Visual Novel Maker

For making visual novels, Ren'py is easier to use, more powerful, more customisable, and [i]free[/i]. It also has an active community and support forum, as well as frequently receiving updates, unlike this engine. There is no reason to buy this program, especially not at full price.

The idea behind it is strong, and in theory it has everything you would want and need to make any UI-based 2D game. If it always worked how it was supposed to, it's powerful enough to produce anything you'd see (in 2D) from a big studio. Unfortunately, the software is abandoned and riddled with engine-level bugs that were never fixed, that can corrupt your project irreparably and cannot be scripted around. And when you start digging into the scripts, you realize how random and thrown together the default system is. Z-order means nothing because all the baked in elements have arbitrary numbers assigned to them, many functions that are supposed to be available by default are broken or commented out. And many, many weird or missing design choices. None of the RPG maker engines suffer from these issues. It's just a shame because if RPG Maker had a simple built-in UI editor with hotspots and extended image functionality, you could completely ignore this and just use that... but as far as I'm aware none of the do. If you have ambitious plans and want to make games as more than a hobby, skip this and move straight to a real engine like unity, unreal, or godot.

It's completely useless for actually making visual novels. It hasn't been updated in years. It's very buggy, glitchy, and hours of work is thrown out because the program decides to stop working.

It's a nice piece of software. But too expensive. Pros: - looks good - you can actually build a simple visual novel with packaged graphics and sounds. Cons: - inconvenient - not updated - after a week you will want to switch to Ren'Py.

I came in expecting this to be an easy tool for creating VNs — but it’s really not. Out of the box you can handle dialogue and swap in some images, but if you want to customize anything beyond the basics, you’ll find yourself jumping through an endless series of hoops. Features that should be simple (like styling choice boxes or tweaking UI) are hidden, cut, or missing entirely. If you’re planning to spend money on a VN engine, don't. I've heard TyranoBuilder is far superior, and I will update once I test it myself!

Don't buy it, just use RPG maker, its easier and only takes an extra hour of messing with to get the same result. Don't waste your money, don't waste your time, and use a better engine.

I really wanted to use Visual Novel Maker and learn more about it, because it looked like a cool tool for making my own visual novels. But honestly, once I got into it, it just gave me flashbacks of using Ren'Py — and not in a good way. Even just adding one custom character feels like a chore: you have to set up multiple folders inside folders, name everything just right, and manage all these expression files. For people who have the time and patience, that’s great — good for you. But for me, I just don’t have that kind of time. I’m all about using my time wisely, and spending hours organizing file trees for one character feels like wasted effort when all I want is to focus on creating. Maybe VNM is better for teams or people who want to go super in-depth, but if you’re looking for something fast and simple, be warned: this isn’t it.

Well... I had high hopes. But the software is very out of date and still has some glitches and issues. This had a lot of potential and I loved the trailer, but no matter how hard I tried, it just wasn't working for me. I wanted something easy to learn—something to make creating Visual Novels fun—but this just didn't cut it. I found it way easier to make a game with Ren'Py coding from scratch. Ren'Py is still in development with a large community, whereas this app feels abandoned. I hope they come back and improve this software, but until then, I am giving it a thumbs down. I really tried, but there were barely any tutorials on how to use this. I am glad I got it on sale because in its current state it isn't worth buying. Save your money and either use Ren'Py or maybe even RPG Maker MZ. Those are in active development and getting better quite often. I am sad this software didn't make the cut.

broken mess and hella depricated