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How to Make Visual Novels

Visit the blog! Click here! 🌟 Connect with me! 🌟On Itch! 🌟On Bluesky 🌟On YouTube 🌟On Twitch 🌟On Discord 🌟On Patreon Hey folks, I’m Stella De (she/her). I’m a visual novel developer, technical artist, community organizer, shader gremlin, event runner, and professional hyper-fixator. I’ve been involved in visual novel development communities for over a decade and have spent most of that time building tools, organizing events, teaching developers, and aggressively pursuing the global conquest in the name of visual novels. These days I run Make Visual Novels and the Visual Novel Developer Network, where I organize conferences, speaker series, game jams, resources, educational material, and a frankly alarming amount of infrastructure held together by my bot-daughters, a lot of volunteers and even more caffeine. I specialize in: Visual novels! (duh)Systems programming Visual Effects, Motion Graphics & Shaders Business Strategy Community ManagementNetworking EventsJam & Competition Organizing ... what do you even do? I mostly participate with other visual novel developers and those that make tools for them as a sort of consultant, providing perspective on the industry and industry practices, evaluating their content and scenes, and helping them reach their creative and business goals. My work occasionally takes on a more pre-package, monetizable state. Sometimes that means writing shaders to fake cinematic lighting in Ren'Py. Sometimes it means accidentally creating four hundred transition effects because I thought it would be funny. Doing things because I think they'd be funny is the majority of the reason I do anything, so here we are. Okay, but why a blog? Partly to share development knowledge. Partly to document projects and experiments. Partly because visual novel development information is scattered across ancient forum posts, Discord messages, and cursed technical rituals passed between developers like forbidden knowledge. One of the things that gives me a unique perspective on the process of making visual novels is my proximity to the industry over the past decade plus. I've been saturated in a comprehensive network of creative professionals for so long, I've been able to gather insights from many, many different places and frequently have front row seats to what works and what doesn't. A lot of this information exists exclusively in my head or on the Visual Novel Developer Network's Discord server DevTalk, I figured I’d start putting things somewhere searchable. And consider donating! Your contributions go towards even more!