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I recommend trello.com, git and the scrum method. You discuss and plan tasks together, you put them up on Trello and assign them to people. Trello lets you see who is doing what and what the task status is. That way everyone knows what others are doing and people are held accountable. If you set loose deadlines and no one sticks to them, you are heading for problems. The most important thing IMO is to discuss things regularly to make sure you solve problems and revise your system - projects often stagnate and die when people have issues that go unsolved and later cause an avalanche of other problems, in the end, people start dropping off and the project is cancelled.

Hello! One way to do it would be to use a viewport in a custom screen; this way you can navigate the image with the mouse.

https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/screens.html#viewport

You can also learn about viewport in the tutorial included with Renpy; it's a very useful ressource in general!

Good luck with your project!

I haven't tested this, but to make sections of the game unskippable you could try this:

$ renpy.pause(1.0, hard=True)
The 1.0 is the time until the user can press to skip.
Making a game play automatically is what the Auto function is for, so if you do some digging, you may find a way to have it turned on by default.

For voice functions, here's the documentation on the matter: https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/voice.html
"Voice sustain" may be what you're looking for?
As Karrion said, the Lemmasoft Forum is a great place to ask more specific questions.

So what's happening there is that you're attempting to pass an object named sfx (which isn't defined anywhere) as opposed to the string "sfx" (which is a string indicating, in this case, a mixer).

If you're ever referencing something in Ren'Py using a python statement like this, be it a mixer, sound channel, label, whatever, you will more often than not need to pass its name as a string.

Replace that line with the following:

renpy.music.register_channel("environment", mixer="sfx", tight=True, buffer_queue=True)

(Again, like in my other example, all the parameters you aren't changing from their defaults are omitted)

And on a related note: I'm curious as to why you're sticking stuff related to your sound in a rpy file that, based on its name, is meant for stuff relating to graphics. Then again, I've seen projects released on Steam that stick all of their script - audio, graphics, and all - inside script.rpy, so you're already doing better than them, IMO.

quick edit: I'm gonna go ahead and link you to the old tutorial regarding adding a sound channel that's on the deprecated wikidoc. The code and renpy script on there works, though if you like being verbose in your function calls (which you seem to be), the following two lines of code are equivalent:

renpy.music.register_channel("nature", "sfx", True) renpy.music.register_channel("nature", mixer="sfx", loop=True)

Double-check the current documentation. You were on the right track with changing mixer, but there's only 3 mixers defined by default:

• "music" - used for music
• "sfx" - used for sound effects other than voices
• "voice" - used for voices

These are the three built-in mixers. If you want to add additional mixers, you will need to add a preference setting on the preferences menu for them (follow the same pattern as with the music and sound sliders, only instead of "xxx volume", use "mixer xxx volume" where xxx is the name of your mixer)

As an additional aside, your channel-creation statement in your post can be simplified to the following:

renpy.music.register_channel("environment", mixer=None, tight=True, buffer_queue=True)

When using keyword (named) arguments in Python, the order does not matter. It's only when using positional (unnamed) arguments that order matters. Since the only parameter that does NOT have a default value is the name, that's actually the only strictly-required parameter, though it is highly suggested to set the mixer parameter to a mixer (see above).

You should take a look at ren'py Animation and Transformation Language

consider for example:

show goldy: xalign 0.5 ease 0.5 zoom 1.2

you can do a lot of stuff with it. you can keep adding instructions that will all be shown in sequence. with the repeat command you could even, for example, make it grow larger and smaller in a continuous loop. do that fast enough and the result can be quite distracting.

If you have no prior experience in any of the things involved in a visual novel and have no particular direction then it'll be a hard bargain convincing people to let you join their team.

To learn how to make a visual novel, I would suggest following Renpy's Quickstart guide. It goes step by step how to use Ren'py to make a very very simple visual novel. Once you have a grasp of those basic tools you'll be able to start learning other things more easily. I recommend you try to make a whole simple game by yourself before trying to join other people.

To find other developers and people interested in VN development, as well as hoards of more information on the making of visual novels, check out the lemmasoft forums.

If you mean self voicing, it doesn't work with Android

https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/self_voicing.html

> Self-voicing mode is not supported on Android, iOS, or Chrome OS.

You can work around this in a sense by recording and playing voice audio lines with dialogue, but that won't cover things like menus that self-voicing does: https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/voice.html

What is the exact school requirement? That the script lines are voiced, or that the game has voicing as an accessibility feature?

Yeah I don't know if there's a great parallel for that here, given it's essentially a programming or scripting language. And the thing with programming is you're not so much supposed to remember all the functions, because there's just too many and they're complex, but you should have an idea of how and where to look for them when you need them.

