qberty

This is incorrect. This isn't just a parser. It's a complete improvement on what Ren'Py offers. If you try to use it, you'll see what I mean. There's no real learning curve to this tagging system, and it's full fledged engine. The point of the Early Access is to get a direction of how users/creators want to control things. This isn't like WYSIWYG. The extreme limitations of Ren'Py are pretty obvious and that's why this exists in the first place, to completely improve it. Have you ever used Unity? I use it quite often for freelanced projects and it is not comparable to Ren'Py at all. Ren'Py is like 5% of what Unity is. There's literally no competition and definitely not a 1:1 ratio in the slightest degree. I know everyone wants to stick Ren'Py on the top of the temple, but to be honest, almost every single commercial Visual Novel that has a marketing budget and translation staff, will *never* use Ren'Py. There's a lot of reasons for it including how the licensing and git-versioning works that's so lax. The reason VN's are STILL niche and are only recently starting to make small bombs here and there in every scene is that there's no viable commercial engine that's cheap enough for a corp. + open enough for VN's. The point is, if you're going to make a commercial VN, you'll make it in Unity over Ren'Py. That's just the way it is. No reason to force limitations when you can just have none. I think what you're missing is the fact that engine makers can already create what exists. Just copy the code. The whole point of this is to do MORE than what exists. To make things easier for developers and make readers happier. Also, If you think Unity can be compared to YU-RIS or KAG, you need to check out what Unity is actually capable of in the GPU space. No existing VN engine is more capable than Unity at the moment in terms of features, let alone memory handling. My goal is to bridge this gap of visual novel creators who don't want to learn C# or Python but still want to make a fully customized visual novel game that they can sell or give out. Currently, my engine is barebones in it's interface because I'm still gauging and gathering metrics on how users create novels in the engine itself. That's how you create a proper UX experience (which certainly no visual novel creator has, with the exception of the horribly buggy tyranno). If you can tell me a visual novel engine that supports Vulkan and Vulkan mobile than you've found a contender to Unity or this engine.

Actually, you can share you visual novel, and link to the name of it on Steams Discussion forum for the engine here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/665040/discussions/ That way I can compile a list of all entries, and everyone can vote on the winners! If you have an idea or suggestion for a feature, don't hesitate to make a thread on the steam forum about it so I can take a look and we can figure out a good way to implement that feature without bothering all the other features.

Absolutely! If you have an Android device you should try VNE for android. It's the same thing, but on the go! Also, if you go into the VNE folder that the app creates in your documents folder, you'll see two folders. A created one and a novels one. Inside them, are the list of visual novels for each category. You can copy any of the visual novels you download into your created folder and edit them just the same. It's pretty fun seeing how people make their visual novels. Also yes, the menu thing was done on purpose, because the projects section is being worked on. I want there to be an option before going straight to editing to let you have a choice to edit the novel itself, or edit the interface (buttons, menus etc..) No worries bro. Sobering up and looking at what you did is a sucky feeling I can relate to as well. To be honest, I see where you're coming from in terms of a corporation developing something like this. I figured that's why we haven't seen a truly professional visual novel creator yet.

Hey! It is in-fact barebones in terms of the interface but there's a lot under the hood. UI customizations are definitely being worked on (I'm working on another Steam title at the same time). The best example code you can get is by downloading "The World Doesn't Know" demo content. It will automatically show up in the Create section and let you edit it and see what does what. If you click the question mark when making a VN, all the supported tags are there with full explanations and usages.

The reason the engine is attractive is that it appeals to those that already know Python. Previously, everyone who wanted to use it would have to learn Python as opposed to any other language to make their visual novel. The flexibility is also a curse as that's the main reason why Ren'Py compatibility breaks with every major version. I've yet to see a Ren'Py visual novel that isn't just a simple visual novel that didn't utilise the majority of the features that Ren'Py offers. Even TyrannoBuilder is too buggy and limited. What makes my engine more attractive, is that it's rebuilt from scratch. It's released with all the features a visual novel writer needs, plus it being so young the community can help shape it to contain as many features as needed. The common thing about visual novel makers/engines that exist is that they have a scope of features and that's it, while on the other hand, i'm constantly adding features to my engine to actually make it easier for everyone to make their own novels and read them. Among other things, my engine will always be backwards compatible with old versions of itself so a creator need not worry about making a VN with one version and still being compatible with newer versions. There's also an in-built update system that allows updating changes and fixing bugs to VN's extremely easy. I look at all the currently existing engines and just want to improve on them. The crazy thing is, why would anyone want to fight Visual Novel exposure and financing? If Visual Novels don't make money, you'll stop seeing sponsored/higher quality VN's almost immediately. I don't see any other viable alternatives to Steam.

