Can someone describe in their own words how visual novels work (for us newbies)?

[olivia_tinker]

A simple description of the characteristics of visual novels, how they very, and the elements that are involved in making them?

[Plk_Lesiak]

Before people smarter than me can elaborate, I think I can pinpoint basic elements. To make a VN you typically need:

1. A game engine (most likely Ren'Py, which is free and have a lot of guides and assets available for it)

2. A graphical user interface (GUI), through which people will interact with your game - Ren'Py provides a basic structure for your GUI, but custom visuals and ability to modify the UI according to your needs is important.

3. Background graphics - static images over which character sprites and the GUI will appear. I think it's easy to find free or cheap stock VN backgrounds.

4. Character sprites - the representations of the characters involved in your story - static 2D images, usually with a few poses and face expressions to fit different situations.

5. CGs - custom, full-screen illustrations which show situations that are hard to present through sprites and text, usually used in crucial moments of the story.

6. Background music - to give your game a proper climate and make it less monotonous, underlining the switches in mood etc.

7. A script - all the dialogues and descriptions that will show in the text box (which is a part of the GUI), along with necessary "stage directions" [especially if you'll not be the one handling the programming, the person doing it must know what background, expressions etc. go with each scene].

8. (optional) Voice Acting/Voiced Narration - expensive as f***, if you want good quality, so many developers skip on it.

9. (Optional) Other sound assets - depending on the content of your story, some additional sounds could be useful, for example if you want bring the reader's attention to something, but often such additions are quite obnoxious - music can be enough.

When you have a script and all the necessary assets, you have to put them together and synchronise them properly. This part I know pretty much nothing about, as I'm not a programmer.

------

20 edits later - Did I miss anything?

Edited June 6, 2018 by Plk_Lesiak

[tymmur]

I think the list pretty much covers all the parts needed to make a VN. However it miss out on one important issue: planning.

If you write a VN, you need to plan a storyline, design character personalities etc, just like when writing a book or a movie. I wrote more about how to do this already in another thread, where I also writes about script design from a programming point of view. It's more like a howto guide and a proposal for one approach to solve the issue, but it should give an idea of the kind of work, which this step requires.