Engines
- Free
- Don’t need to know Python nor coding
- Very active community with frequent engine updates
- $150
- Unity plugin
- Frequent engine updates
More Engines
- Twine
- VNMaker
- Game Maker
- Tyrano Builder
- Novelty
Text Editing Software
- Notepad++
- Sublime
- Visual Studio
- Atom
- Editra
Writing
Google Docs
- Free
- Saves automatically to Google Drive
- Allows easy sharing and collaboration
- $99.99
- Game asset manager
- Allows you to test the flow of the game
- $49
- Primarily for writing and managing long scripts
Artwork
Examples of Character Sprites
Examples of Cut Scene Art (CGs)
Free Art Programs
Audio
Free Audio
Tim Reichert’s So you want to be a Video Game Composer Guide
Marketing
Chris Zukowski’s How To Market a Game blog
How to Make Twitter Painless for Indie Game Marketing
Other Resources
Free Resources
- DevTalk+
- A Discord server for anyone interested in visual novel dev, including artists, voice actors, writers, and more
- Canva
- Free graphic designing tool
- Unsplash
- Free to use photos
- Freesound
- Free to use sound effects (check licenses before using)
- Lemmasoft
- Largest English forum for visual novels, primarily for developers
- Visual;Conference
- An annual online conference for visual novel devs, with each of the previous panels uploaded to YouTube
Game Jams
Itch.io has a wide array of community-hosted game jams here.