Question! What program...?

[Terren]

Sooo~ Ren'Py seems to be the favorite around here but what about the others?

Programs..or the ones I know of:

Flash: I'm not sure what you can do with this at all to be honest~
I've never used it and the only ren'ai-ish games I've seen made with it are plot-less hentai games.

RPG Maker: I've seen only one or two ren'ai games made with this program..it seems like it would be good for the battle system
..but the coding for the novel parts seems too difficult @@;

Ren'Py: Everyone here already knows this one ^^ Seems the best so far..Though I haven't figured out what all it can do yet.

Blade Engine: From what I've heard it's a paid "crappier" version of Ren'Py. I could be totally wrong though.

Kirikiri: Japanese visual novel creation engine thingy~ It was used to create a lot of commercial games in japan^^ So I tried it out..but heh..japanese~

Renai Maker 2: I don't know anything about this~

I'm not really sure which to use at this point.. I started with Kirikiri but the language barrier was too much for me^^ So now I'm working with Ren'Py.
...but I'm wondering if Flash might be better..But I've never seen ANYTHING made with flash really..is there some reason no one uses it?

Anyway~ Share what you know about these programs with me~? <3

Sorry if theres already topic like this^^ I didn't see one~
(As for info on my project...hoho it's a secret~! Hint: It's a rather large semi-professional series of games~)

[DaFool]

There are some Flash games in http://www.renai.us, some of them very good and really take advantage of its animation capabilities.

But yeah, they're not really made for visual novels (i.e. make sure to click on exact button to advance the text...tedious I doubt you can make really long games with Flash.)

RPGMaker ... downloaded it, almost tried it, never got around to it.

Ren'Py ... duh.

Blade Engine ... visit their forum. You will see cobwebs. Literally. And it is an entirely non-intuitive messy system compared to Ren'Py.

Kirikiri ... oh I was hoping some English speakers get to use this, I was amazed by its capabilities in translated Japanese games.

Renai Maker 2 ... I think that was one of the attempts to build a decent renai engine. But as of this date, Ren'Py is the most tried and true of them all.

[DrakeNavarone]

There's also ONscripter. Development has been handed over to Haeleth, so you can get the latest version at his site, but insani has fully translated the reference manual, so you can learn how to make games with that. However, ONscripter isn't exactly the most user-friendly of engines. The level-of-entry is pretty high for non-programmers.

Kirikiri is certainly impressive, if you want to go with Japanese made vn engines, as opposed to Renpy, Blade, or even Flash... And although the documentation for it remains in Japanese, it's actually not that much of a barrier. With a little experimentation and a machine translator, I managed a few things when I was playing around with it a while ago. One thing to note, though, is that it does not support word wrapping for English text, and the insani method which they use for their demos and doujins is extremely "hacky", making the script near illegible afterwards. Unless you find a different way to do it, or manually insert line breaks, you should keep in mind that the current means are not pretty...

[mugenjohncel]

- CONTENT NO LONGER RELEVANT -

[papillon]

I'd be willing to give anyone who was already a Game Maker programmer the basic engine that I'm using, but being stuck with only ME for support puts most people off, I think.

If you want to do a ridiculous hybrid, like Pacman/VN or Galaga/VN this is probably the easiest way to do it though!

[Counter Arts]

If you're a really good programmer and want to roll out your own engine with your own features then use XNA.

Haha... but it's really hard to get a programmer/writer unless you are the kind of person who is really an artist but got into computer science just because you got the grades for it.

But if you're really for commercial VN then Renpy would be the best engine to use for time/financial reasons.

[Scout]

However, ONscripter isn't exactly the most user-friendly of engines. The level-of-entry is pretty high for non-programmers.

ONscripter syntax is outright arcane, even for experienced programmers. I strongly considered it over Ren'Py for a long time, but... it's insane, and ultimately, not nearly as powerful.

I've also had experience with RPG Maker, and while it's not actually a bad engine, it has the distinct problem of looking terrible. Screenshots are rather deceptive; the combat engine is both bad AND uncustomizable, and most games end up looking very similar no matter what sprites and tilesets you use.

I was really reluctant to use Ren'Py for a while because of my absolute hatred of Python, but... in the end, I gave it a shot, and was really impressed.

[Jake]

If you're a really good programmer and want to roll out your own engine with your own features then use XNA.

If you're a really good programmer, why not use something like SDL so that there's even a hope of porting to a different platform? XNA's actually fairly easy to code in, as far as games go, since all the stuff that's still tricky with a framework like SDL's done for you. It just has the same old platform-dependence problems .NET does.

If you want to code .NET and also want to run on multiple platform, I'd expect SilverLight is probably a perfectly good framework for VNs...

[Sapphire Dragon]

rpg maker is actually a nice and easy tool, I used to love it to make rpg's on it because I didnt have to script anything. And you could make a VN easy with just the buttons.

It will take a lot longer to do the VN parts though, especially the picture showing and taking off

[Laveil Kurtis]

Well, let's see

RPG Maker: Obviously used for creating RPGs. Before Trying Ren'Py, I tried making a Visual Novel here (using sprites instead of artworks). It can be perfectly done, but it was very complex only using variables and switches.

Ren'Py: The best choice IMO to create Visual Novels. Easy to learn, fast and a lot of possibilities

Renai Maker 2: The only interesting thing that I got from the program was the Character Generator and the backgrounds. Never tried to do anything with it because of japanese.

I've tried more engines, but don't fit on Visual Novel creation.

[Twar3Draconis]

RPG Maker:
I used this for quite sometime. The battle system itself is customizable (RPGXP), and most everything else. My favorite VN-ish title is the Dating Sim Engine by Sailor Taurus.

Ren'Py:
So far, it's nice. I like the code and syntax, being a Python/Ruby/C# guy.

Flash:
Honestly, I've never gotten past making animations. I don't know any ActionScript.

Blade Engine:
A horrible coding effort, horrible tech support. Most of all, it's DirectX based. I can understand RPG Maker XP being DirectX... But, SDL would've been a better option.

I've tried ONScripter, but the source for most games isn't well documented, thus removing the ability for learn from source.