itch.io

I'm happy to answer any questions you have, and I'll shoot you a message soon so that this comment section doesn't get too bogged down. 

This was actually super helpful! Seeing as your library didn't include any games made in Ren'Py I didn't expect you to have much experience with it, so no worries. I will look into Naninovel though!

See, my main reason for considering walking away from Ren'Py is that I am not a particularly code savvy person. I'm a writer who picks up bits of code from all over the Internet and shoves it together to try and get what I want. This is all well and good, but it also leads to me not finishing my games as I find myself needing to find other people to help me code, and as I have no money, I feel bad if I can't compensate them well for their skills and time. Especially when coding is so integral to the creation of any game. (I also am not an artist, but that's a bit easier to work around with placeholder art I make myself until I can get money together and hire someone to make exactly what I need.)

Plus, Ren'Py does have some limits as to what you can do gameplaywise. It is designed with the traditional VN structure in mind, and if you want to step beyond that, you need some real coding chops to skirt about the limitations of the engine. Don't get me wrong, Ren'Py is an amazing engine, and I would highly recommend it to anyone out there. Especially given its price point is very good. (Free.) I'm just not sure it's the best engine for what I want to make these days.

After seeing what you managed with Unity on this game here, I'm thinking it may be the better way to go. I actually have a somewhat similar idea I've been working on for some time now, (No worries, it isn't about a digital person becoming real, which is a very cool concept and I wish you loads of luck getting it finished, I did love what I saw so far. It's a Princess Maker style game where you teach a robot how to be human.) and it will be a lot easier adding JRPG style elements to it in unity, I believe. Having never touched unity I'm not sure how seamless it would be to combine two very drastic coding needs together.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to reply to me! The games I've seen from you so far are very neat, and line up pretty strongly with my tastes, so I will be following you from here on to see where things go. (I'm also an audio design nerd, and adored the digital manipulations you did with the VA's here.) It'll be sad not to hear them in future installments, but I absolutely get wanting to pay them very well for their work, and just not having the cash to do that sort of thing. Perhaps as this project progresses you can make a kickstarter and add voicework in as a goal. It's actually not that bad of a process, the team I worked with for the last game I finished did one and it really helped us get on our way. However, I would not recommend including merch as a donation tier! That really bit us in the butt later.

Hey there! Fellow game dev here, I noticed you switched from Tyrano (a pretty play by numbers builder) to Unity. Did you find Unity to be a better experience for making this VN? I'm typically a Ren'Py stan, but I've been eyeing unity for some time now. I'm just paranoid that shifting any projects over to it will be a huge time sink. I already procrastinate enough as it is. d:

This is neat! And of course it looks very stylish. Good luck with it!

I love it! I'm definitely excited to see the Blue Rose one too. She was my fav to write.