twin.
Jesus Christ I mean. You're not wrong.
If you were the Biebz I'd be a belieber though :P
🤣🤣🤣
Just as a nice little note in the comment section. You can get away with making a visual novel and it looking somewhat nice for the low price of zero dollars if you're ok with some small and big cuts.
Audio:
📌Audacity(editing)
📌A free sfx maker on itch(SFX)
📌Mixing and mashing sfx around(Music)
Images:
📌Use Blender to make a 3D scene then use blender's camera to take render an image of the area you want and then save it to your pc. You now have a background image.
📌Mannequin(Character/Sprite Creation)(Can be found on itch for free or steam for $15)
📌Visual Effects(Gimp)
📌GUI/UI(Inkscape)
Engine:
📌Ren'Py
Story:
Write it yourself
Grammerly I belive(Spelling and word checking)
Thanks for sharing this information! Very concise and helpful!
Right now how should i become an artist to 25 year old......
Extremely interesting! I like to take the time to learn about something new every week, and this most certainly fulfilled that requirement. I'll definitely check out some of your other videos. c:
Wow. Big differences with the cost of visual novels. From what I read the average cost of a VN made in Japan is about 500.000 yen and Supipara cost over 100 million yen ( over 1 million USD !)
VNs also typically sell for significantly more in Japan, in the same ballpark as AAA games in the west :)
True. But do they charge 80 bucks because the market is small or is the market small because they charge 80 bucks ? :thinking:
There is a higher demand for visual novels in Japan, so they can invest more into their product and charge more for it when it launches.
EVNs don't have that luxury.
More like $880,000 in USD, but yeah pretty close to 1 mil
I've been working on some indie game projects for the last couple months. And as a college student I need money, so I thought a good visual novel would be relatively cheap to make over other games.
After watching this, I'm really doubting it'll be as cheap as I hoped. I was expecting a $400 max on art (My game relatively has little amount of art. Most of the story happens within a few areas and has few characters)
I may have to acquire the art over time. It's costing a lot less to pay for my other two projects, visual novels cost a lot to make it seems.
Great Video! Now i only need to learn to Code and I'll be good to go!
I'm sorta in a unique situation where I know how to write, draw and compose music, but I'm probably strongest in drawing. Regardless, I'll try making a short vn to see if I can really do this.
Gosh, this video really help me understand how much money I'll be spending. It is sad to see that there is a lot of people in this comment section that didn't understand the meaning of it and started talking bs. But I thank you for taking some of your time making this video!
this is why i use 3D over 2D i personally use Daz3d it is pretty expensive but i can create my own poses and can reuse assets in other works
Exactly I'm a terrible artist so Daz3d is awesome plus the script can be done on renpy
@@iankinnell5643 i use renpy but i have recently started using Visionaire studio its for adventure games it also does not require coding but you can as well i turned daz assets into 2d sprites
Wot, i can't believe it's so frkn expensive...I remember back then when i was just want to try make a VN by myself....And...It's frkn exhausted (even tho it's only 5Minutes to 30 Minutes(?) with different scenes. I mean by that, its have lot of different scene, cuz the story requires lot of place....)....So i think...Maybe....It's worth for the priceee ???
background art work takes time unless you want a load of detail i used to do the background art work for a well known gaming company
since this video is quite old, how did your journey go? are the two novels you mentioned out and did they make back the development costs?
So glad I’m an artist. Out of this list the two things I would really need to hire someone for is music and coding
1996AprilTheCat
hey. I'm half a burger, music. Plus, I need publicity rn, so I do it for free or I don't do it at all!
I would do coding too, but I'm not confident yet. If you're really desperate, I'll try not to let you down
Here's a link to my discord if you're interested
discord.gg/ChCSGu6
$40,000 seems pretty reasonable for a visual novel. considering the potential profits it could make. Since we are at a global market now you would only need to sell 10,000 copies at $5 to make a profit. visual novels tend to sell on average 50,000 copies so you're likely to make 5x your initial investment if it is successful.
Also remember that you could always commission artists from Malaysia which will dramatically reduce the development costs. Many big studios do this. There is one particular studio called "Lemon Sky Studios" that has created artwork for many huge games such as "Mortal Kombat 11", "Uncharted" and "Starcraft"
As someone from Malaysia I never knew this studio exist 🗿. Thanks for exposure, appreciate it.
Thanks a lot for the video, I'm in the process of making a VN and found this info really helpful (Y).. I'll check your channel later, keep it up!
