A long, meandering, introduction/inquiry

[harmonxxy]

I'm very much interested in creating my own VN, as I've had a large interest in writing for the greater half of my life, but managing the resources for one particularly important aspect of the process is proving a bit difficult; that being the artwork. While my younger years were quite full with aspiring drawings and doodles, I never really took it farther than that. I would need to work toward a tablet and re-learn everything I've forgotten for that to become a possibility, which isn't something I'm averse to, but the idea of hiring actual artists is also appealing. The obvious problem with that being that it would be quite expensive to commission not only several characters, but different emotions/poses for them all as well.

Like I said, I wouldn't mind taking the time to fine-tune my illustrative skills to a point on the skill tree that I'm pleased with, but until I have the means (like I said, a tablet, unless I wanted to attempt a visual novel with photographs of pencil drawings...which sounds too Avant garde to be worthwhile) to do so...that brings me to an interesting conundrum...

How could a rough draft for a visual novel be written? I've tossed and turned between the idea of starting as much in the program as best I could...but what would that 'best' even look like? If I've progressed to a certain point where I'm pleased with the PNG's I've created, should I painstakingly go back and insert everything in as need be? Of course, at the moment I haven't chosen a proper vessel for my story yet but I do see merit in VN Maker, Renpy, and Tyrano Builder. Surely I couldn't write a rough draft as I would with any other story, hoping for pathways and ideas for dialogue trees to pop up later. 

I should note that as far as music goes, I'll deal with that myself as well. It's an easier avenue for me to manage, given the tools I have available. However, a visual novel without artwork and images to go by is just a story; and I want to move onto a new avenue since I already know how to write those.

Any help is appreciated!

[Plk_Lesiak]

Well, as a start, welcome to Fuwa!

You're asking a lot of difficult questions and I think most of those only you can answer. However, in my opinion, the thing even VN should start with is a script. Depending on what kind of story you're trying to tell, you might need very different types and quantities of art, and its quality will have different importance. You always want your game to look great, but if it's a serious, down-to-Earth drama, you can probably focus more on the quality of the intrigue. If it's an adventure story or romance, and especially if you want to sell it, you probably want it to be gorgeous. I've recently read a few pieces of interactive fiction, with only simple backgrounds and music to accompany the text and they were quite brilliant, but probably not the most commercially-viable projects if someone wanted to monetize them.

With the next step, I have actually no experience with that. I can only say what I hear VN developers saying and the consensus seems to be that Ren'Py is the most versatile engine for this types of games and for the reader, it by default offers all the quality-of-life features one would want. All three you mentioned are ok though, just don't make your VN in Unity, those literally give me nightmares, particularly if they have branching paths and I want to re-read them a few times without a proper skip-read function.

Also, you're likely to get more meaningful feedback on the Lemma Soft Forums – it's a community mostly for Ren'Py developers, but it's probably the biggest gathering of people involved in the EVN scene on the production side of things.

[littleshogun]

Welcome to Fuwanovel and as for your question I think mod Lesiak already answered it, so I'll just say that I hope you'll have a good time here. Aldo good luck to your project later if you manage to establish it.