it is exactly a handbook for your hobby

Glad to have you back in the world of game dev!

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!

Thank you! I'm glad they're helping!

Thank you! I try my best!

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!

Bro photrash???? Interesting too see you here!!

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.

​@@vimithis helps

Thank you!

Thank you!

and I'm happy to keep making them!

I'd have to think over this one!

@vimi cool that you're responding to comments after all this time! i hope my idea gives some brain juice ^^

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 don't want to rock the VNDev world until my video essay, "Annapurna's FLORENCE is the GREATEST VISUAL NOVEL EVER!"

You guys are a frequent point of reference I make for other visual novel devs! Keep up the amazing work!

❤‍🔥❤‍🔥❤‍🔥

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!!!

Seconding that, the thought of maintaining a social media presence sounds absolutely godawful, but I can see how important it is!

I see that same template in SO MANY places!

I'm working on it!

Totally valid strategy!

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!

My action editor + images can cover some basics: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gdWJi92DqqzcZHU.html And then I have another video on animation that should cover everything else you need!

I had to buy a second suitcase in Japan for all the secondhand Jojo figurines I bought 😍

@@vimi Ahh yes, a real Jobro😌

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/

@@vimi omg, thank you so much for the answer! This is extremely valuable information. Also, I love your videos. Can't wait for the next one.

@@recentlydanny 4 days from now, fingers crossed

Ack! I'm sorry! My visuals have really been improving over time, but there's still a lot I need to learn about audio mixing!!!

In a few months, yes!

@@vimi Awesome, thanks! :D

hell yeah bro!

I haven't been able to get it working well with a held keypress; it gets super jittery.

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!

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.

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!

@@vimi Good point!

🤬it's not the /worst/ business model I've seen... 🤬

@@vimi I know few devs who still updating one game since 2015 and have over 7k on patreon 😏

@@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.

Here's an article that covers the basics of google analytics integration with ren'py: patreon.renpy.org/analytics.html

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.

@@vimi Thank you!

I just grabbed it from the youtube audio library! It's a bunch of stock music, so the VN may have just pulled it from the same audio library???

@@vimi I love it and it was the main reason I began learning RenPy and Honey Select, technical issues aside; I can't come up with a coherent story!

Yes, but it's a lot of work, and you may have to do a bunch of reinterpreting! It's also much more expensive!

@@vimi What makes it more expensive?

​@@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

Monster Prom!

@@vimi thank you!

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.

:D

I heartily agree, capitalism sucks.

🌟As a professional game dev, I endorse pre-made assets.🌟 I'd elaborate, but I'll save it for another video 😎

@@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!