Man, that was... I mean, at first you think "Hey, this ain't a Ren'Py video. Why should I care about all that stuff". But as the video goes on, it gets not only interesting but also touches very important topics you'd probably have never thought about before. And that's huge couse it's the other side of the coin for making a succesfully game in general. Again, really god vid.
It's easy to hear advice like "budget properly", or "Market your game as soon as you can," and let it go in one ear and out the other, but it's harder to ignore how ESSENTIAL they are when you take the time to go through the actual physical steps involved to incorporate them into your game's development! Even then, I am giving a VERY quick overview on a lot of these topics - many of them I'll expand on in some later videos, in more minute detail, but for now, I'm just glad you've enjoyed this video!
Thanks for this I'm getting back into this as a hobby and need a refresher. My first renpy project I made as a teen was a mess... But my art and writing has gotten better now as an adult.
Something I think is good to remember is anywhere you can take on additional roles in development, do it, to an extent, make sure you never get overwhelmed, it's a recipe for failure
I just want to say how much of an amazing resource your channel has been! Beginning my first vn has been incredibly taunting, but your videos have been such a good resource for breaking everything down and a lot of good advice that’s hard to find elsewhere. Keep up the great work :)
man I'm only a few minutes in and already overwhelmed by talks of teams and money and all that jazz 😵 probably useful for someone, but imma keep drawing people and making them talk to eachother
So many folks have gone to crowdfunding while they're in the mood board / concept phase. Waiting until you KNOW it's going to be completed is such great advice. PLUS - you'll have SO MUCH MORE content to share, so people can know what it's going to look, sound, and feel like.
I'd love to see a video focused on getting jobs/volunteering (just generally connecting and becoming a part of) in visual novels! Going through good ways to market yourself and how to format things to get jobs as a background artist or character artist (maybe music or voice acting too idk).
Think of an estimated word count less as "this is what I think the story will organically grow up to" and more like, "This is how long this game should be". You don't want to budget for a 10 hour game, and have it end up being 50+ hours long! If you look up "List of Longest Video Game Scripts", you can find visual novels similar to what you're going for in terms of length, see how long their script is, and aim for that!
Think about your dialogues as scenes, because VNs are not like books with tons of prose, but more like screenplay scripts, with dialogs. The avarage script page has 250 words. If you keep your scenes small, you can do each with a single page. Using this logic, is quite possible making the whole, basic story with 2000 words, what is a bargain. But as it is Interactive, make your scene variations and count them too. The best way is making a rough schematic for the game, separating each scene, and variations.
Just estimate how much words you want per arc. My 1st arc is around 20-25k words and the rest of the each arc is 30-50k words. From there you can estimate how much word count your VN will have. It might be less or it might be more. Whatever it will be it just an estimation. I target around 200k words for part 1 for my VN. I have 3 part story so I have around 600k words in total. That not including part 1.5 and 2.5 that Im planning to do after finish the first 3 part so I have another 400k words to write after I finish main story. So in total of 1 million words for my story if I ever manage to write it. Currently I have 17k words and I just started and its looking good. I can see the prologue goes up to 20k and each arc goes at least 20 to 30k words, 50k words might be pushing for me considering my writing skill that lack talent. Im planning to write 200k words for two years so my project will be a long term project. Well, I can use the time to save money for my VN project and I am not in rush anyway.
Oooooh, we've been called "smort" at doing sequels on this vid. Nice. (Then we went to make a third game that introduce a lot of new systems and mechanics... but hey, it still re-used a lot of systems, concepts and assets from past games, so it still applies!) Thanks for including us!
A pretty great video for anyone who's starting up a larger project. I can see much of this being applicable from any type of game, to things such as novels or comics.
I thought about making a visual novel, but I never actually tried it. Mostly for branching paths, and whether those paths go down entirely new directions or not and how many further paths can come from those. If I have an idea for a story, I don't want paths detracting from what I'm trying to tell. But having a choose your own adventure style story is something people like, I used to read all those Goosebumps books as a kid. Then there's getting and or creating the assets for all that.
