welcome to the visual novel toolbox.

"okay, where am i now?"

shocker! you're in the toolbox page. this is an entire page where i list all of my stuff where i make my visual novels from, much like a digital swiss knife for making visual novels. if you want to create something to show your original characters and their story, then this is the right place! this is a step-by-step process, so please read them in order. (or not, if you want to keep it that way)

"alright, what engines and tutorials do you recommend?"

the only first thought would be Ren'Py, since the Quickstart documentation is easy to understand and you'll get the hang of things by just reading the documentation carefully. you can find Ren'Py via renpy.org and it's documentation, but you shouldn't go too much on the advanced things yet. if you're getting used to coding Ren'Py, then i have more tutorials to show, which are curated by other people in the Ren'Py community. i'll list them below here:

• Feniks' tutorials
• Lezalith's tutorials

however, not all things are explained, so you might have to stray yourself with the Ren'Py documentation and experiment some things before utilizing them for general use. or, go to the Lemma Soft Forums for more information. the forum is locked behind members only, so you need to register on the forums and join the Ren'Py Discord Server for the password. also, please do not leak their registration password and be professional around other Ren'Py developers. failure to comply will leave you helpless, so please do not blow your chances.

if you want some tutorials curated by me, then bad news; i haven't did any tutorials yet. please rely to the tutorials above, they explain and understand more than i do with tutorials.

"what if i don't wanna use Ren'Py-"

use TyranoScript instead. if you want to create one of those Japanese visual novels, then TyranoScript it is. you can find it via tyranoscript.com and there's a tutorial/documentation about using it. fun fact is that; TyranoScript is the same as KiriKiri (though stated to be similar in the FAQ), so it's basically the same engine as Nekopara and Koikuma uses! if you want to add more features, there's a plugin library for that, but all of the text is in Japanese, so you might have to translate that before curiously downloading those plugins. most plugins are free, some are paid.

there's another Tyrano related tool called TyranoBuilder, but that's paid; and the only pros with TyranoBuilder is to make visual novel creations easy than typing the entire script in Visual Code Studio. you may stick to TyranoScript, but you can pay them to make your life easier.

"what's next? i'm missing something..."

oof, i think something that's missing is... characters. backgrounds too, if it's included here. don't worry about it! i have found some sources where you can find them. for the character part, this should be skipped if you knew how to draw your own characters, otherwise don't skip the character part if you're getting desparate for character images.

as for character images; character creators are going to be your Plan B if Plan A (aka. drawing characters yourself) isn't gonna work at all. i've listed on what character creators are recommended here, but be warned; i don't have much of those characters creators lying around.

• Gacha Club
• basically the real deal when i was making my own visual novel. it has the Save PNG feature, which is the only feature for getting those images without the pain of screenshotting every pose and expression. sadly, Gacha Life 2 doesn't have that feature, so this is the maximum of it.
• Gacha Nebula
• it's just Gacha Club, but cooler. it has advanced customization, and the ability to save those poses and expressions as PNGs; unlike Gacha Life 2 where it has the same customization as this one but doesn't have the ability to save PNGs.
• Mannequin ($*)
• if Gacha isn't your thing or you want something different, then Mannequin will be the answer to that. paid, but has a free version if you're okay with the limited features and has all of the DLC content on the free version. however, if you want to tween or use it for something else, you'll need to pay them 40$. you can only export it as a PNG file (for visual novels or PNGTubing tools such as veadotube) or an INX file (for Inochi Creator for creating VTuber models using Mannequin), so certain exportable files such as PSD files are locked in the full version, but this shouldn't be the case for visual novel development, as it's highly reliable on those PNG files.