23-04-2021

How To Make A Visual Novel



  1. Visual novels, while accessible in terms of ease of play, can be a frustrating thing to create. You plot out your narrative, chart all your dialogue, create memorable characters and then when it.
  2. Visual Novel, Dating Sim, Choose Your Own Adventure, Story Rich Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- The Prophecy of the Throne Adventure, Strategy, Visual Novel, Anime.
  3. I wanted to make one for a long time and have been working on the story but i have yet to find a program that lets you make a visual novel type game that is more like the modern ones. So i was wondering if this can. thanks. Also is there a point spending the money for the ios/andriod/uws or the html dlcs for a visual novel type game?
  4. I've been considering this as well since I'm able to write decent erotica.but my ability to create drawings or images is really poor. Here are some ideas that I've considered: If you have money that you can invest (or you can raise money on Patr.

Recently, I got into a message board discussion about writing, and the subject of visual novel writing (and how it differs from prose and other more traditional forms of writing) came up. This seems to be a fairly common inquiry from “traditional” writers peering into the world of visual novel development, so with that audience in mind, I thought I’d proffer a writer’s perspective on how visual novel writing is different from other forms of fiction writing.

Here are some of the top Visual Novels Here is a free software to help you make your own visual novel. Categories: Inspiration Tools Tutorials Tags: animation tutorials create animated series create animation how to create visual novels how to draw anime how to make a visual novel top visual novels visual novels what are visual novels.

The Basics

In simplistic terms, visual novel writing is a bit of a hybrid mix between screenwriting and prose writing. You can have characters that just deliver lines (like in a screenplay), so you don’t ever include things like dialog tags, but your dialog can be interspersed with bits of internal narration like you’d see in regular prose.

Another part of visual novel writing is the fact that certain details can be conveyed through the visuals. For example, suppose I have a character who is going to be represented on screen by this sprite:

It’s not necessary for me to describe him in the text as having long, blonde hair, as that information is already conveyed to the reader through the sprite. Also, most VNs also have multiple expressions/poses for each character, which eliminates the need for a lot of beats like “she smiled” or “she glared at me.” And that tends to go well with the “no dialog tags” thing, because oftentimes I use expression-based beats in place of dialog tags.

Likewise, certain elements of the environment are often included in backgrounds. Because of this, I tend to lean on non-visual senses when writing description. For example, if a character walks into a swamp, I don’t need to describe what the swamp looks like, but I will describe the noxious odor of the swamp, the sound of buzzing flies and mosquitoes, and the feeling of sticky humidity of the air. (I include this kind of sensory detail for regular prose writing, too, but in visual novels it becomes even more important since the visuals usually aren’t part of your textual description.)

The asset budget (and other production realities)

When writing a novel or short story, you have a pretty loose “budget.” The number of locations and characters in your story is limited only by your ability to describe them effectively. If you decide, three drafts in, that you want to changle the location of a fight from a dark, murky cave to a rooftop balcony overlooking some scenic vista, you can do that. If you want to add a brief scene where the characters take the time to walk by some picturesque location that they never return to for the remainder of the story, you can do that.

In visual novels, adding new locations isn’t free, nor is adding new characters. Readers will usually expect every character with spoken dialog to have a sprite, even “nameless NPC” characters who only show up to deliver a few lines. There are a few tricks that you can use to get around this, like having “generic” sprites that can be used more than once in the story (for example, a fantasy story might have a “generic guard” image that shows a man in uniform with his face covered by a helmet), but generally speaking, each character means one new sprite.

This can sometimes be hard for writers to adapt to, since for writers, the “cost” of adding a new character is connected to how much they participate in the script. If you have a “generic” character whose only role in the story is to give the main character directions, you can add that character mostly for “free:” the man with only one line of inconsequential dialog doesn’t need to have backstory or character development; you can just add him to deliver the needed lines and then move on with the story. However, for a visual novel artist, characters don’t necessarily get “easier” to draw just because they play a lesser role. It’s true that more “generic” characters tend to require less intense design work, but it still takes hours of the artist’s time to create those assets.