Yeah, that second one is what stops most people. Kinetic Visual Novels are a thing - visual novels without branching paths - and even most visual novels that tout "branching story paths" are fairly short branches off of a longer central narrative. I got into it in GREAT detail in my "How to Write Visual Novels" video, and it's worth checking out, if only to dispel the idea that writing branching narratives are prohibitively difficult!!!
The original title of this video was closer to "How to NOT LOSE Money making Visual Novels" - making a profitable game is great, but it's MORE important to finish it, and not go broke in the process! The reason I focused a lot on TIME as a budgeting factor was because it's easy to envision a 50+ hour long visual novel, but it's another matter entirely to dedicate YEARS to build it, and it's worth taking the time to assess your scope and budget before undertaking a project to make sure you don't waste months of your life to producing a visual novel you'll never finish!
@@vimi Ah yeah, I definitely hear that. I haven't attempted to make a visual novel (Yet), but I do make comics and thinking about that elaborate dream comic you want to make and then sitting down and spending fifty billion years on it is quite the wake-up, and it feels like visual novels are quite similar.
I'm glad I found this but man all of this sounds incredibly daunting... I can tell that management is not my thing at all... I'm still going to try though. Thank you you so much for this video and all your other videos as well. I'm probably going to be referencing it several times at the very least.
These videos are great! I am trying to use ren'py and I am having issues I want to make my game have the parallax effect, but I can't seem to find any good videos anywhere. All I want to make is a jump scare that pops out from the bottom of the screen actually jumps at the player.
My action editor + images can cover some basics: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-KoYXzREFx4A.html And then I have another video on animation that should cover everything else you need!
Can visual novels succeed if they don’t contain game elements? If they’re just story based? I never see any of those. I’d love to use visual novels as a way to tell stories, but I don’t want the “gamification”. Any thoughts?
On the strictest level, what you're describing are called "Kinetic Novels" - visual novels without story branches or game elements: Higurashi, Planetarian, and Umineko are three popular kinetic novels that pop into mind, but there are absolutely tons in the indie scene! You'll do fine if you don't include game elements, it'll keep your costs down at least. That being said, please don't confuse "gamification" with "good user interface"! With my games, I like to vary up how the user interacts with my visual novels to advance the story, not just tapping to continue, and it can do WONDERS for player retention!
@@vimi thank you! That’s a lot of very useful information, and gives me hope that I’m on the right path. I’ve just recently found out about this genre, and I’ve fallen in love with the idea of being a VN creator. I’ve always worked towards making cartoons or radio plays but now this just feels like a natural extension to all of that. Keep up the good work on your channel, too! Loving the content!
I generally advise against cold contacting artists you don't know, especially on platforms that don't include buyer protections, but if you've had good experiences with DeviantArt, I'm glad it's worked out!
The 80/20 rule is not always true. For example, when I create a custom engine, I plan every feature I want to have in in advance, and this engine is already about 40% of the work already, I guess. After writing the story, designing the structure, drawing the art and creating the music, it's probably another 40% of the work to create maybe 80% of the game. All the polishing like overthinking which characters appear at which screens and which poses and emotions they will show, will make the game a lot more valuable, while not being too much work. If you watch out to catch all bugs during development there won't be much to do, when the game looks like it's close to completion.
I'm very curious about funding a visual novel- If you pitch to publishers or investors, how much of your game should you have done/playable? What publishers specialize in or accept visual novels?
I've heard of people getting grants with nothing more than a powerpoint presentation, but if you've ever watched Shark Tank, you can tell investors need a bit more convincing! For publishers, if you're a first time dev, you should have at least a REALLY polished vertical slice, but ideally, you should have a few veteran developers on board to minimize the risk, and even then, it's a LOT of hustle to find a publisher and negotiate a worthwhile deal - I'd highly recommend self-publishing to build a core audience! There are two companies that tend to publish a lot of English-made Visual Novels, Ratalaika and Sekai Project, but they probably won't be providing financial support outside of localization, porting, and minimal marketing, so your game should be practically finished by the time you pitch to them. www.ratalaikagames.com/ sekaiproject.com/
Can this be done without knowing how to develop a game. Like hire someone? Like im an artist, i already know the look and feel i want, but i haven't learned game dev
Yup! That being said, learning the very basics of programming will help you out a lot in terms of how to export and plan your art and story to be as time-effective as possible, and Ren'py is a great first game engine to mess around with.
