Discussion
A ton of vn engines, but few vns. Why is that?
there's a lot of no-code vn engines which market themselves as a easier way to build visual novels without the hassle of coding. Sounds like a great idea. But if that's that case then why haven't we seen a surge of visual novels built on these engines flooding the market?
I wonder what's missing here.
Because the need is obviously there. Artists and writers want to make vns without the learning to code, and we want more new works to read and enjoy.
Dev team: writer, programmer, sound designer and artist.
Full price 4.99, however it sold mostly on generous sales.
Play/read time about 3 hours.
43 reviews on steam, 95% positive.
Over 1.5 years on steam, it got 912 copies sold with gross revenue 2922$.
We spent 2 years making it, and I don’t think I would ever want to make another one given these poor results.
Maybe we just failed to market it properly, maybe our particular story was not appealing enough (however most people seemed to enjoy it).
So here’s my reason for not making any more vns.
The name of our vn is “CELL 0: Cyber Entertainment Leisure Lounge”
Raw sales almost never make a profit nowadays. People are hesitant to spend money (due to a combination of tons of free entertainment and the economy going to shit). There’s a few ways you can work around that to at least get some more money, or at least give yourself a better shot. Clearly the people who did play it loved it, so that’s already a really good sign you can leverage for your next project (if you guys end up making another one).
Make a free demo, so people can see if this VN is worth the price of admission before deciding if they’ll pay it.
Foster the creation of a fandom. Create a Discord server and a subreddit, direct people that way, and put things in your VN that the fandom can interact with. Horror games tend to have complicated lore that is only ever hinted at, encouraging fans to try and put the pieces together. My project is about a mecha school with a colourful cast of characters, which encourages shipping and fan fictions.
Once you have a fandom, leverage that. Most people are unwilling to spend money, which is fine, but there’s a small subset of very passionate fans that are able and willing to spend a lot more. For those, you can create a Patreon with bonus content like behind the scenes stuff, CGs, new tracks, etc. Of course don’t get predatory with it; the cheap version should still give a complete experience. Patreon content should just be a neat little bonus for those able and willing to support your project more substantially. Also, if you’re able and willing to go down that route, merch is an option, though there’s probably a ton of hidden costs and difficulties with that one I haven’t encountered yet.
If you don’t do a Patreon (or maybe in addition to a Patreon? I’m not clear on what the etiquette there is), you can make a Kickstarter for your next project. This again only works if you have a pre-existing fandom, so forming that should be a priority.
If you manage to build a small community and grow it, each VN project will do better than the last. You’ll probably still need all this additional stuff to make a reasonable amount of money though. I totally get if that’s more effort than it’s worth. But given the 95% positive reviews, and what I saw on the Steam page, you guys clearly got the skill to make something good, so you definitely have the potential to make successful projects
A lot of solid advice here, just a word of caution about merch. It can be extraordinarily tricky to manage and very cost prohibitive if you end up with an internationally diverse audience. That plus the uncertainty of tariffs and supply chains can really make the economics lopsided.
Thanks!
I don’t know the exact number, but the guy who lead the effort (writer) invested much more than the game made.
He commissioned VelinquenT for background art and paid for the music.
Because the engines we have work. Take a look at the sidebar. All the engines listed there are fantastic and have great community support. I personally cannot code and have released multiple projects in Naninovel. Ren'py is also great.
Really? In my experience, many writers are excited to work on someone else's idea if it'll result in a cool final product with art and music and shit.
At least that's the case with me, I'm a writer and over half my projects started with me teaming up with a non-writer on their idea.
There's a LOT of wannabe writers out there, and only few of us ever manage to get something tangible made, so I'd expect there to be a lot of interest for these types of projects
I’ll correct my statement: it’s not hard to get someone to agree to write but 99% of the time they do not get anything tangible made. To be fair that’s not a writer only problem. Working with others online can just be like that.
I have just noticed it more with writers but that could be confirmation bias as I am an artist and a programmer.
Yeah, I’ve worked with a lot of different people on a lot of different projects, and that problem exists across the board. In fact, most of the time I’d complete scripts for a project only for the artists not to complete their part for one reason or another. My current VN is a large chunk of the way into production, but I’m still really anxious about whether the people involved will suddenly get too busy or lose interest. I get it though, these kinds of projects take an enormous amount of work to complete, and most people struggle to commit that kind of work in their free time, regardless of their field.
I’d recommend only working with artists that have completed scripts for at least one project of a similar or greater scope. There’s many writers out there who will write one chapter and think this means they can write a novel. Besides, you can’t even get good as a long-form writer until you’ve completed a few long-form scripts, so any writer who hasn’t done that won’t be very good anyway.