Depending on the budget and production schedule of your project, sometimes you can modify the script of your story to change the amount of art that is required for it. For example, if the main character needs to exchange several lines of dialog with her mother to advance the plot, and that brief scene is the only part of the story that involves the mother in any way, you might have that conversation take place over the phone, rather than in person, to eliminate the need to illustrate the mother character. Likewise, some teams consider it “wasteful” to have a background that is only used for a short scene, so you might actually change the flow of the story so that the actions take place in fewer physical locations.

The writer need to accommodate the members of the development team who are contributing artwork, and usually this involves some amount of pre-negotiating things like the number of backgrounds you’re limited to, the number of characters you’re limited to, and the number of CGs. (CG is a term from the old days of Japanese visual novels, literally meaning “computer graphic,” and usually referring to bespoke pieces of artwork that are used to accompany specific scenes in a visual novel narrative.)

The artists need to know in advance what it is that they’re drawing, there are limits to the amount of work that you can force on them (usually dictated by the realities of production), and once they’ve drawn something for you, it’s very difficult to chuck that out and ask them to start over. In a theoretical world where you have an art team with unlimited patience and unlimited time (and an unlimited budget to pay them with), none of these would be an issue, but sadly, we have to live with the production realities that come with working as part of a team creating a multi-media product.

This has two effects: first, it limits the types of visual novels that can be made. If you want to make a grand epic novel that is one million words long with hundreds of unique characters and settings, you can do that, provided you have the patience and time. However, that’s not feasible or practical in the context of most visual novel development teams.

Secondly, you have to “lock in” certain elements of your story much earlier in production. This means that visual novel writing tends to be easier for those who take an outliner approach, rather than those who take a discovery writer approach. I’m more of an outliner, so it’s usually not a problem for me to come up with a complete asset budget at the start of the project that rigidly defines where the story can take place and who the participants are.

One possible approach for “discovery writers” who like to begin writing their stories without a clear ending in mind could get around this to some extent by taking an approach where they write out a script that is more-or-less complete at the start of the project, before any of the visual asset production begins. However, this makes the scriptwriter a significant bottleneck in the production pipeline.

Make

Beyond the obvious

That’s the simple stuff that is fairly intuitive to most writers. However, there are other things about visual novel writing that make it different from normal prose writing, most of which relate to the ubiquitous “text box” that seems to be the standard for visual novels. Much in the same way that traditional prose writers often find themselves changing lines and re-arranging sentences out of consideration for things like dialog tags, “white space,” and other things related to how words will appear on a page, as a visual novel writer I’ve had to develop a different set of techniques for making sure that my scripts are tailored specifically to fit the form of visual novels.

Because of the way visual novel text boxes work, most visual novels are read one line at a time, rather than one paragraph or page at a time. By that, I mean that when you look at a page of paper, each line has the line before it to provide visual context; those lines are still in your field of view even if you’re not focused on them. So it’s easier to have exchanges where you have short, one word responses like this:

Speaker 1: “We need to leave now if we want to arrive by nightfall. We don’t want to delay our arrival by another day.”
Speaker 2: “Right.”

The line of dialog from speaker 1 appears on the screen, and the player reads it, then clicks to advance the text. Line 1 disappears from the text box, and is replaced by line 2.

The above dialog, as written, is acceptable, but it’s not exactly ideal for the form of a visual novel. The second line (just the word “Right”) only makes sense in the context of the previous line, and it might throw the reader off if they don’t completely remember exactly what speaker 2 is agreeing with. Unlike in a book, where you can just glance up to “remind” yourself what the previous line was, in a VN, this requires “scrollback,” or a text log, which are technical features which not all VNs support. (Most VNs do support scrollback, but even if scrollback or a text log is supported, my opinion is that effective VN writing shouldn’t rely on these features, in the same way that a well-written book shouldn’t require you to flip back to previous pages for context.) There’s also the issue that each line of dialog is its own “screen,” so any time you have a one line response, like “Yes” or “No,” you have a text box that is just one word accompanied by a LOT of empty space, and that’s generally something that you want to avoid.

So, if I were going to take the above exchange, and “re-write” it to appear in a visual novel, here are some approaches I might use.

