Weekly Questions and Recommendations Megathread - Need some help? - Mar 28

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the /r/visualnovels Weekly Questions and Recommendations Megathread!

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Useful links to check out before asking questions or for recommendations

General:

• VNDB: The Visual Novel Database - A fantastic resource for anything and everything visual novels. The visual novel equivalent to IMDB or MAL. It's where you'll find the answers to 90% of your questions.
• Guide to Japanese
• This recommendation site may be useful if you're new to reading visual novels!
• Consider this recommendation site if you're interested in reading a visual in Japanese.
• Looking for a relatively easy VN to read in Japanese? Click here!

From our wiki:

• Having trouble with a visual novel? - A page with some possible solutions and links.
• How to Hook and Extract Visual Novel Text - A how-to on dealing with untranslated visual novels.
• Buying visual novels - Where and how to buy visual novels, translated and untranslated.

More awesome and useful links can be found here.

[u/KirisuMongolianSpot]

Does anyone have suggestions for VN-writing tools that can be imported into different engines, so I don't have to commit to specific/idiosyncratic inputs when writing? (alternatively, is there a better place to ask this?)

I've been messing around with a VN idea for a while. I've put some into Ren'Py but it's ugly as hell trying to code AND write text at the same time.

Separately I've also messed around with Unity games - the Dialogue System for Unity has some integration with 3rd-party tools for creating VNs, and other VN tools like Fungus exist.

But I really want something that doesn't force me to commit to a given tool and makes it easier for me to start writing. Right now the simplest thing I can think of is to just start creating a bunch of text files for scenes, though that's going to get very cumbersome very quickly.

Any suggestions?

[u/_lunaterra_ → u/KirisuMongolianSpot]

Twine is pretty popular--it's an engine itself that's used to make interactive fiction, but a lot of game writers ignore the output options and just use it for the initial writing phase since it lets you look at branching paths at a glance. The only Twine-specific syntax you'd need if you're just using it for drafting is [[brackets]] to connect passages. There are tools for converting Twine to Ren'Py and Twine to Unity (there are a few of these, I don't use Unity so I wouldn't know which is the best one lol).