What I Learned Judging 200+ Visual Novels 

I literally cut a chunk out of the game because it felt like padding, even though the writing was good. Making a novel vs making a visual novel, are two completely different things. I've yet to implement camera pans, but it's in the works. I really dig the idea!

Hello, friend! I just started writing the first draft for my visual novel and I've been diving into your videos. Thanks for coming back!

I've been into amateur filmmaking and writing for years but when I came up with and fleshed out an idea for a show, my excitement got the best of me and I realized a whole month later I had no way of actually getting a show funded especially when I want it to be freely available. I remembered visual novels exist and realized the show actually functions perfectly as a VN, and now RU-vid recommends me this video. I hope to learn a lot so that it's a good VN, despite being my first.

watching other games was like a HUGE impact to see how big the world of visual novels is and how little I'am and need to learn.

beary the hatchet mention! i was the head artist on that game thanks for shouting us out :]

Yo, this was a wonderful video for advice on the games. And honestly, a little honored to see you mention Reaplaced as a good example as to how to set the tone and expectations for a game, especially since I was the writer for the game. I think that this for me was because I came from a background of writing a lot of AA fancases, which requires someone to be dead early on to even have a plot. There's a lot of good advice that I'm sure both new and experienced devs alike will appreciate. For me personaly, polish is something that I struggle with a lot. I was blessed enough to have a team that was very good at applying neat flourishes to the game to help set the haunting tone and make the game feel very sleek among other things.

Keep it up man nice videos. I think my view to Ren'py as a game engine changed a lot and it seems more practical and rewarding for me to start "coding" with . I hope I can progress further into the fundementals and furthermore make something visually appealing. So I will be watching your tutorials a lot from now on and am thanking beforehand ❤

I'm adding these as a reminder in my design document. The tips are a great tool to make sure I know what to keep working on and what the next step is.

Thank you so much for judging + giving tips!! (I worked on music for a couple of games in this jam, hoping you'll judge next year too because I love your notes on everything ^^)

Heyo, Vimi! Awesome to see a video on your judging thoughts for Spooktober 2023 (I directed “protoViolence”!) It’s always a treat to see your advice to aspiring visual novel writers - in fact, I used your cinematography tutorial when I was coding “protoViolence”’s scenes. Your tips on what (not) to do for game jam works are beautifully edited and insightful, and I’m excited to share this with my friends who want to get into VN development. Thank you for making this! 🎉

oh, you're back ! pretty good timing, i was binging your channel haha

missed this upload but great video :) always love when you drop a new one

I LOVE your videos. Each one is developer gold. Thank you for all the knowledge and wisdom shared - I hope you keep making these for years to come!

This is really helpful, thank you so much for making this video!

For the past couple of days, I've been fretting over what hypothetical vn i would turn my story into and figuring out what needs to happen to make my story more exciting and interesting & player interactivity via combat and investigation mechanics (even though I've only written down the broader strokes of the first half of the story and a bit of the ending). Watching this video made me realize that i played more vn hybrids than pure vns themselves so to help me with this, im going to through some of the vns from the game jam as well as Muv Luv, steins gate, witch on the moonlight demo, etc.

Such a good video - thx for making it.

I look forward to every video you post!

Hi just wanted to comment and say, seriously thank you sm for ur videos 🙏 everything related to renpy and VNs is outdated and confusing, so all your videos giving tips, guides and more has seriously been a big help! Tysm!

awesome content as always!

i've been working on a fan visual novel set in the project moon universe and the videos i've seen from you so far have been a huge help! the project is really just a passion project and rather niche since it's set in an existing franchise (and its going to be kinetic/no choices), but it's my first project i've planned this extensively and gotten this far into development with so i'm hoping it'll help me learn the tools to develop my completely original concepts in the future. i'll be looking through a bunch of your other videos, but i really am glad your channel exists! your videos are engaging unlike a lot of other tutorial videos/channels out there, i find them very easy to pay attention to (which is usually pretty tough for me)

I would like to see a visual novel made in powerpoint

This has hyped me in continuing my visual novel!

I just wanted to come on here and say thank you so much for your videos. All of them have been so easy to understand and follow, I enjoy your tone and thanks in part to them I just finished making my first game jam visual novel that's going up for ranking here in a day. I'm very excited and my family and friends are all super impressed not only with the game but also that I'm the one who made and completed it. I'm giving myself a month to take off from the cramming and going through some courses, but I do plan on jumping into another visual novel jam next month and I'm just so excited. So thank you. And your judging event sounded amaZing! Does the USA have a visual novel event do you know? That would be so cool to go but, alas, flying to Vietnam isn't possible. LoL thank you!

First time coming across this channel, I've recognized the other game from the thumb and decided to give it a go. Not sure if you've actually played it or just added for illustration purposes but I'll have to disagree, it's a pretty good game! Either way your tips were amazing, keep up with the good work!

Oh. I didn't expect Враже footage. Love this song❤

I've played my fair share of visual novels, and I'm in the process of planning my first one right now, so this video should help a lot

16:38 ... In hindsight, maybe us having only a handful of judges when I'm constantly trying to expand and improve the event was an... administrative oversight? We're already getting some inquiries from potential sponsors for the prizes, and I started recruiting judges early. Shooting for 10 judges this year, fingers crossed the burden will be lighter per judge this year.

