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With me it was rather by accident.

I've always wanted to create computer games and had no interest in anime/manga and all that stuff.
But project after project, team after team, nothing were finished and I gave up on creating games (instead I went on solo assets creation, but it's another story).
Some things in my life happened and I think that all was mix of these many different factors that got me in VN as well as anime/manga.

On Summer Holidays of 2016 I was sitting depressed, bored of all these american/europe FPS and RPG and then I found Fairy Fencer F in a low price, so I thought "Why not? It's something different.".
That's where it all started! When I saw the story sequences displayed as characters on backgrounds.
I thought: "Wait... Maybe I can do something like that? Could it be standalone game? Just characters and backgrounds... Can I write a story?"

And then I started researching about Visual Novels as well as started learning to draw in anime/manga style.
At the beginning I wanted to use game engine I was familiar with, that is Unity and Unreal Engine, but decided it was overkill for such simple mechanics.
That's when I found Ren'Py and after playing around it I decided to stick with it because of ease of use and amazing community here!

And well, here I am, with one game released on Steam and another one in production

For me it was probably the open source nature of Renpy. I teach an after school computer art club and for a variety of reasons we only use open source or free software. I also loved choose your own adventure books as a kid and later interactive fiction. It is also the easiest way I know of to make a high quality Android game.

Money definitely isn't a reason, I don't think there is much money to be made considering the time and effort required.

banannasquid wrote: ↑Wed May 03, 2017 10:42 pm I played katawa shoujo a long time ago and thought to myself "huh, I can do this too"

Similar to this, I was inspired by Katawa Shoujo.

But it played out a little differently for me. I had come up with the idea for the story I'm working on now (Summoned), and I loved fantasizing about making it a TV show. Then I started imagining something more plausible: an animated web series. But even that is just a ludicrous amount of work for one person to do, especially for the length of story I've had in mind.
So I dialed it back much further, and imagined writing a book. However, I didn't like that because I had a very strong vision in my head for how certain characters and scenes looked and I wanted readers to be able to see them.
So I thought, "How about a webcomic?" But again, it didn't QUITE cut it for me, because I'm also passionate about music composition, and I believe music plays a huge role in how much something can emotionally affect me. Furthermore, constantly creating new panels for every new scene sounded quite ambitious.

So, finally, I thought about Katawa Shoujo, and about visual novels in general. They seemed to be the perfect balance between all these mediums: A way to craft an experience for the reader than involves visuals and music without being absolutely impossible for one person to make (little did I know that KS took 5 years with a team of over 11 people).

In fact, I've always been kind of weirded out by how many anime dating sims flood the VN market (not that I have anything against them, mind you). To me, VN's are just another potential medium, a natural stepping stone between books and animations. There's no reason any particular type of story, setting, or art style has to be used in a medium, right?
So, even though my story is entirely linear, set in the U.S., and has no dating sim elements (unless you count romance), I didn't see any reason why I couldn't represent it in kinetic novel form. I DID attempt an anime art style, but that's only because I like it.

If I'm being honest, I don't know if I'll make more VN's after I finish Summoned (though that'll surely be years from now). This just seemed like the most practical option for what I wanted, which is why I'm sad VN's carry the stigma that they do. However, they're also FAR more popular in the U.S. than they were 4 or 5 years ago, so I'll remain optimistic about what the future holds for them.

To be honest, I don't even remember what kicked it off. I remember I was hugely into anime and manga during my middle school/high school years (I was a textbook weeb), and somehow I ended up learning about visual novels. I think one of my anime magazines might have had an advertisement or something. In any case, I began finding freeware and doujin games on DeviantArt, buying some VNs at cons, and eventually I thought "Hey, I want to try something like this!"

Then I found out about ren'py and was ecstatic - I COULD make something like this! And...well, it's slow going but here I am.

All because I was a giant nerd.

If I recall correctly, I was introduced to Visual Novels through "Swan Song" a long time ago. I was never able to finish it and I still can't finish it. Not sure why.
But the first Visual Novel that I played that I was able to finish was "Crescendo ~Eien da to Omotte Ita Ano Koro~". Then and now, I consider it to be one of the best Visual Novels I've played.

From there, I kept playing Japanese Visual Novels, but none of them really made me think "I want to make a Visual Novel".

But then I came across and played an English Visual Novel called "Katawa Shoujo". That was the first Visual Novel that planted the idea of making my own, if only briefly. I think it made me aware that Ren'Py was a thing, but I soon forgot about it.

A while later, I came across an English Visual Novel called "Sounds of Her Love", (which, for the record, is really good). That was the first time Ren'Py was planted in my head and stuck.

After that, I came across the one Visual Novel that made me say "I need to make my own Visual Novel!"
It went by the name of "The House in Fata Morgana". That Visual Novel was so good, it spurred me to make my own.

Now here I am trying to make a Visual Novel called "Unsound: Minds".

I was introduced to Visual Novels by a youtube/streamer I used to watch a lot. (She moved on from Visual Novel let's play stuff) She honestly sold me on them because of her goofy voices and the fact I was super into the story of one that she didn't finish.

I've always had a passion for creating worlds and events/people that would exists inside them, but I was and kinda still am not confident enough to tell them to the world. I love to write but self doubt makes me think I can't write good enough to post it to the world next to these other people who are so talented in what they do. Same thing go's for my art, I see all the little imperfections and well as the saying go's I am my own worst critic.

But despite all that I have so many Ideas and I truly want to pull people into the worlds I've imagined to help distract them from whatever. Be it a bad home environment or a bad day to simply being board and needing something to do. So here I am trying my best to make my first Visual Novel "We're All Human" less of a dream and more of a reality.

For me, I started playing visual novels at some point (mostly otome-centric). Then, I stumbled on ren'py and its offer to allow you to create your own visual novels so I was excited to try it out. I'm mostly just writing stuff before and the medium seemed interesting and presented more variety. You can have prose, art, music, and even programming all in one ride. So yep, that's how it went for me. Although, at first, it had been hard and I don't know what I'm doing but at some point, it became fun :3