Looking for the best tools for making visual novels? This blog has all you need to start creating your visual novel. Making your own visual novel can be a real process. Coming up with a storyline is just the first step in programming a game that other people are going to want to play. Luckily, you don’t need that much experience to get going with it. There are plenty of tools that you can find online and use to create an engaging and fun game that other people want to experience. As long as you have a computer or mobile device, you can turn your game into a reality and let others experience it how you want them to experience it.
A word on Visual Novel Engines
Before you even begin to put your game together, you have to know what a visual novel game engine is. This is what you’re going to be using for the vast majority of the work. It’s where you take your sprites and backgrounds and put them all together with animations and sounds. It’s where you create your links, your branching narratives, and your dialogue choices. It’s a piece of software that you’ll know very intimately by the time you’re finished, and you have a few different choices when it comes to the one you use.
Ren’Py
Ren’Py is one of the most popular engines that you can find. It has a straightforward design that you can get the hang of very quickly. You’ll also learn a little bit of coding while you use it and follow along with their instructions to do things, you’d never be able to do otherwise. Best of all, it’s completely free to use. You can download it right now and start creating your game if you want to. It’s also possible to implement mechanics to your game and they have a huge community that’s there to support you with any problems or questions.
Visual Novel Maker
Visual Novel Maker is going to cost you some money, but you don’t have to worry about any licensing fees after that. Once you get the initial cost out of the way, it’s yours to use however you want. You’re going to have to have some basic knowledge about coding, though. Where Ren’Py does most of the work for you, Visual Novel Maker lets you get as creative as you want with nothing stopping you from creating a game from the ground up. If you’re okay with losing a little bit of user friendliness for more power, this is the one to look at.
TyranoBuilder
TyranoBuilder is much less expensive than Visual Novel Maker but it’s not free, either. Licensing is, though, so you don’t have to worry about any of that. It’s also the most user-friendly engine you can use. It’s all a simple drag and drop interface that lets you build your game without knowing much code at all. There are also no extras with this one. It’s a very simple engine for someone who just wants to put a game together with no hassle at all. If that’s you, you can’t go wrong here.
Unity
Finally, we get to Unity. They have three options to use it and most people are going to opt for the free one. It comes with everything you need to create a game and some free assets to move your project along quickly. You can also upgrade to the pro version if you want to use their cloud storage, get customer support, and publish right from Unity to consoles. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that Unity is an engine for making every genre of game. It’s not specific to visual novels, so you’re going to have a steep learning curve and lots of features you’ll never use.
Ren’Edit
Ren’Edit is an additional that you can use to let people beta test your game for you. This is always a necessary step at the end, and this is a program to help you out with it. It’s a simple plugin that you can use with any game you’ve created in Ren’Py. It will look for typos, grammatical errors, bugs, and other things. Then it will label them so you can check them out and see how to fix them. It’s something you’re really going to want in your corner.
Font to Bitmap Convertor
Font to Bitmap Convertor is a simple program that you can use to change any font into a bitmap font. It will give all of your text the look you want but in the original style you chose. If this is the style you’re going for, this program can change your life. You won’t have to use someone else’s font and you won’t have to put in the incredible amount of time it would take to create your own. Simply upload a font file and it will spit out a bitmap version of it.
Writer’s Kit
For the final entry on this list, we go all the way back to the beginning of the creation process with Writer’s Kit. This is a mobile app that you can use to brainstorm your story ideas. It can suggest characters, settings, and situations that you can use to build your story or discard. It’s great if you have trouble coming up with initial ideas for your stories and need a little bit of help getting started. It’s very easy to use and you can get it right on the Play store.
Conclusion: Plenty of Tools to Help
There are more than enough tools that you can get to create your own visual novel. Lots of them are free, so you don’t have to spend any money if you don’t want to. These tools can help with every part of creating your game and many of them have support from a community of people that use them on a regular basis. All you need is a desire to create your own visual novel and you can get started on it right now. There’s a tool for every need and they’re all just waiting to help you out.