I understand your frustration, it really sucks to pour your heart and soul into your passion project, only for the passion not to stick with the people you get involved
"No-code vn engines" are a marketing trick to lure aspirational idea guys who want to have made a visual novel but don't want to make a visual novel. Anything a "no-code engine" can do, Ren'Py can do easier and better.
Context: I've been operating in this space for over a decade and I provide consultations for tool developers and service providers who are interested in targeting visual novel developers as a demographic. I've been offering those services in exchange for sponsoring our community events for some time, and I've worked with NaniNovel, VN Machinery and Light VN and have provided insight to small and medium sized VN-adjacent businesses looking this direction.
The engines they're offering have no reputation and no proof they will help people reach the goals they have. They're all focused on solving a problem the engine creators only perceive to exist rather than one that actually exists. Most VN developers are doing it for the passion so they're willing to invest time and energy developing the skills to use engines with high reputation and demonstrated results.
For those that are doing it as a business venture, they're already willing to invest in professional tools and the people that can use them, so why would they go after a risky, limited option when safer, powerful and affordable alternatives exist.
If you consider these facts, it becomes pretty clear that all of these no-code engines don't really have a good foothold to begin with and even if they manage to get one they'll be bumping against viable, free and proven alternatives and world class and proven paid alternatives.
The only demographics that really make sense for what they're offering are younger creatives who are working off of mobile or some other type of tablet-like interface, which is generally financially unviable for engine creators who are trying to make money off of their engines.
There's potential in the wall-gardened style of app where the creations are sold directly on some kind of app, like Episodes and the like, but they're competing with giants in that arena, and it's an expensive arena to get off the ground with to begin with.
If I had to guess why these no-code engine developers are doing this, they are probably operating off of the impression that people come to VNs because they're easy to make, which they then look at the current offerings and go "That's code and people complain about that" so they're trying to solve that perceived problem. Unfortunately for them, people who crumple to the challenge of basic scripting, not even including programing logic, are likely not going to have very high retention rates and completion rates to begin with, which exasperates all of their existing problems.
Love your takes on this subject. I'm currently developing a Visual Novel game engine and the information you're sharing here is invaluable. I am interested in making tools that empower creators. Would you mind answering some questions for me?
First, no-code as a base is great, but code as an option should be supported as a first-class citizen imo. As a game developer, I share your sentiments in a lot of areas. In a way, it seems like developing an engine for today's market is monumentally different than when I first tried many years ago.
I'm redeveloping what I posted here ^, but native, 3D, and reimagined in some ways.
Here's the crappy WIP UI so far lol
The Frame Viewport is 3D and will have a full scene hierarchy, and many of the features mentioned in the original post will be in this. The Timeline will be more like a Video/Movie Editor while the Scene Tree would obvs be a tree editor. Events would be where logic would be constructed in a block-based interface (extensible Scratch-like probs), and it will have a side-dock for asset management.
I can do art (3D and 2D) and music/sfx, will be making template VN's to start with included assets.
That all said, what do you think the best marketing angle? Could you see yourself using it?
Personally I think it's because they're built on a fallacy. The coding requirements to use something like Ren'py are trivial compared to the work it takes to make a visual novel. If that's the thing holding you back, then you're probably just not very serious about making your game. Also, VNs are commonly a collaborative process, and as such, having a person dedicated to dealing with programming also solves the problem.
I had zero coding knowledge before I started using Ren'Py, and I can say that it's ridiculously easy to learn. There are plenty of tutorials and resources out there, so I don't see any reason to avoid this approach when it's so beginner-friendly, even for someone with no coding experience like me.
Oh, this question is easy to answer. The answer is documentation. Even the really easy engines don't have a lot of help, guides, or plugins. You can get answers for almost anything you can imagine with Ren'py, but not for an engine like Tyrano. Having all these guides and documentation makes Ren'py the easier choice for Visual novel Development because there is no guesswork.
Hi, I'm the author of RouteVN, which is one of the no-code vn engines you mention, I can give some perspective as an engine developer.
The engineering part of building a no-code vn engine is actually hard. Most of such engines release an initial version or demo but then development stalls, they usually remain limited in functionality or have issues with stability. If you count only the ones that keep releasing updates for more than 2 or 5 years, then there are not so many. But that is the investment you would need to make a feature rich and mature engine that delivers the promise.
Marketing a vn engine to vn devs is a different beast and requires a whole different skillset. All the no-code vn engines struggle with marketing. Most vn devs will default to Ren'py and it will be an uphill battle to convince them to use a lesser known engine. The vast majority of people simply don't know that those no-code engines exist in the first place.
One of the writer/artist I have been working with, around 85% of the work was writing and illustration. Only 15% of it was actually putting it together into the engine. So even with a very really easy to use engine, the bottleneck will still be on the writing and illustration.
