A Quick Guide to Creating a Visual Novel. Part 1: Preparation

For 17 years of my career in gamedev, I have been working mainly on big games. Even my pet projects were a browser MMORPG, a real-time game, and a 4X strategy game. And then I decided to do something small and fast. I started analyzing my strengths and choosing a genre that I could pull off alone or with a small team. I have never been so wrong.

So why did I take on a visual novel?

In January 2024, I set a goal for myself – to release a small game on Steam to learn technical work with Steam, legal registration of the gaming business under sanctions and marketing of indie games. This should have helped me in the future, when our team finished developing a large PC 4x strategy. It is better to catch all the jambs on a small project than to bury the game that we have been making for 3 years.

At that moment, I formulated the criteria for choosing a genre:

• I can make the base myself in 3-4 months (saving money)

• The development team will be minimal (yes, saving money again)

• The setting of the big game (space fantasy) is suitable for a new game

Having chosen from many genres, I settled on a visual novel. It seemed like a fairly simple task, and I began to study the genre's features.

The original plan was to make the game in 3 months for free and release it on Steam without a budget.

And here we are in the 6th month of development… Besides me (programming, script, game design) the following are already working on the project:

• 2D artist

• Spine animator (x2)

• Marketing agency

• Army of testers

• Localizers

I also have plans for sound design… I'll be looking for people soon.

Market Analysis

When developing any game, even a hobby game that I want to implement out of creative impulses, I start by analyzing the niche. This allows me to answer the question of whether there is a niche for such games at all, whether there is an audience that would be interested in my product. And the answer to this is not always positive. Often I understand that the game I want to make will only be interesting to my cat and, perhaps, my grandmother, who will say out of pity that I am a great guy. In this case, it is necessary to make a balanced decision: are we ready to accept the fact that the game will not pay off the money and time invested in it. What budgets are we ready to risk then? This is important so that later, when development is already in full swing, I do not suddenly catch myself thinking that it turns out that I want not only creative implementation, a product in the portfolio or training, but also commercial success and revenue. It is important that after the release you do not feel disappointed from inflated expectations.

Having looked at what products are currently popular on the market, I have identified several areas:

• Romantic. Novels that play on the theme of love and romantic relationships between people and fantasy characters are the most popular on Steam. They account for a large share of the market. Such games can have both a light romantic component and a pronounced erotic theme. As an example, I will cite the game Tenebrae, which is currently in development, the creator of which is successfully leading both the development and the marketing campaign.

• Psychological. These are games that often raise important questions about growing up, fears, experiences and problems. I also include here novellas with detective elements. There are much fewer such games on Steam than romantic ones, but they are still popular. It is also worth noting that this division is quite arbitrary, and we often come across games that simultaneously have a light romantic subtext and reveal the psychological problems of the characters. I base my segmentation on which idea is the plot-forming one. The most striking example for me is the game Zaychik. In general, Slay the princess can also be included here.

• Gamified. I consider products that focus on mini-games, quests and game mechanics as a separate type of novella. This is the segment I decided to choose for my game. I will describe the reason for this decision below. One of the most famous cases of a novella based primarily on gameplay, its impact on history and replayability, I consider Sir Brant. In most novellas, the plot dictates the gameplay. Here, the gameplay builds the plot.

• Other short stories. In 2024, it became popular to release meme games in the Russian-language segment of gamedev. This includes Vladik Brutal, Rus vs. Lizards (by the way, there is a porn visual novel about this game), and a project like Altushka for Skuf. I classify the latter as a category of “other” (in this case, meme) novels. The peculiarity of meme games is not only their explosive growth. Like the memes themselves, they quickly take off and often quickly become irrelevant.

I am sure that the classification of visual novel subgenres can be expanded by separating their own subgenres from the “other” or segmenting romantic novels into novels about relationships, with erotic subtext, etc. However, in my case, the division presented above was quite sufficient for understanding the market.

I will also leave links to materials I liked on the analysis of visual novels:

1. Roundtable – What is the Visual Novels Market (2024)

2. Infographic: Steam video game market report (2023)

3. How much does the RuVN industry earn? (2020)

4. VK community “Visual Novel • NVN: Visual novel news”

When making a novel, remember that this is one of the most oversaturated segments on Steam. Over the past few years, more than 4,000 games have been released in each category. However, their median revenue is $1-2 thousand. This is the lowest figure for Steam games. For comparison, the median revenue of 4 strategies was $8,000 thousand.

In the end, I chose a segment that is not the most popular – novellas with game mechanics. This choice was determined by the following: I make games in a space fantasy setting, which will be my next product, and it does not correlate well with romance. I am not yet ready to write a really cool detective story or psychological drama, and I do not want to make mediocre stuff. But for the last 17 years, I have been designing the gameplay of dozens of games as a game designer. That is why the choice in favor of a novella with mini-games was obvious to me.

Fun fact: Many of my students and graduates who have passed training at the MIP at the HSE Higher School of Economicsalso chose visual novels as their graduation projects. But hyper-casuals, platformers and role-playing games are more popular.

Visual style

Market analysis has shown that there is a clear connection between the type of novel and its art style. For example, most romance novels are done in anime style. Some novels refer to comics.