This entire statement is incorrect. Your hatred for Steam doesn't really make sense. You're basing your assumptions as if "Steam" or "Valve" want to take over the market. If you watch some of the Valve staff interviews you'll realize that they only just recently started correlating a growth in visual novels on the platform. Also, Steam itself has nothing to do with developers choosing to put their visual novels on Steam. If you don't use Steam, you'll need a better reason than just "they're trying to make more money". Since that's every company ever. I seriously don't get your delusion in thinking that Steam (a digital media delivery platform) is somehow bad for VN's in the west. It's a distribution platform. Not a publisher. Also, my engine is free. How is steam supposed to capitalize on a legally bound free application? They can take their share of profits from any paid title and that's more than fair considering the exposure Steam provides. Anyway, if you know what Ren'Py is which i'm assuming you don't based on what you just said, you'd realize it's very old, not cross compatible and not translation friendly. Plus there's no central place to catalog AND PLAY Ren'Py made projects directly without more manual work. Ren'Py is literally an engine that requires programming knowledge. It's in the name of it. "Python" is the language you need to know if you want to do anything good with Ren'Py. My visual novel engine requires no prerequisite language. Just a simple drag and drop tagging system. It can do everything Ren'Py can plus it has a tonne more features that make it easier for developers to create, and easier for readers to play. Also yay! Trending on Steam:

Hey there! To celebrate my Visual Novel Engine making it to Steam (http://store.steampowered.com/app/665040/Visual_Novel_Engine) I will be hosting a visual novel creation competition. Visual Novel Engine is an app designed to help anyone create their own visual novel for free without any programming skills. The rules are pretty simple, help the development of Visual Novel Engine by creating and submitting a visual novel using the engine itself. The winners will be able to put up their entire visual novel as DLC on Steam (free or paid). The Visual Novel Engine is in Early Access, so i'm also looking for testers that can help improve it. Thanks for reading.

No worries. The reason why this differs so much from renpy, is because of it's language. I made it extremely simple to write scripts for, you don't need to have ANY programming knowledge to get started. If you check out http://vnengine.com/documentation.html you'll see I made a simple tagging system for all the major features that visual novels have. Why it's the better choice at the moment, is specifically because if you need a feature added, you can simply e-mail me and I'll have it added for all platforms! Another good reason is that any visual novel made with my engine will be fully compatible with ALL newer versions of the engine (unlike renpy). It also has a lot of internet capability, as well as hooks into mobile functions (like vibrate, GPS, push notifications etc..) Renpy is definitely fantastic and versatile, but it's built upon something that wasn't designed for visual novels. This engine is 100% designed for visual novels from the ground up.

Wow, it certainly has been a long time since I've been here. You guys have come a long way, and for that, I can finally say I've finished the first real working version of my old visual novel engine that I once did an interview on fuwanovel (https://fuwanovel.net/2013/10/interview-qbertys-om3ga-engine-transcending-platforms/) about. I'm proud to say that it's finally what I wanted it to become. A non-nonsense simple multi-platform visual novel creation and testing tool. It supports running your visual novels on Android/iOS/Windows/Mac/Linux with only needing to write your story once for all platforms. I'm also testing cloud saving/loading as well. All testers are welcome to http://vnengine.com to check it out. You can try it out for yourself at: http://vnengine.com

Just thought i'd give everyone that was interested a heads up. The first full port of a visual novel to my engine is complete (Yume Miru Kusuri): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.qberty.ymklatest As well as my engine is now fully compatible with ALL VNDS games as well as KiriKiri scripted games (documentation coming soon). Another thing that's neat, is i've also made it possible for the engine to run FULLY in a browser. So that boosts it's native operating system compatibility to Windows, Linux, MacOSX, Android, iOS, and Web/Browser!

Yep, as Tay said the engine does support VNDS. The build that's currently on the playstore does not have VNDS features until I update it, but to show that it works, I have released the VNDS version of Narcissu running on my engine through the playstore. The engine on the playstore will be updated soon. The kirikiri compatibility will take a little bit more testing and perfecting before I can let it out in the wild.

What formatting did you use?

Is there any specific reason why you want to use this engine?

Just taking a preliminary look here, the engine itself is hardcoded to do exactly what you don't want. The reason why, is because 640 by 480 is relative to a square, and for the text to be formatted properly, it would need those spacings (as well as the font they use). The text window graphic is a static image, so everything inside the text box must conform so that it looks right without any morphing. Anyway, you could fix this issue using assembly directly on the engine itself (though it'd take forever). Or fix the scripts to have no spaces (which would mangle the engine anyway). Or use a different engine since you already have all the resources extracted *cough*cough*.