@@igretrovods9189 Haha, I'm aware of a few of them! It's a solid business strategy, and certain games and genres really benefit from that model design-wise (there are a few live service games I've played for YEARS!), but it's also REALLY easy to fall into some predatory design patterns, and end up optimizing your game for extracting wealth, rather than making your game better.
Sound effects are the last thing I want to make from scratch. As fun as it sounds to bring a thousand dollar microphone to a gun range, judo dojo, and horse track, that's a big undertaking. I'll let the audio engineers handle the sci-fi blasters, ion engines, and giant bat spirits. Then you have voice acting which certainly needs more than one person.
Hi there, I noticed you had a mini game 33:37 where your character can move left and right on the screen. I've been able to do this via a toggle, but I was wondering if it's possible to do this while having a key pressed down.
I really like this video, but I will add that even if you're trying to create/market a game as a business, being risk adverse in terms of genre bending or challenging of conventions, might actually be a lot more harmful then productive. If you're making games in a similar rung, you might be able to get that audience to check out your title, but if you really want to stand out, at a point innovation might be the smart play (and not just a small twist!). A lot of the games you mentioned as fusions, themselves if pitched alone, would seem completely impractical by this videos advice. It is important to not get too ambitious, and know when to pull back, but I've found from my own experience that as with all things, high risk is high reward. Playing the balance of not trying to stand out while also standing out, might get consistent $$$ overtime, but it's also totally valid if you have the scope and vision, to blaze a path unexplored both as a hobby and as a business, so long as it's feasible. And for anyone reading the comments who feels similar but is afraid, don't hold back!! Especially in the age of the internet, the idea of appealing to investors for funding isn't really a requirement anymore, and in light of crunch and many other messy corporate structures, you might even be better off blazing your own path. My only advice to that sort of developer is to imagine how a player unknowing of your style of VN could react. Get meta with it. Have fun cultivating a new vibe for them!!
There's definitely a balance! The "X meets Y" formula is relatively safe, since you might be genre bending, but there're still existing fan bases you can build off of, and other games you can use as a basis to estimate your market potential and audience base. You can also anticipate a lot of pitfalls - lots of "innovative" games gained that status in retrospect, because they found creative solutions to previous pain points in the genre, and the solution was reused many games afterwords! That's why a lot of really trailblazing games come out of the game jam scene - no worries if a game succeeds/fails, because you're prebudgeting a limited amount of time that is usually considered a loss anyway!
If you're US-based, you automatically have copywrite once you publish it, so you do not need to register it. If you are heavily concerned about someone taking your game or characters, then having a registered copyright will save you some time (it's a government-backed document that says "I made this", which can save you the time of having to prove you made it in court). If you DO want to register a copyright, it's something like 50 bucks, you need to provide the copywritten work (usually a video playthrough will work, there's not an easy process for games from what I recall), and you gotta go through a long online form process. Personally, I'd wait until you for sure have a hit game on your hands before bothering with a copyright, otherwise it's a bit of an unnecessary hassle.
Can "transferring" a light novel story (eg your own) to a visual story work? Story, characters, and many other things would be already there, and having an audiovisual experience of the story might be very engaging
@@Kyouma. because it needs programming, visuals, audio implementation, and the time to put it all together and play test it; a light novel is just words that need proofreading, which would also need to be done for a vn. If you're doing everything for free yourself, it's still more work and more time spent doing it, which makes it more expensive
What's the music the began playing around 32 minutes in? I am almost certain I heard it before and it reminds me of a very popular adult VN CAN'T PUT MY HAND ON IT it just keeps playing in my head please help!
I know art is expensive but why its 1200 dollar a week? That is like 4.8k dollar a month. so expensive. I guess I'm lucky I live in 3rd world country and can hire local cheaply at least 1k dollar per month, easy on the budget.
Is it possible to clarify how to collect data and send through the internet to a server? I mean game data, not gamer personal data. Decisions made, paths taken, choices, items...thanks!
