The slides for the talk that I gave at Visual;Conference 2017 about the pros/cons of using different game engines for Original English Language Visual Novels.
To see the full talk and more information, please visit: http://johnpdoran.com/visualconference-2017/
These are the main options as of this recording. Obviously in the future there will likely be more.
Now there are a lot of different options out there for you to be working with, mostly based on your comfortability with them.
I have a lot of talk about in very little time, so I may not be able to give you all of the nuances between engines
For each of these engines, I’ll be going
Note that I will be sending everyone here a copy of my notes for this presentation which will include these details as well as insights from developers using the engines that I talked to while researching this talk.
There are themes available which will give a VN appearance (Like LoveClassic but only works with Twine 1): http://www.slideshare.net/rebthegreat/workshop-make-visual-novels-text-adventure-games-with-twine
http://pixelles.ca/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Pixelles_LOVEClassic.tws_.zip
You can actually see this game in motion here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeVn17Ti_Ts
There are some definite pros to using Twine, first of all being that it’s completely free to use for commercial purposes.
As we saw before, it has an incredibly simple interface making it very easy to work with.
It’s also very easy for us to see how the story goes.
http://tyranobuilder.com/faq/
To add gameplay, you’ll need to dive into TyranoScript or Javascript to implement your own games within TyranoBuilder
It was also missing things like moving characters
Do this quickly!
While not as mature in areas as the engines here, there are some things that are part of this engine that I think are worth noting that while I don’t think it’s ready for prime time currently, it could develop into something down the road
Should be at 10 in 2 slides
To see Live2D in action, check out: http://tyranobuilder.com/use-live2d-in-your-games/
CloudNovel also has been talking about making people pay for the ability to export their game, but I wasn’t able to find any finalized info about it.
Controls weren’t very intuitive to me.
Even supports additional features such as In-App Purchasing
Lots of nice features for artists such as LiveComposite and ImageMaps
Also has great debugging tools
No WYSIWYG editor
One Night Stand, which is a IGF Finalist for Excellence in Narrative
http://moacube.com/blog/professional-developers-look-at-gamemaker/
GameMaker Studio is newer version