I can't really nail down an ETA until i've finished implementing the entire language first. Then i'll be able to tell you how long the testing and the rest of the debugging will take.

Pretty good. Though, most of the integration is done, I just need to fine tune and debug everything to make sure nothing goes wrong when people use different games than the one i'm testing it with. Debugging takes about 3x the time of the actual coding. Fixing old bugs tends to spawn new ones et cetera.

Interesting. Though I still think it'd be easier for the porter/translator to handle the extraction first, and let the engine just download the extracted/decrypted files for everyone that used it.

Well then auto-extraction may be possible. I didn't know the Kirikiri engine powered so many visual novels, and is so widely broken open. Guess i'll start implementing it.

Interesting. Well then, this will be a "very" easy process. I'd just need to implement the scripting language that kirikiri uses in to my engine. And have two options for existing visual novels that use that engine. Either build an extractor that can sift out the files from the .xp3 files (requiring only the user to feed the xp3 files to my engine to play the game, keeping it 100% legal). OR do all the extracting for each kirikiri game where my engine would provide the files itself, as long as the user can verify that they own the game, which would also be legal. I could take either two routes depending on the easyness of coding an xp3 extractor. Is CRASS open source? Otherwise i'll just start implementing kirikiri's scripting language anyway since that's a must, and people can use the engine to play those games.

Well it's actually doable. The "easy-ness" is ranked if it's applicable or not. Those scripts you linked. Were they manually decrypted? Or were they simply in the directory of the game? What about the game assets (music,images,voices)? The less manual work that has to be done, the more legal it would be. For example, if I could implement KiriKiri's engine in to mine WITHOUT it requiring script decryption or asset unpacking, then people would just need the existing games content. Otherwise, for each game using that engine, the script must be decrypted beforehand as well as the game assets so that my engine to read from it. So i'd have to use the model i'm using now for YMK which requires the user to verify (with activation codes etc.) that they own the game before my engine can download the game scripts and files. So all-in-all, I think i'll implement kirikiri before I do the mind-bogglingly in-efficient Ren'Py. It took me about 10 hours to implement all of VNDS's engine. Might take longer for this engine if there's any animations hiding.

Wow just taking a simple look at the scripts, it's not that difficult to automate (Except half of every script file is duplicate text because of the wrapping). Also, your second link redirects to the first one.

Well since I have to follow the not-so-linear scripts instead of route by route, there's a total of 106 script files left to port over (or about 1.32 MB worth of text, though half of it is garbled engine code). I it's entirely possible to port over 1 to 2 script files a day if you spend more than 3 hours on porting. The more people that do it, the quicker it gets done. As for the price, originally I had YMK up on the play store for $9.99 and it was getting purchases like there was no tomorrow, which is how my endeavor had gotten popular, and why Will Co. sued the shit out of my ass. lol In actuality, after I put some security, and a code generator for people to already be forced to have the game, I just had to lower the price in all fairness. 4.99 is a reasonable price for any app/game, and since there's no major resource work I have to do, the porting is worth the price even though i'm being entirely generous (making the engine fit the port not the other way around). To answer your question, no I don't plan on raising the price UNLESS the more help I get to port it faster requires me to raise it to cover the cost of the porters time. Princess Waltz is just... Jesus christ has over 4 MB of script files. It's an insane amount of code for a game that actually doesn't have multiple endings (95% of the game is one route vs YMK's 4 Routes. Though for some reason the card game is scripted at some points awkwardly lol).

Well the menu in this case IS hard coded in. But in a normal scenario for the Engine app itself to play your own VNDS games, it won't be hardcoded. That's particularly why I made Narcissu a separate app to begin with, any app is more appealing if it's more personalized to the content. Though, since my engine now uses both my scripting and VNDS's, a person could use VNDS for the novel, and mix and match with my scripting language to do the menus and all the jazz if they wanted. Well both YMK and Princess Waltz are already on the play store. Any 18+ graphic scenes are not allowed by Google Play, so i've taken them out for the release on the store. Though, it doesn't stop anyone from emailing me for a way to get them separately with no relation to Google Play at all. I was thinking of programming a special notepad/editor type of app to help people port scripts to my engine. It should allow the tags to be automatically placed in based on hotkeys and custom macro creations I guess. Would need all the help I can get if I plan to get as many VN's on Google Play with my engine.

Yeah, that's the app that i'm porting for Princess waltz. People that already own a PC copy, can use the app (I developed a code algorithm specifically for the copyrights to stay intact).

Well, I did it. VNDS is now fully integrated in to my engine. So I think it's the first free engine that can use VNDS games at full resolution. As a test, I ported over the VNDS version of Narcissu without touching a single line of script. Narcissu For Android