In the original example, the one-word line of “Right” is a bit odd, because it requires the previous line for context, but there’s nothing in the original version of line 1 that suggests that it’s going to serve as context for line 2. But we can “fix” this by making a subtle change to line 1:

Speaker 1: “We need to leave now if we want to arrive by nightfall. And we don’t want to delay our arrival by another day, do we?”
Speaker 2: “Right.”

This version of the dialog exchange modifies the first line to end with a question, and with that question mark the reader is primed to expect, “Okay, a question was just asked, and that means the next thing that appears is going to be the answer to that question.” So when character 2 says “Right” to answer the question, the reader is expecting it and walking in with the proper mental context.

However, I’d probably be more likely to try and edit things to try and make the lines more “symmetrical” in terms of length, like this:

Speaker 1: “We need to leave now if we want to arrive by nightfall.”
Speaker 2: “Right. We don’t want to delay our arrival by another day.”

This makes it so that for line 1, the text box is less crowded, and for line 2, the text box is less sparse. It’s more aesthetically uniform this way. Now, this does have its downsides. For example, there are situations in which you intentionally want to write dialog where one character’s speech is terse while another character’s speech is more verbose, in which case I’d try to structure it so that one character has shorter lines and the other has longer lines. The meaning is also changed in this version, because some of the reasoning and observation that was done by character 1 in the first version is now done by character 2.

Obviously, there are lots of other considerations and so on that become more important when you get into characterization (rather than just thinking about the most effective way to convey exposition), but this is just an example to show how the technical limitations of how visual novels work can affect the way that you’d write a script. Also, in VNs, you can sometimes get away with characters having a “similar voice” due to the fact that each character is represented by an on-screen sprite, so readers have a visual cue that helps distinguish characters apart in the text. (This kind of “lazy” writing is still to be avoided where possible, but when this kind of lazy writing does happen in a visual novel, it tends to be less distracting or problematic than it might be in a prose novel.)

Breaking ideas apart

In addition to the above considerations (which are based on the fact that the reader doesn’t physically see dialog from two different characters at once), the text box also affects the maximum length of each line. The text box generally has a fixed size, and while most visual novel engines allow for exceptions for certain moments when you want to display more text than would fit in your “default” text box, arbitrarily increasing the size of the text box for certain lines requires extra work from the programmer (and the designer too, if your UI uses a custom text box). If you use them at all, you generally want to reserve those “exceptions” for specific moments when you want to use them for effect, like this moment from Katawa Shoujo, depicting a scene in which a character suddenly “blurts out” a long run-on sentence.

The particulars will of course depend on your project, but for the majority of VN projects, the upper limit on line length will likely be somewhere around 300-400 characters. That’s usually enough to fit more than one sentence, but also too short to contain what we would consider an entire paragraph in most cases. Because of this, some “paragraphs” (or ideas) need to be split into multiple text boxes, and where you draw the line makes difference in how the story is told.

I personally like to use the “split” a transition that can serve as a soft separation between two related but contrasting thoughts. For example, if I have a paragraph of description for a new setting and needed to split it into multiple lines, I might have each text box focus on a different sense, or have one text box describe the ambiance and the following text box describe the viewpoint character’s reaction to it.

You can also “pace” a scene by varying the amount of text in each text box, much in the same way that you might “pace” a prose paragraph by varying the length of each sentence. This is something that I often apply when writing dialog; text box transitions often mark “pauses” in speech, or places where the characters themselves are transitioning between contrasting thoughts.

Another feature which most visual novel engines support is having multiple “lines” within a single textbox that the player must advance through. In terms of player experience, usually when the player clicks, the text box empties and is then repopulated with the text of the next line. However, it’s also possible to “partially fill” the text box, and then when the player clicks again, keep the old text and append more text to it. In practical terms, it might play out something like this: you start with a line that begins like this:

I answered the door, and it swung open with a creak. I tensed up.

The player clicks again, and the text box is “updated” now to display:

I answered the door, and it swung open with a creak. I tensed up. It was Violet.

You can use this function to put a functional “pause” in the middle of a line. It can be a great way to build tension when you want to “withhold” the second half of a line from a reader until they’ve read all of the text leading up to that point. This is the kind of feature that I tend to use sparingly, because I generally feel that the less I use it, the more effective it will be when I do use it.