If I wasn't only outsourcing music, I think I would be crying after this video ^^"
I’m pretty sure cloud novel can solve most of these problems tho it is glitchy because it run by only one person it easy and has all the stuff you need made by people for free in a public domain their are also game jams where you can chose to work with others there are also tutorials on how to use the website but of course if people want something of higher quality there are going to have to what the video tells you
Thank you so much for all of your helpful videos. Do you know where I would be able to find a programmer to create a simple match 3 minigame for use in a VN? I have no clue where to even begin to look lol
I would suggest looking at the programmers on the RenPy LSF :) There are lots of very talented people there.
Well i thinked about creating my own visual novel because i now a bit of programming, drawing and my family knows how to play the piano. The problem is that i dunno where to start xD so ill go and watch some tutorials...
If you know how to art and make music and buy visual novel maker on sale you can make one with just 20 bucks. However it takes a lot of hard work and time
Thanks for the answers so far; where do you usually find music composers for 100$/minute ?
Sixpounder The RenPy Lemmasoft forums. It's such a common rate that I'm really surprised that people are so hung up on that number. A composer I am currently working with is charging $75 for 2:30-3 minute songs.
Cool. Also, 500k words for Novus Inceptum; that is BIG. Would that be the biggest western visual novel?
Sixpounder I believe so. I have about 300k written so far.
Yeah music varries on quality I seen guides on how to make your own midi music and what not on RPG maker guides, its a pain but some do take advantage of it. Its like a licensed blue collar job takes practice and some are naturals, but most won't do it so you get away with charging more. Like I got bunch of assets for RPG maker for good price way less the 75 bucks for 2:30 seconds but I am licensed to use said music for RPG maker. Like I got a couple 20 bucks for some great cinmatic music must be like 30 minutes or more of music for I think was 25, but I got it on sale for 20. But you got read that fine print I can't use it for anything but RPG maker and I am looking at other engines now such as visual novels and saddly voids my license for the music assets I got.
If Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber had a baby...
If I had a dime.
thanks a lot for this video, advice and precises ideas about budget and cost.
As i 'm trying to make a visual novel (and otherwise work as a freelance artist and game developper) i'm doing kind of a "sociological study", meaning i'm reading and asking anything to get a clearer view, knowledges about this situation on various topics (programming, drawing techniques, budget, marketing, how the other freelance succeeded and how many time did this take, by which means and works...
Briefly, this kind of video helps a lot
I could answer that b4 even watching the video with a simple answer of nothing, the amount of money it costs depends on how much u want to spend on it as in hiring people to do things u cannot or buying assets, but if u are proficient enough in everything needed ie art, programing, music and storytelling then u can do it all yourself for free with one of the many free visual novel programs out there
3 year experience I'm realism art, am associate degree on the basics of python, and experience with simple animations as well as 8-bit music. Not much, but enough
I know this may sound dumb but I have a doubt....about those hentai visual novel games you can find in f95 they keep using similar art and even the character looks same.....and even the songs I dont think are open source. I am interested in making one but dont know what are the most important things to keep in mind so that I dont get into trouble.
If your visual novel is free then you might get away with using copyrighted stuff. But not if you want to sell your visual novel
This video is gold! Now I have to join a couple of VN Discord servers. Sempai clearly went to rock'n'roll high school 🤘
Cries I just hope I’ll be able to draw good enough to make a dating sim 😂
Hey, I'm using game maker studio 2 to make a visual novel. I'd use renpy but i need walk around mechanics and inventory and more control over environmental sprite placement. I need to know how to go about scripting a 'engine' in gml similar to ren'py. Any advice or tutorials? I haven't found much help on designing your own visual novel 'engine'
Yey I can make one myself
The music will suck tho
;-;
A lot of the CC music you can find on the LSF boards is actually pretty good! You should totally check them out :D
same lol
Two words: Kevin MacLeod
I would love to make a visual novel or something close to it, the only issue is that I don't have an anime artsyle and it would be set in England not Japan so no one would want to play it lmao
Honestly, art was the biggest hurdle for me when it came to making a game. Now that I've learned how to make my own art via Daz Studio, the only thing that's holding me back is how fast I can type on a keyboard. ^w^
There is a writer I know who I think could make an awesome visual novel. I'm not a creative, but I think it would be fun to fund a project, which I'd have to save money for. 200k words is about 400 single spaced pages, which is a lot. I was hoping for a shorter story of ~6-7 hours, would that impact the price of the game?
there is free to use musics and chracters, it wont be professional enough but it stilll be your game
I created an hour long of a VN, how much do you think I should priced it?
I can't really say without looking at it. If it's an hour worth of gameplay in total, I can't say it'd be easy to price it past $5USD.
@@thefriendlysenpai Would you mind to take a look? I will send google drive link to you.
........ and ALL this fails if you don't have a good, well-structured story to back everything up with. It sounds obvious but I bet a lot of people making VNs think that beautiful glossy art and a catchy soundtrack will make up for everything else. Nope. Hell, even a lot of Japanese developers rely on good art, but there's not actually a lot of substance in their VNs.