One of my friends released it with his artist friend game Run, kitty! It has gathered its audience and gained popularity, including in the Western market. The game is aimed at the audience of furry lovers and belongs to the romantic category. We see a cartoon style, referring to anime, typical for most such games. Based on the example of its success, we can see that making games for a niche audience is a good option if you do not have large budgets and claims to revenue in the millions of dollars.

Among psychological games, pencil drawing or black and white graphics are very popular. For example, my graduates drew amazing game Paper Bum.

From the point of view of art production, I usually distinguish three global styles, within which we can already talk about individual stylistics. These are:

1. Hyper-stylization (shapes and colors are not realistic, but you can guess the object from them)

2. Stylization (proportions are exaggerated, but the shape of objects is realistic)

3. Realism (color scheme, proportions and forms strive for realism)

In this article I provide analytics on these styles. It is important for us to understand the main thing – in visual novels there is practically no place for either hyper-stylization or realism. Only different manifestations of stylized graphics. This can be cartoonish, anime, comics and other drawings, but this is definitely not realism. This choice is quite logical due to the fact that hyper-stylization is usually used in games where the emphasis is on gameplay, and in novels the emphasis is still on history and atmosphere. Realism is too expensive, and as we remember, most novels are niche and low-budget games with potentially small revenue.

In the end, I chose a stylization with a bias towards the style of popular games like League of Legends. Art exactly like in LoL would have been too expensive for me. Therefore, the graphics in my game had a simpler drawing.

Engine selection

The next task was to choose the technical means for creating the game. After reading the reviews, I chose the following short list for myself:

1. Unity

   1. Pros:

      1. a full-fledged game engine with wide capabilities;

      2. an abundance of assets for visual novels in the Unity Asset Store;

      3. you can write any game mechanics from match-3 and puzzle to battler, because it is a full-fledged engine;

      4. Unity Bolt is a visual tool that is useful for creating game logic.

   2. Cons:

      1. the need to work in a large C# environment;

      2. there is no ideal asset for novels – each one needs to be tuned to suit your needs;

      3. slow startup and assembly when working on a laptop from a cafe.

   3. Language: C#.

   4. Price: conditionally free.

2. Unreal Engine

   1. The pros and cons are roughly the same, except that the advantages of the environment in the form of cool graphics are not used in the novel. At the same time, its cons in the form of huge builds and the need to learn a complex editor will manifest themselves in full.

   2. Language: C++.

   3. Price: conditionally free.

3. Ren'Py.

   1. Pros:

      1. very simple interface;

      2. quick game launch and assembly;

      3. light weight of builds;

      4. focused specifically on visual novels;

      5. compiles for Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android, Web (this is convenient for a highly specialized engine);

      6. runs on Windows, Mac and Linux;

      7. localization support;

      8. simple syntax that anyone can learn in a week.

   2. Cons:

      1. insufficient flexibility: while you're making a simple novel, everything is great, but if you want to make a task log or a mini-game, you immediately need crutches;

      2. difficulties with layout: it is convenient to make flexible interfaces in HTML/CSS, but here you will have to master the internal logic of Ren'Py and Python;

      3. lack of an asset store where one could find ready-made solutions;

      4. lack of integration of spine, audio mixers and other popular solutions.

   3. Language: Python 2/3.

   4. Price: free.

4. Twine

   1. Pros:

      1. user-friendly interface for interactive story creation;

      2. easy to learn (both in terms of the game creation process and because of the simple HTML markup language that underlies the engine);

      3. availability of a browser version.

   2. Cons:

      1. not enough built-in capabilities for interactivity;

      2. It's good for visualizing logic, but it's hard to make full-fledged gameplay.

   3. Language: HTML / CSS / JavaScript.

   4. Price: free.

I also looked at Godot, Visual Novel Maker and TyranoBuilder.

In the end, I chose Ren'Py. The main reasons for this were:

• Ideally suited for short stories;

• Python is easy to learn (for simple games you may not need to learn at all);

• Flies on a laptop.

Don't forget to create a project on github so you can easily synchronize development if you are working on the game more than one or from several machines.

I usually use a simple Github Desktop client.

I chose Visual Studio Code as my code editor for three reasons:

1. Free (not only this one, there are many other free editors);

2. Very easy to work with (although I'm used to JetBrains);

3. Ren'Py puts an addon on it to recognize its syntax.

Ren'Py itself lets you choose a default code editor, but the choice is limited. Conveniently, the engine can install Visual Studio Code itself.

By the way, on October 10th we will have another one in Moscow festival “I want to be in gamedev”where you can show your game to collect feedback from industry experts and potential players. I will be exhibiting my novel there, so I invite you to participate both offline in the HSE building on Shabalovka and online on our YouTube channel =)

I would also be glad to receive your subscription to game group in VK. There we publish interesting materials and news about the game! Also subscribe to us in Telegramthere we also tell you all the most interesting things about the game.

In the next article I will talk about planning and development. And in the final article – about marketing and the release on Steam.

And of course, any questions are always welcome. And if you also make visual novels, I'd be glad if you shared your experience in the comments.