My steps of making the visual novel for the first time alone, from 0 to 1

In this post, I'll share the steps that I took to make the visual novel for the first time, from 0 to 1. I hope it will be helpful and encouraging for beginners like me.

First, I had an idea and a general plot for what I wanted to make into a visual novel. (I'll elaborate on the detailed idea in another post on game design.) Of course, the idea will be modified a lot in the following steps, but a general idea is a must. It helped me go through the whole process. Even when taking difficult steps such as programming for adding albums and variables, I never thought of giving up on the project.

Second, I downloaded RenPy, got familiar with its basic programming, and wrote my story. After playing "Detroit: Become Human" and "A Summer's End - Hong Kong 1986," I knew the game I wanted to create belonged to the visual novel genre. I searched "how to create a visual novel," and I found RenPy. Its interface was quite friendly for beginners. Just a click of "edit file," and I can edit .rpy files in Atom. Since I had used Atom when I learned basic programming in Coursera and EdX, the interface was familiar, and I decided to use RenPy without trying other visual novel editors. I then became familiar with basic grammar, like how to define characters, set labels, and show scenes and characters. After that, I finished writing stories in a short time.

Third, I started a complex process of doing many things at the same time, including expanding new plots and modifying existing plots, learning new grammar for adding variables, and finding appropriate background pictures and music. Since I decided to draw characters by myself, that large workload of drawing will be done after I finish these things. My detailed thoughts on plot development will be in another post on game design, and this post will focus on tutorials. The grammar of adding variables was a bit difficult at first, but Lemma Soft Forum and Reddit provided helpful explanations and sample codes. Pictures were found on https://unsplash.com/. It offers many high-resolution (1920 x 1280) pictures that are handy for game backgrounds since pictures with smaller pixels won't fit the background. Music and sounds can be found at https://freesound.org/. I used keywords like "happy" and "melancholy" to find music that was in accordance with the atmosphere in the game.

Last, I drew characters and album pictures, put them in the game, did some final modifications to the plot, and tested the game. I was very familiar with drawing, but testing was a huge workload for me. Previously, I tested every time I did modifications to plots and scenes, so in this phase, I tested to make sure the scenes and characters appear and hide at correct moments, the music and sounds start and end rightly, and pictures in the album can show after the player unlocks certain plots. I did testing many times, and every time I tested different things, because I thought if I had to test many things in a single attempt, I might have too many bugs and lose patience.

Everything was right in the final version, although I think the downloadable game file will be smaller if I have more time and patience to delete useless codes and files. Nevertheless, I am quite satisfied with the final version, for I finally told the story in my heart (I will elaborate on my accomplished feeling in another post on game design), and I hope you can also create the game you want.