If you haven't made a basic visual novel yet, then I think the best thing you could do is follow the quickstart tutorial. It goes over all the components needed to make a visual novel, and then if you want to tweak anything or get fancier then it's a matter of looking up that thing in the documentation. https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/quickstart.html

The home page of the documentation has everything laid out neatly by category so you know where to search: https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/

as it says here: https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/audio.html#renpy.music.register_channel

"mixer
The name of the mixer the channel uses. By default, Ren'Py knows about the "music", "sfx", and "voice" mixers. Using other names is possible, but may require changing the preferences screens."

You've set it to None which means that no slider will ever affect it. either set it to one of the 3 basic ones or make a new one and adjust your preferences screen to account for this new channel.

I've been approaching my multiple routes by drawing out how I want them to progress. You can use any kind of flowchart program or, in my case I use Twine. You can plan out the big chunks this way and at a top down glance figure out where to add or remove branches in your storyline. Twine in particular also would let you put your passages inside each "node" of the story, so that might make it easy for your proofreaders / friends reading your drafts to understand what's going where.

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I think the horror visual novel called The Letter actually does something kinda similar to what you're proposing, as it has 7 playable characters that you swap perspectives between with their own relationships and such to eachother. Maybe playing it will give you some ideas of how to execute your idea. That said, it may be wise to try reducing your scope if this is your first game or if you feel you're having trouble keeping track of everything.

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I will defend things like Uncle Mugen's BGs, OpenGameArt.org and the free stuff on itch.io to the death and for good reason. You can make a compelling game with free assets-you will never look as good as someone with a budget but you can get more done faster that way.

Let's be honest: the first several games you make are gonna be bad. They're gonna be incomplete. You are still learning and there's no shame in that. It angers me sometimes that people shame newbies for these practices.

For the first 20 games you make that aren't very good, you can and should make use of those resources and placeholders. You do NOT need polished graphics from the very beginning. I paid a portion to a friend who cut me a deal on my first serious project (not finished yet) - and I relied on Google Fonts and placeholder music because I simply don't know many musical artists and am nervous about relying on some random dude on Tumblr with suspiciously low prices.

I am not ashamed of the tool I use to work on the VN. It's very basic in ways. It is flawed and I work very slowly-but I'm getting it done without worrying too much-and the community around Cloudnovel is pretty great!

HIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!
It's my first post here typing with a half-broken keyboard and an on-screen keyboard as a backup. Graduated from the uni this year and now, I'm juggling with this and finding a job ... maybe.
So, recently, I made an update on a visual novel called Hiking Kemonomimi a few days ago. Do check it out and show the lassie who owns a bigger tail. Anyway, I made a blog weeks ago blabbing about revising the art work and for this week and the weeks to come. I'm still going to do more of that ... with other changes. Mainly, the additional black and white strip of the MC's backstory.
Currently, there is one side of the route I think it is acceptable for the demo while the other side of the route being less than partially done. I'm doing that now.
I need to change the outdated synopsis as well, probably because I don't know what I am doing. Well, for some reason, the story started out on how the MC's life begins and later on ended up in a situation where he meets the demi-human while on his hiking trip with his friends but then it didn't turn out well and someone gonna lose something. Oh, and it's planned to be M-rated. Be warned.

If you want to have an engine to make a VN pitch demo, I'd suggest Renpy: https://www.renpy.org/

You don't get a great engine to do custom features but it supports flags that you can use to create branching paths. They also have very beginner friendly documentation.

If you have any questions regarding making your demo, drop me a DM, happy to help.

"Most used" is the operative term there.

There's a lot of functionality in Ren'py, and while there's a handful of tags that will get tons of reuse (label, jump, show, etc.), there are SO many transforms, properties, statements, and python segments, not to mention all the different ways to customize and add screens, that most projects will only use a fraction of what's available.

On a bigger level, everything you'll find in the official Ren'py documentation is nothing compared to variables and functions you'll make on your own!

So generally, as I'm coding, if there are important codelines, variables, and other things I need to input over and over, I'll just make a labeled text document so I can ctrl+C and ctrl+V those snippets.

I can't comment on other engines, but this is what I know about Ren'Py.

I have not worked with ads in a VN before, and Ren'Py has no native ad support. I searched and found a few guides for using ads in Ren'Py, but don't know if they would still work.

For paying for specific content I know that Ren'Py has an in app purchase API.

I hope this helps!

I'm not sure how you could set up multiple variations of that using the default ren'py gui settings - POSSIBLY something could work by setting these variables to OTHER variables that you can manually change and call in set functions, and then call gui.init?

> define gui.dialogue_xpos = [var1]

> define gui.dialogue_ypos = [var2]

> define gui.namebox_width = [var3]

But right now I'm not on a computer that can test that, so the one thing that I DO know can work is to put the text in manually with new screens; the example screen "click to continue" is probably what you'd want.

It's a bit more work to put together, so if you need to use this a LOT, it's probably not the best option for you.

https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/nvl_mode.html

Again, depends on your individual needs and work methods. Sometimes the reason something won't work for you doesn't become clear until you start implementing.