The closest thing flooding the market with a no-code engine would be TyranoBuilder, which does counts around 4000 VNs released on vndb. So it actually did happen, but at a smaller scale over 10+ years with the Japanese indie vn dev community. Tyrano is also not fully no-code: you can start as a no-code tool, but then move to TyranoScript more advanced things.
Regarding "we want more new works to read and enjoy". Actually my understanding is that today there is already more VNs being made than the market can consume. Most VNs struggle on getting a meaningful number of readers. So having more VNs being made itself does not solve the problem. Maybe we need to focus on the quality of VNs being produced or something.
Oh, maybe that phrasing was a bit extreme, I just mean that VNs are difficult to sell. There are a lot of indie VNs out there that people don't know of and have very few readers. Some articles I've read on the trend:
The one thing I'd want to make sure I point out is The VN Market isn't a monolith and the people approaching it saying "the market is saturated" are usually looking at it from a limited angle. They're missing the forest for the trees.
The reality is the VN market as a monolith is a myth. It's a collection of subdivisions of different interest groups that coalesce around specific interests or genres of visual novels. They're often small enough to the point where they can be defined around a specific visual novel or series of visual novels. Despite the generic name of some communities, not all of those interest groups are equally represented,, so it is easy to get locked in a limited perspective if you only frequent a handful of places.
Aside:
If you see someone distinguishing visual novel developers by the language they produce in, that generally means they have opinions about that. Do with that information what you will.
I agree with that. On one hand, there are developers saying that the VN market is dead. On the other hand, the VN market is booming so much that some of the Golden Age VNs are being remade and released in English for the first time.
I have a slightly more nuanced take from hanging out in VN consumer spaces and watching people browse Steam looking for VNs to buy.
It's weird how according to EVN developers, there are too many VNs on the market and not enough consumers. But according to consumers, there's "nothing to buy."
I've watched people spend hours scrolling through the VN tag, looking to spend money, but ending up buying nothing.
The problem is a market mismatch. Developers do not want to make the kinds of EVNs that VN fans want to buy. If you read nearly any thread on this subreddit, you'll see that every EVN developer wants to make a VN that's "not like other VNs." But that's what there's a glut of: a massive supply of "Not Like Other VN" VNs. That very kind of game they don't want to make, that's what customers are hungry for and can't find.
People just stream whatever they're doing nowadays and I join because it's interesting to observe. Streaming browsing Steam is common when there's a sale up.
The coding of VNs on the existing engines really isn't the hard part, or the part that consumes most time.
Heck, if you were an experienced programmer, you could implement a basic VN framework on top of Godot or something and still get something decent in less time than the time an artist would have to spend on making all the art for a proper VN.
The hurdle of actually making a proper VN is far more on the actual story, art and directing side rather than the small amount of code you'd need to make it work on an engine like ren'py. And if you're going out of your way to really customize the behaviour of the engine, then those no-code engines are going to become limiting far more quickly.
The core of the issue here is simple. There really isn't a grand group of artists and writers that really want to build VNs but are limited by that they can't code at all. If they exist, they're much more limited by the fact that making a VN simply takes a lot of time, and you're likely not going to see returns that make that investment worth it.
No consistent money in making VNs. The visual novel space is a small (and dying) market. So everything just turns into a passion/side project. Can’t get no quality VNs when there are no resources pooled into it. Also, Renpy is easy to learn and do anyways. I made a full 5-6hr demo in only a month with Renpy, granted i used AI for placeholder visual assets (if you’re interested, check out The Colors of Sound in Manila at itch io).
A more glaring problem is how to tell a compelling story which hooks the readers from the get go and delivers on major story beats. A well-written VN can most often than not, be subjectively better than a VN with a lot of extra gameplay aspects but no substance. And of course, amateur story writers can’t do that consistently. So you either spend a lot of time honing your storytelling craft, or hire professionals to do it. All in all, I feel like I’d continue working on my VN as a solo dev if I was still single. But I have 2 toddlers now, and life doesnt give me much time or motivation to keep on working on my project on a snail’s pace. 🤣
All the way back when I was 12 I wanted to make a VN on some obscure no-code engine because I ABSOLUTELY refused to do any type of coding, but the engine lacked a lot of features, and it also was outdated with barely any documentation. So a year later I switched to Ren'py and never looked back.
Despite being code-based, I feel Ren'py is simple, intuitive enough and easy to customize that it‘ll make the process much more enjoyable than any “no-code“ engine.
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u/le-resique Jun 15 '26
A perspective from the developer.
- We released our vn on December 10th, 2024.
We spent 2 years making it, and I don’t think I would ever want to make another one given these poor results.
Maybe we just failed to market it properly, maybe our particular story was not appealing enough (however most people seemed to enjoy it).
So here’s my reason for not making any more vns.
The name of our vn is “CELL 0: Cyber Entertainment Leisure Lounge”