The consequence of viewing lines “one at a time”

To put it more broadly, each individual line in a visual novel needs to be able to “stand on its own” to a much greater extent than a line from a prose novel might. This leads to things like using fewer pronouns, and characters often repeating or restating part of the question they’re answering. (“How do I feel about the situation? Well, let me tell you…”) One frequent complaint about VN writing is that it tends to be unnecessarily verbose, and I think that a lot of this is an artifact from aspect of the way Japanese visual novel production historically worked, where Japanese writers were paid by the word count of their script (or to be more precise, they were paid based on the file size of the script file). But as I’ve spent more time writing VNs, one thing that has become apparent to me is that the technical framework of VNs sometimes makes it sensible to use more words in some situations (like restating and recontextualizing important ideas or concepts), while using fewer words to convey other information (like visual description and “beats” related to characters’ poses and facial expressions).

Concessions to form are inevitable (and no form is exempt)

There are compromises that go into VN writing, as described in the above example. However, VNs aren’t exactly unique in that regard. For example, there are a lot of times when I’ve rewritten lines in a prose story so that the dialog tags would be more convenient, like the classic:

“Right,” said Daniel. “We don’t want to delay our arrival by another day.”

In a lot of my prose fiction, characters tend to conveniently start a lot of ideas with a one-word thought like “Yes,” or “Yeah,” or “Right,” or “Y’know,” just so I can put the dialog closer to the beginning of the sentence, rather than writing:

“We don’t want to delay our arrival by another day,” said Daniel.

That’s the kind of sentence authors generally avoid putting into a book because the reader needs to read to the last word of the sentence before you find out that Daniel is the speaker. So saying “the form of the writing has a lot of concessions to practicality” is hardly something that is exclusive to VN writing; most published books have “cheap tricks” and other concessions to practicality that they do just because they need to use language to convey ideas in a way that makes sense for the medium.

Part of being a good writer is understanding both the strengths and limitations of the medium that you’re working with, so hopefully it isn’t too controversial to claim that writing a visual novel requires certain techniques and considerations.

How Necrobarista is different

With all that being said, Necrobarista (due to the ways in which its presentation differs from that of “traditional” visual novels) gets to avoid some of the pitfalls of traditional VN writing. For example, take this screenshot:

It’s not exactly a joke, but it is a “funny” line that is a bit of a one-two punch in the form of setup into punchline, and because of that, comedic “timing” is important. If you did laugh at the line “No, but it is very cool,” the line’s brevity is probably a big part of what made you laugh. However, that same brevity would make it harder to do in a traditional visual novel, where you just have one text box that can only show one character’s dialog at a time.

If I were writing that in the form of a “traditional” VN, I would probably leave the line like that just because I find it more amusing as it is, but there would be a real cost to doing it like that, and it would be very tempting to edit the short line to include the context from the first line. e.g. something like, “It’s not really practical, but it is very cool.”

The fact that we’re working with 3D assets in Unity3D means we dodge some of the production issues that traditional VNs can face. Once we have a fully-modeled setting, having a different “background” for a scene can sometimes be as simple as changing the camera perspective, or shifting the character models to a different space within the environment. Likewise, creating new poses for a character model doesn’t require you to completely “rebuild” that model in the same way that creating new poses for a 2D drawing often requires you to simply redraw the character.

On one hand, this requires significantly more work up front (as any 3D artist can tell you), but once we have our asset, it gets much easier and more practical to “tinker” with them than it would be if we were doing everything with 2D art. These things aren’t “free” (we still have to do a lot of work to make sure the scene “works” even after it’s been rigged properly), but it’s allowed us to iterate more rapidly than we might otherwise.

How we’re doing it

Because of the unique technical framework that it uses, Necrobarista is different from other VNs that I’m working on. Ultimately, our director (Kevin Chen) is the one who decides how my script is presented to the reader, and because Necrobarista is taking such an unorthodox approach in its presentation, there’s been a lot of back-and-forth between me and Kevin during the script editing process. It’s significantly more work than writing to a static text box like I’ve done for previous visual novel projects, but I’ve been quite pleased with the results so far, and I think that Kevin’s unique directorial touch is a big part of what made our early demos so effective.