Definitely very helpful. I get that most people play VNs on desktop (it seems). But I was hoping to make one for mobile. Seems like RenPy would be the best fit for what I’m trying to do... but on https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/ios.html what does it mean - “the default Ren'Py interface does not comply with Apple's guidelines and will need to be changed.” Like the default way the game interface looks isn’t allowed by Apple?

As a follow up - is there a good framework for unity VNs? I see yarn spinner.dev and https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/systems/naninovel-visual-novel-engine-135453

Really appreciate the advice from everyone.

Ren'py has support for Android and iOS, though due to the proprietary nature of iOS there's some caveats and you can read more about that in the documentation. https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/ios.html

Android part works perfect, though.

I didn't get to play around much with VN maker so I can't speak much on that one, but as far as I know Ren'py is the most versatile and well understood in that if you run into issues or want sample code, you can find just about anything you need. Also best if you are familiar with python.

Tyranno is good if you prefer a more visual interface or if you prefer coding in JavaScript as it's built on that. Unsure how good it's mobile build implementation is though so hopefully someone else with more experience with it here can elaborate on that.

Godot or Unity will give you the most flexibility when it comes to adding other kinds of game components since they're more general purpose engines rather than VN oriented, though you can do a lot with Pygame for Ren'py, though you won't have a nice visual editor to work with.

Ren'Py is not a ton of learning. Didn't mean to scare you. It would be residual learning of Python, you'll realize that you have a lot of the fundamentals if you do it long enough sort of thing. Not active learning unless you want to do complex stuff. Most of Ren'Py's code is "show [image] at [place]" It's so simple. I honestly don't think I've seen an easier language.

Stock assets are all over the internet, free and paid. The VN community shares these with each other all the time. The Lemmasoft forum is a great place for this (account creation password is "rollback").

It's no harder to add video to Ren'Py than it is an image. You define it and then show it. https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/movie.html

Check https://www.renpy.org/dev-doc/html/screen_special.html?#main-menu

Change the part of the title screen that says "vbox" to "hbox" and give the frame the style property of something like "align (0.5,0.5)". It'll look weird so for more fine tuning read Ren'Py's documentation on screens and styles.

an imagemap with hotspots should work just fine even today. have a look here for details:
https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/screens.html#imagemap-statements

you mentioned however that you couldn't get it to work. any errors or weird behaviour your seeing when you try?

The story is really interesting. I think the requirements from the artists are a bit of a tall order. Do you live in the UK? I recommend taking pictures yourself and using a filter like this for your backgrounds: http://www.fotosketcher.com/ I'm pretty sure there's zero free background artists since it's the rarest skill set for artists.

I don't think any artist wants to do research on a volunteer project, so you should make it easier on them by giving them the research material to base it off from (or pay them enough to be willing to do it). Also a semi-realistic artist is harder to find as most interested in VNs tend to have a strong anime style. For the time being, use free sprites as the placeholders (you'll need to do it anyway): http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewforum.php?f=52 Once you have a convincing demo with lots of the assets in place, you'll probably have an easier time in getting an artist (or enough material to make a KS pitch I suppose).

deviantArt has a stock section with lots of free content, some even already stylized: https://www.deviantart.com/resources/whats-hot/?q=room https://www.deviantart.com/resources/whats-hot/?q=vn+background

Just make sure to credit the creator and check if the uploader has the rights to the image. (Sometimes people just rip backgrounds from existing VNs they didn't even make.)

While Lua seems like a nice idea and is widely used, IMHO it's a terrible language. All larger Lua implementations hack some variant of OOP together which is harder to use than if it just was natively supported. I personally just feel it's kinda hacky and not super well suited for larger projects due to being very limited.

I would really look into something else instead. Python or JavaScript I guess being two very popular contenders. If you target developers or people who want to become ones, they are fine choices.

I would advise not to do your own unless you are really passionate about it. Writing your own scripting language is a lot of fun, and I have done it plenty of times, but actually implementing enough to make it useful, will require a lot of work, and it's very likely not worth it.

If you target non-dev authors or artist-types, I think you might look at Ink or Inform 7 to get an inspiration or just build some DSL yourself, which is less cool but more accessible.

It would better for you to understand clearly what you're doing and, using that ability, be able to grow upon it, so that's why I'd recommend you to read this Python tutorial https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/index.html (it may not be as simple and beginner friendly though), or you could in some way obtain a book (I'd recommend this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Python-Crash-Course-2nd-Edition-dp-1593279280/dp/1593279280) that introduces a person who has never coded properly to this programming language.

Hello devs, last week me and a friend released an app for making & playing simple visual novels for Android (no coding required). The Apple Store version should come soon.

On this version, it's possible to export the novel and play it in the same app. We are considering adding APK and EXE exporting in the future.

Although advanced novel customization is not possible at the moment, it could be useful for POCs or having fun in general.

Google Play: Link

Documentation: Link

Reddit: r/KochoVN

(Images from Pixabay)