Hi nice video, is there a software like comipo where you can create Jap characters and use them anywhere you like? Say I want to make a visual novel, I need characters & sprites, as i can't draw or hire someone to draw what software would you recommend if you know any? thanks.
Drawing: check
Writing: check
Music: Need to learn or I'm screwed. then again I could hire someone some are affordable for simple soundtracks.
Well looks like I'm going to be saving a lot of money.
same here
Tbh, I have lots of art, I make UI for fun, and lil sprites and everything. I am an artist.
My programming skills are poor but my best friends are programmers. My other best friend is a writer and I am studying English so I have ideas for the story.
That leaves the music. My ex girlfriend makes music and I did study music in secondary school.
I am still not very confident about making a visual novel :( If not monetary cost, then a timely one.
It definitely takes a lot of time. We've been working on The Secrets We Keep for so long that it's since killed my passion for the game itself and I just want the project to be finished.
Where are you finding your writers and other creatives? Is it through some sort of community or forum?
Hey nice explanation. Thanks for it. I'm currently planning to create a visual novel myself and I was wondering if I could use songs like "La vie en rose" by Edit Piaf, or "Fly me to the moon" by Claire Littley. I really want to use them and several others. Can I do that?
You would be better off asking for an expert's advice than a random RUclipsr.
well. I can do music maybe. I'm not sure if my syle could be what you're looking for though
Danm that's so cheap for artists If they spend 10 hours on a pic that's like less than min wage on something they spent their whole loves learning ;__;
Thanks for the heads up tho I've had a lot requests from indies for BG art and they seem shocked when I charge $50 an hour when that is considered low for even an illustrator in the 1950s. Rent in my city is around 2 grand it would be impossible to survive on $200 illustrations especially with breaks between projects. With that low of money I'd rather work on my own projects, suppose it's good for new young artists that are still at home tho.
Sorry but What dose CG stand for in this context?
Disthron Honestly I don't think it stands for anything. We had a discussion in the RenPy Discord a while back where we tried figuring out what it meant and I think it boiled down to a file type back in the early VN days.
The Friendly Senpai that's strange. Watching again, my guess would be Character Graphics.
Very informative video! Maybe little out of context question but- as an artist/animator who would be interested working on vn projects- where should I begin? Could you please point out some for exp. some websites, forums? Where I should try?
LemmaSoft
Hey Friendly Senpai! My sister and I plan to make a visual novel during our uni sem break. We're more or less covered for art assets, coding and script writing (I'm a multimedia student and she's an English major student) but we need assistance for producing a suitable soundtrack. Are there any trusted websites you can recommend in which we can find/hire a decent sound artist for a reasonable price?
Good video.
baby, baby, baby oh
BABY, BABY, BABY, OHHHH
That moment when you can music but you can't art.
You can m u s i c
🌟very good and informative video!!
Thank you!
Are you using a Nikon DSLR to film this video?
Canon G7x :)
you look like you have fangs but somehow it's a good look
also this is a helpful and informative video
Yeah I've got weirdly sharp canines lol. I had a few friends in high school that called me vampy
There is tons of way to make your own free sounds and music. Art there is some stuff you can use for char posing that is free if you do patron and never make people to pay for the game. Its pretty basic way to do it. Like there is a million out there that just use free 3d rendering software with generic models and some even use Japanese hentai game char poses and just make only safe for work chars, or make NSFW images if they are making an adult game. Its the most basic way to get started for free assets. You can also search for royalty free music and background art, and sounds. You can find tons of these all over the net.
And thanks to the miracle of Patron a big loop hole your not selling the game you are taking "donations" for your work so you can use assets licensed for free use. And then after you make money from patron you can easily afford to replace the assets as you go. I seen some use nothing but free assets make 2k a month in donations and slowly replace the art over time to help milk it. Like I follow a couple that every like 3 months it updates mostly its just image replacements including animations, and like an hour of new game content.
They also do "contests" for writing seen plenty do that for number of different games if you get some followers you can do a "contest" to have people submit characters, and event chains for them to you. With the reward being you thank them in the credits and put a little fine print "Event content for this char was made by so&so12" Some of them with more assets increase submission count by offering cash rewards for contest winners or people selected plus the standard your name and full credits for that content. I mean there is a lot of ways to cheese if you can get enough backers and popularity eventually even getting people volunteering to work with you at a discounted rate. I seen a few do patron route and a talk around deviant art and what not and find some one who likes their work, and get a discount over their standard commission to get their name slapped on it.