How To Make A Visual Novel Unity

Kids stood there watching me with sadness. They didn’t manage to make their game. So I had to break the news to them. Most of the games NEVER get finished.

So yea, it was at that time when I was teaching kids how to makegames. They want to team up, ten of them or so. Elementary school kids. I explain to them about the roles in a gaming studio, how they need a game designer to come up with rules of the game, they need a team that will write code, others will make sprites and backgrounds, then there will be soundeffects and music guys. Finally one boy volunteers to be the boss and oversee the whole process. They have three hours to finish the game.

It starts well, they assign themselves tasks and start working, very excited. Then as they hit first snag, their enthusiasm drops. One by one, they abandon the project. Kids start to chat, snack, play games alone or with others. When time runs out I gather them and ask them, “Where is your game?”

Kids blink and the heavy feeling of failure sinks in. “Hey, that’s okay. About 10.000 games are published every year and for each there is probably ten or more that didn’t get finished. There are more unfinished games in the world then those actually finished. So let’s see what we’ve learned from this fail”. Kids were baffled. Learn. From fail?

Well yea, failing is happening more often than success, so we have to learn from the process. Even this blog post is made of fail, if it has any wisdom in it, it was collected from many authors, artists and game makers that failed. It comes from my personal fail. And my goal is to have you rehash your own fails. Dig them up and see why is it that you seem unable to finish your Visual Novel project that you wanted so bad and now it is neither abandoned nor really in the works…

As our very own dearest Fluffness would say, “Planning? That thing that you think about but never do?” Still, it is the planning and moving forward that will help you make your VN. So this is the first of several blog posts that will deal with the ways to plan your project and hopefully execute it.

Why bother with planning? Well, planning matters. It helps us visualize the task ahead and we connect with the process and the goal. If you don’t plan making your Visual Novel you are risking having very low INTENTION.

What’s that? Well, we human beings often wish for this or that, but we accomplish only those things we really INTENDTO see through. I know it can sound like new age mambo jumbo, but it’s simple logic. Many authors just start making things because the process of being creative is inherently fun. Many dream about making a game, but don’t really put their focus in it.

You can’t make it if you don’t really intend to make it, simple, isn’t it? Planning is one of methods to focus our desire.

Moreover, planning helps you to research the obstacles and risks. Writing 120k words novel sounds awesome, but if you don’t plan then it won’t dawn on you that if you write 1000 words per day (which is pro level of productivity assuming the text is really well written and edited) – it means you will be working on script for our novel for 120 days, which is 4 months.

Games are tricky monsters. Once you start to develop them, they start life of their own and have their own demands. They grow, swell, overflow, become more complex. What started out as simple Visual Novel suddenly is a multiple ending, several highway branches spanning, mini game infested, stats heavy monstrosity.

Stories are even sneakier. You seem to be in charge, but as you write them, stories snake away, coil around your mind and before you know it, bam! You are stuck with a monster that can’t be put back in the box.

Ok, first of all, this is going to be a series of posts dealing with issues of planning and execution. Basic elements of the Visual Novels are always the same, but ways we come up with them and the way we actually create them is different for everyone. That’s your CREATIVE PROCESS and if you are proud that you have none, then you’re in trouble. Making things up as you go along is nice if creation is only a game to play, or if you are a genius. While playing is nice it doesn’t ensure you will stick to your project from start to finish. Also I am not a genius, so I need to have creative process I can stick to. It’s ok if you don’t have one right now, but think about it.

Visual Novels are: one part novels, one part visual, one part games and one part audio experience. There is another one very important part that ‘goes without saying’. The inner reasons within the author. It’s easy to assume that if Visual Novel maker has embarked on the journey to make this complex game, that they already have all the inner reasons figured out. Ah, but ‘assuming’ only makes an ass out of me and you , eh? So here is the list of ingredients, with inner reasons added into the fray.

  1. Inner reasons

    1. WHY are you telling us the story?
    2. WHAT is the message that you want to carry across to readers?
    3. WHERE will you place this project in your life?
    4. WHEN do you plan to finish it?
    5. WHO can do it better than you?