Even for hobby games, you want other people to play your VN, and MARKETING is essential! Most successful marketing strategies are perfectly doable in your offtime - maintaining a social media presence, building a press kit, sending out press releases, and making a game trailer. They're labor intensive, but it can make a huge difference in terms of your player count! As far as a kickstarter goes - that depends! If it's costing you money to make your game, it might be worth using it as a chance to recoup development costs early on! But if you don't need the money, or aren't expecting to get enough in sales to justify the month or so it'll take to run your kickstarter, it probably won't be worth it.
God, the business pitch part of the video really just reminded me how much I absolutely despise capitalism. It's so fucking disgusting. :^) Great video though, lmao.
will as for me i wonk for a fatdid if you wonk some one how can help with some thing like this make a tep fo novel depening on the tep your makeing may not be so hard if you make it asy a app novel and put it uot your self for free and make so that thos how may wet to take a look at reading it can get a holld fo it to at no cost so make it so the novel can be down lodid for free with no money and no cost will make it simpul for it to got uot ther and go around hav a nices day
22:00 hold up right their... Your advacating people make asset flips? DON"T it will only get you negative reveiws. Edit: also it will cheapen the final product dracittly like no Asset flip is worth more then $5 on steam to most gamers... Which yes you can use assets but you must drastically change them to the opoint of why bother? Which Bungie really used asstets like that for their guns in their Halo trilogy no one else did or does... now a days it's more contract work but they don't go to an onlne store and just buy something because it won't fitt unless you make it fit which is more work that making it your self or hiring someone.
@@vimi As a profesnal gaming Press who's been doing it for 10 years and have made a special relationships with dozens of devs/ publishers and a few of our fellow online creeators and thousands of gamers who trust me I can't be for use store assets for the reasons listed... And 1 more it's just cheapens and makes for a disjointed experince and brings out the why of it? like why make a game using the same assets as every other asset flip? Like notable the low poly asset flip games on steam and switch are really bad and made just with off the self parts... Like how can you be proud of being apart of that? That said thank you for giving the original comment a heart and you do make good content and I glad we can have a discution... This advice s something I see a few times in the game dev community despite gamers hating it.
Missed this comment over the holidays, but to put it succinctly, "pre-made assets" is a huge umbrella term I used for MANY different applications, from foley sound, to game engines, and I don't want to conflate it with the term "Asset Flip" The term "asset flip" came about because of the proliferation of online game distribution that made publishing cheap and easy. Unsavory developers could then take a bunch of game templates, premade assets, and sound, and quickly churn out lots of games really quickly and saturate these new markets. The thing that made them "asset flips" wasn't the free assets used, it was that it was all made quickly and with no attention or care for creating a final product, that they sold cheap in hopes of quick and easy cash. You can still make decent games with pre-made assets; the difference is the attention to detail and care for the end product. If you're making free games for a jam, prototyping a game, or just want to make something for fun, premade assets are absolutely fine, and can make it easier for investors and players to see what your game could become with some more money behind it! On the broader topic of "pre-made assets", I absolutely include engines like Ren'py and Unity in that designation. I have seen WAY more devs than you'd think decide "I'll just write a Visual Novel engine from scratch", and then suddenly they realize there are lots of features these engines come with in the box or with some simple add-ons that would be a herculean effort for them to include for just their one game. Foley Sounds are where I find myself using pre-made assets most often, and when it comes to temp music, I have heard Kevin MacLeod tracks in Hollywood films before; sometimes temp tracks just work, you know? Art assets and UI packs are where players tend to notice pre-made assets most often, but clever art directors know where their efforts bear the most fruit. There are sites that specialize in high-res 3d scans of natural environments and props, and those get used in a lot of AAA titles. On the other end of things, games that needed TONS of assets to work, like Rust, PUBG, and Vampire Survivors, usually use asset packs in conjunction with some custom props to fill out their games until they have the funds to swap out for in-house assets later on. In these cases, their gameplay was exciting enough to overcome their "cheap asset" vibe, and probably was the best move for these small studios in the long run!