But in the end many think you can just show up to patron and make it big and pay others to do it all for you, you got work crazy hard for marketing to get the fan base to get these discounts or free work done for you, and have acceptably place holder content using available free use things like illusions char poser studio or other games poser studio features. So early on it is still a crazy huge amount of free work on your end, but if you suceed the pay out is months latter you are making a profit off donations and can start upping the quality of you game peice by peice and then more marketing it for your target audiance, and you get more backers. I seen a couple go from 83 bucks on month one to 3k a month in backers on patron, but I seen others go from 400 first month to 20 month 3 because they did a great presnetation then went to deep into the free content tricks. Like posts for suggestions of what to do next a pole is one thing but when you asking over and over again for what they want you to do, it becomes clear you kind of run out of ideas, and if no one coughs any up for you that are worth taking well every one flees and talks shit about your patron page on every spot you advertised about how you had no idea what you were doing and you expected the fans to write it for you.
I saw one do that month two started writing contenst for more content plus started making more and more posts asking for suggestions. It had a decent amount of money but not many fans, just a few genours ones who got pissed real fast when they sorted out the dev was a one trick pony, and while that trick was nice it wasn't enough to complete a game at all.
Big issue also with free route is time you go into to get around making you own music when a amateur takes more tiem then some one commission same with those hgame char posers its an art to so if you suck at it could take you hours for each render to look right for your story, so in the end you could very easily spend 3 to 5 times the effort making these place holders for free mind you then a commission art is would. But some of us sadly are part timers I would love to pay 600 bucks for artwork, but that would cut into my rent and bill money or take me a few months of saving up for... I always enjoyed storry telling and always end up with dead end jobs so to me I got 5 times as hard to try my hand at this. And I am not doing patreon route way to easy to fail. I want to so bad but instead I am doing RPG maker, but I am dinking around with others like Renpy I love idea of VN but first I got get assets together to get art or get place holder art... And I got tons of assets I got forever ago when I had more hours and cash for RPG maker I never used, that saddly all licensed only for RPG maker use.
I mean if anything once I get a real thing out I may try patreon seen one guy do that did a meh, game then started a patron as it didn't sell as well as he liked did a game using all free public use stuff used the donations to finish a 2.0 revamp of his first game. It worked but in the end people loved his free game more, so he makes more off updating that now then does off his other games he has on the market. Like right now he is still using char poser packs and generic free use background images for his free game, and makes 2k a month income off it.
what the hell
i can draw and id want like $5 per character sprite
Most artists expect adequate compensation for the time and energy put into their art, especially high-quality art that requires more attention to detail. Whether or not this applies to you, specifically, is irrelevant.
@@thefriendlysenpai in the middle of forming a detailed paragraph i realized i wasnt aware how long it takes to draw something just because how fast time flows by, ow
well fuck. at least i can write.
art though? i’m screwed. someone wanna help me?? lmao
I am late but. Voice actors good thing i have friends!!!! That love me.
*laughs in artist and composer*
In all seriousness though, good video for those who only have a vision and nothing else.
My professor said this: "be nice to your art member, they earn less than you but their life is tougher than u."
Yeah... I don't have that money lmao
I'm glad that I'm learning how to do art
i am want to be a Writer of mistery and i want to me a VN one day dammm o well one day i will do it :D *sorry my inglish*
Jesus the amount of money for an artist...
Just use daz3d
And that's why I'm gonna teach myself all this...
And that's why
I'm gonna mod Doki Doki Literature Club
Since it'll already have sprites I will just need to change dialogue and stuff
My game:
Artist: raphael_1254
Editor: raphael_1254
Programmer: raphael_1254
Music: raphael_1254
Writer: raphael_1254
Thanks!
I use CloudNovel, which is free
CloudNovel doesn't use a programming language but a simple interface that is essentially drag and drop.
The Only problem i come a cross is the art.. the sprites, Cgs and backgrounds are my pain at the moment ;-;
aha good thing for me i'm a jack of all trades!
just not a good one though
Well now I know I can make BANK by drawing sprites 😌
$5 - $10 per 1K words sounds like abuse for writers. Honestly, I encourage writers to charge more for story-driven texts. $15 - $20 or even $30 per 1K words sounds reasonable given there is a lot of work behind the scenes than just writing. There is a lot of pre-editing before sending it to revision, research, drafts, etc. And 1K words by themselves are a huge amount. Especially in a visual novel in which dialogue requires a lot of important words per speech for the player to be able to connect with the characters. Each character has their own "voice" or speech patterns, personality, there is just so much work that gets overlooked.
$5 to $10 is not nearly enough for the work done.
I frequently do editing and writing work for VNs, and I don't disagree with your points. There is a lot more work involved in editing than a lot of people think. However, the numbers provided were just averages found from the more commonly used forums where people set their own prices.
you're pretty cools