16:31 best visual novel right there

Funnily enough, I seem to get most inspiration from things I didn't quite like vs things I did. When I don't like something, I tend to focus in on "why" a lot, picking out what worked and what didn't to help me in my own writing. Admittedly, I really want to make an original visual novel as I've already made some small fanfic ones to practice and I think doing a small one for a jam would help kick me into being less afraid to do something original. Do you know the average script length for jam games? You mentioned they were 20 minutes to an hour (though I guess the reality is more what can you do in a month)

I currently have around 5 games that I am working on, some of those are split in chapters/acts. I noticed that I myself need feedback in order to have my motivation keep on going. But still, I always end up take way too long brakes cause it feels endless to code something/create something you don't know if it is going to be good and rewarding (in a feeling sense). With especially this video I kind of instantly had something in mind I wanna do: I want to create a game, with an ending - My current problem is, I always want to have an open ending, cause I like to keep going on older projects. So with that being said, I try to make a short and compact one this time, set the scope real small - like 20 - 30 minutes and maybe that type of coding fits me better!

He's backkkkkk

Thanks for making this! Tbh I was just wondering whether to participate this year since I was pretty let down by the judging last year. I didn't care for the lack of transparency and some of the judges experiences they wrote about kind of rubbed me the wrong way. A lot of them spoke about not liking horror games or just skimming the games. Which sucks if you're a horror game trying to build suspense. I also felt the criteria for the shortlist didn't make much sense. Things like bugs disqualified you from it but there were several games with bugs on the list. I just think there should be more judges, the judges should be compensated for their time, and it should be required they like the genre a large portion of the games are going to be. Anyway I wasn't trying to be like grr my game should have won change your judging or anything. I just think that with a jam that has a prize like that it should be taken more s- oh shit fillerbunny? Comment cancelled, whered you get that????????????

I love that Corpse Party comes to mind right away at 1:34 lmfao... man it was such a great game though.

VND IS HERE

The early hook thing is generally good, but exceptions are genre-subversion titles, like Doki Doki, where the "hook" takes like an hour to appear, I believe, or Madoka (though it's not a VN), where the "hook" fully appears first in episode 3. Regarding Rance: Didn't it have a normal control scheme? I don't remember. It's still a hugely successful visual novel, so well yeah.

Holy cow. I'm mainly familiar with the Furry VN scene, where big mechanics like walking or even simple stuff like moving the textbox from the bottom center of the screen are just absent. A lot of those things seem very daunting to implement.

Can you please make an updated version of drag and drop?

When I made March of the Emissaries for NaNo jam of 2024, and one of the biggest critiques was that the buildup took too long. It makes me wonder how many people actually played into the action scenes I busted my ass to make lol

ive always been passionate about reading dating sims, and later on trying to make one i felt like needed to exist, knowing plenty of the places where VNs have succeeded or could've done better. i sadly worked on one by myself entirely solo for around 5+ years (between college and all that) and eventually gave up on it when i couldn't properly transfer my progress on a different computer sometime ages ago. that made me want to give up, besides the little faith i had in myself and the fact i was doing everything entirely solo for free. but i think part of the problem was how long and ambitious i tried to make it. it's been years but i've been interested in starting fresh and maybe hoping one day to pull something off and have an actual queer VN that i would've loved to find and read for myself

Videos on Visual Novels? Subscribed!!!

I am wondering if you could do a video on the financial side of creating and then releasing visual novels on store fronts such as Steam. I have been working on my own visual novel project for 2 years or so using pre-existing assets for the sprites, backgrounds etc. (it’s a long story as to why, and don’t worry I’m not doing it for any profit) and despite getting a lot of positive feedback and 10,000+ downloads I am reluctant to put the extra effort in to make it a separate, full-fledged release. This is primarily down to my concerns about the overabundance of visual novels available so I am worried it would just get lost in the crowd, and also the high cost of commissioning CG's, backgrounds and so on. Just wanted to get your thoughts on that.

I'm not really trying to make an interactive visual novel game but these are good writing tips nonetheless.

God, I hate it when visual novels won't let me progress with the space bar. Space bar should always equate to "next line of text". One visual novel had the space bar be "Hide the UI" and I kept doing it out of habit and it was so incredibly annoying.

(using the translator) congratulations on the video! Hello my friend! Do you have a complete course or Ren'py video lessons for sale? I created a story and was thinking about doing an interactive type of manga, but Ren'py seems like the best option. I'm Brazilian, so the language barrier is the first problem, but your video lesson is well explained, plus Google Translate, I think I can handle it. Thank you for your attention and I look forward to your response!

Finally vimi is back ... Means he is not death ☠️💀😂

Don't stop record ❤

inescapable could learn from several of these.........

Hold on a sec: 1. “Don’t bury the lead” and 2. “Build your atmosphere” This does seem like good advice, Yet DDLC seemingly breaks both of these rules. I mean It does build up an atmosphere for pretty much most of the playthrough, yet it isn’t for like a solid 30ish minutes before anything actually happens, and even then, all cards still aren’t on the table. Can anyone explain how and why this exactly works?

Huh. So that's what a "visual novel" is.

I don't know, visual novels, as a genre, feels very incestuous. I'd suggest looking at actual literature, and getting your ideas from other forms of media. I mean, well, there's a concept I've been thinking about called "Friendscape" which is about parasocial media. People who read books because the characters feel like friends, or perceive media as though they're supposed to put themselves in the place of the protagonist, instead of process the story as meaningful entertainment. I think we have to ask ourselves what the purpose of a work is; and if it's intent is to replace something real, ditch it. So I think the healthy approach to Visual Novels is creating an amazing interactive narrative, that can branch off, and still be meaningful as a story. Because that's what literature is, and because it's healthy. I don't know if I should post this. It's a bit rambly.

So you watched five minutes of something that usually takes hours to get through and bullshitting on whether something is good or not.