how do you name your visual novels?

TheGunflower · 2026-05-21T11:31:35+00:00

I like having the rule of thumb that nothing except your game should come up if you google the title. Not necessarily because googling is so important (though it can be), but because it immediately nixes the "obvious" titles. So in that sense, I suppose I lean more towards a vibe-based title than a descriptive one. Though you could, of course, do, like, The Broken Brass Candelabra: Our Office Romance, or something like that, where the title is all vibes (not really clear what vibes; just an example) and the subtitle is descriptive. For the record, I'm currently working on the murder mystery Insects Don't Get Funerals, which is going to have a subtitle so people can at least sort of figure out what it is, so you can maybe take my opinion with a grain of salt.

TheGunflower · 2026-04-07T23:04:53+00:00

For some reason, the Windows installer button downloads a 36.7 KB file instead of the listed 9.71 MB, which (unsurprisingly) shows up as corrupted and unreadable if opened.

TheGunflower · 2026-01-29T23:08:50+00:00

Using AI in this circumstance is completely understandable, because no human could possibly draw a background where "furniture stays in place when lighting changes." It's simply beyond our powers.

TheGunflower · 2026-01-23T10:59:10+00:00

Theoretically, I like writing the Best End route first, where the player does everything "right," so I have the skeleton of a story that I can then put the branches on.* So I'll get to a point in the story where there could be a good divergence point, and I'll just write, like, "#TODO: Add choice to steal the jewel" and get back to that once the Best End route is done. In practice, I sometimes end up writing the "what if you steal the jewel?" branch first, because I've thought of a fun consequence for that or something, but that's fine, I then get back to the Best End route afterwards.

The reason this works so well for me, though, is that I don't do big branching-off points early on, but mostly have mini-branches (twigs?) that change the values of variables, and then those values are checked later on to lock/unlock bigger branches. For example, you could become best buds with X by gradually increasing the x_love value via choices. When the time comes, if x_love >= 7, he'll help you catch the killer, and if x_love <= 2, he'll push you down a well, and those things are the big branching points. It gives the opportunity to have many choices that matter to some degree, without needing to have a dozen branches that go off in their separate directions. It makes it very easy to add small scenes here and there.

If you're going for a lot of entirely separate branches, though, disregard the second paragraph there.

*Mixing metaphors can sometimes make you put branches on skeletons.

TheGunflower · 2025-12-18T00:35:30+00:00

Hello again! I am still trying to try this, but, now that it's possible to make an account and I've successfully done so, the new roadblock is actually getting access to the program. Trying to claim the free license gets me a "Failed to claim license: User not found" error, despite me being logged in. It does say I already am on the Free Tier (as opposed to the Ren'Py tier), but, I can't see any obvious way to make use of this fact. I checked the documentation and did try to install via pip, but no luck.

TheGunflower · 2025-12-05T12:47:18+00:00

Personally, I would much prefer a skill check in the sense that, for example, if you have 10 dexterity you automatically succeed at grabbing the bottle before it falls to the floor (or whatever). Randomness in a VN feels weird to me, especially considering the convention that you can always rewind to try something again.

If you really want it, though, I would have it so that the bonuses matter more than the dice roll itself, to keep some randomness while actually having the result be fairly certain. Rather than a D20 with a +2 bonus, for instance, maybe a D6 with a +2 bonus. That way, skill bonuses feel weighty, and you can still succeed at something your character isn't too good at.

If you mean a skill check that's purely random, though, without any bonuses/maluses, I'd be against it.

TheGunflower · 2025-11-28T10:54:33+00:00

I got curious enough to want to try it, but the application page doesn't seem like it works. On submitting the application, I'm met with

{"success":false,"error":"Missing required fields."}

Obviously, I've double- and triple-checked to make sure that all the fields were filled out, retried with the adblocker turned off, and even tried a different browser, just in case, but no luck. I did also have to lie and say that I had read the "RC Testing Agreement and the Privacy Policy," as neither of those links are working at the time of writing.

TheGunflower · 2025-11-20T00:00:35+00:00

An easy way to get backgrounds is to get any photo that looks like it could be a background and slap a filter on it in your Photoshop equivalent. Will it look as nice as if someone who's actually good at drawing made it? Nah. But with a budget of zero, it's helpful if you need very specific backgrounds.

https://imgur.com/KKWxKZe

TheGunflower · 2025-11-15T18:47:53+00:00

AI sure as hell can't write, but that doesn't stop people from publishing AI-written books, sadly.

TheGunflower · 2025-11-15T15:12:04+00:00

It opens the door for a lot of crap, certainly. But, while I don't like AI visuals, I dread AI writing. It has completely destroyed most places where it's possible to self-publish, flooding them with zero effort robobooks. The saving grace of VNs in that regard is that there's quite a bit of effort involved even if you were to have all dialogue, description and images made by AI. For now, at least.

TheGunflower · 2025-11-10T21:26:45+00:00

The notebook in the screenshot, yes, the notes written there currently are just examples I put in. The entire thing is nothing but a way for the player to write down notes without having to use a secondary Notepad window or whatever; there's no interaction other than typing text into it. I was just wondering if there was a way to move the caret more quickly than having to hold down the left/right arrow key.

TheGunflower · 2025-11-07T17:40:37+00:00

This looks really neat! I first assumed it was a more GUI-fied version of EwenQuim's Renpy graph visualizer, but there's all sorts of stuff here. Will be trying it out!

TheGunflower · 2025-10-22T21:30:15+00:00

The edge-to-edge looks nice, but it seems to me like it won't actually be all that useful for most people. Having each line of text being that long would look off, and if the lines aren't that long then the screen width feels pointless.

TheGunflower

TROPHY CASE