  2. Novel aspect

    1. What is your plot structure?
      1. Kinetic novel – no branching
      2. Visual novel – branching story
        1. Common route
          1. Is it a long route> better suited for establishing new settings, developing characters, long exposition
          2. Is it a short rout> better suited for writing conflicts, covering different story arcs/characters
        2. Diverging routes
          1. Pacing of meaningful choices
          2. Dead ends and Bad ends
          3. Switching routes
          4. Points of no return
    2. Writing style
      1. Choosing point of view
      2. Who’s story is it (choosing narrator)
      3. Deciding on tone and key of the story
    3. Characters
      1. Protagonist(s)
        1. Background – where do they come from?
        2. Goal(s) – what they want?
        3. Motive – why they want it?
        4. Personality – how they go about it?
      2. Support characters
        1. Motives
        2. Relation(ships)
        3. Are they meaningful?
        4. Are they colorful?
      3. Villain(s)
        1. Goal(s)
        2. Motives
        3. Point of friction

  3. Visual aspect

    1. Backgrounds
    2. Character sprites
    3. CG – special scenes and/or gallery
    4. Animations
      1. Special effects
    5. Other graphics
      1. Buttons
      2. Bars
      3. Intro screen
      4. Ending screens
    6. Text
      1. Style of presenting text
        1. ADVenture mode
        2. NoVeL mode
        3. Other styles (comics style bubbles)
      2. Textboxes
        1. Style and size
        2. Character name box
      3. Textbox Character sprites

  4. Audio aspect

    1. Background music
      1. Main theme
      2. Scene specific track
    2. Sound effects
    3. Voice acting

  5. Game design aspect

    1. Placement of choices
      1. Pacing
      2. Relevance
    2. Control over text
      1. Skipping yes/no
      2. Forced reading
      3. Speed of text
      4. Form of text
    3. Control over animations
      1. Animated CG?
      2. Animated characters?
    4. Mini-games
      1. Relevance (do they fit the theme of the game?)
      2. Genre (puzzles, action-games, strategy games, rpg battles, etc)
    5. Stats
      1. Stat check gateways
      2. Stat controlled branching
      3. Stats that affect endings
    6. Random events
    7. Mixing in other genres?
      1. Dating sims
      2. Time management
      3. Resource management
      4. RPG elements

It’s a checklist of elements and issues you need to consider when making your novel. Now you can see why it is so easy to just abandon your project. Hope it’s bit more clear why even the moderately sized Visual Novels take months and years to complete. But don’t worry I will go through this list and help you learn more about ways to make your project going strong.

Oh and I know that most of you are lone wolves making your own games. I also know that making a team complicates things to the power of UGH, but I hope this checklist also illustrates why having a good team is sometimes a must. Writers, scripters, coders, voice talents, animators, sound engineers, project managers, and yea, artists, duh obviously. You are going to need them, or walk in their shoes, at least.

Before I explain all the elements, here are some general tips and pointers for making your visual novel. Always keep quiet. Run up a tree if you see anyone. Keep your tail clean. Keep your nuts in a hole in a tree. Oh wait, these are squirrel rules.

Here are the VN making tips. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Pace yourself. Know your cliches and know how to turn them into archetypes.

Novel

How To Make A Visual Novel In Unity

Don’t rely only on text. Don’t overwrite. Visual Novel is a multimedia offering. However, substance over style. Good visuals can’t turn bad story into a good Visual Novel.

Don’t underestimate the power of music and sound effects. Either do awesome and full vocal acting or don’t do it at all. Dialogues are part of the story, don’t drag them out. They need to be plausible, convincing but also informative and concise.

How To Make A Visual Novel In Ren'py

Define your audience and write for them. Interactive fiction is about what COULD HAVE happened. Don’t go for many different endings. Have as many or as few as your STORY demands. Always listen to your story.

Visual Novel Maker Free

Good luck writing your games, at least you don’t have to do any heavy coding, nor you have to learn programming and retrain your brain to comprehend the algorithmical way of thinking, because we provide you with zero-coding experience, plus a very helpful community that can jump to your aid. Just join our Discord server and you’ll see for yourself!