TyranoBuilder- Visual Novel creation made simple

I’ve always been interested in visual novels as an art form, to me they’re the idea of Choose Your Own Adventure stories taken to the next level. I also love the sheer democratic nature of them, not only in the choices you can make, but also the fact they’re so easy to make. At least, they are in theory, and software like Ren’py, Novelty, and now TyranoBuilder have been working to make that into a reality.

TyranoBuilder is a “new” (in English) piece of software for graphically building visual novels that’s just been released (on STEAM for $16.99). It lets you make visual novels that you can then sell royalty free as phone apps and on various online stores. It looks pretty cool, and after reading through the tutorial documentation (which I highly recommend reading before you try playing with it) I’d say it’s one of the slickest methods for making visual novels I’ve ever seen.

Scenes are built on a timeline based dragging and dropping various elements into play, which makes it dead simple to put a scene together. Graphics, music, dialogue and other elements can be easily assembled in any way you choose, and then you can branch those scenes off into other scenes which allow the reader to control the flow of the story in any way you see fit.

Tyranobuildertimeline

And while people think of visual novels as being linked to anime, remember that visual novels don’t have to be in an anime style. While it’s certainly the most popular style, I’ve seen them used with pencil sketches and even heard of people using pictures of themselves and their family as the characters in stories! You could also use free 3-D character software like DAZ Studio to generate characters of your own, or some other character building software like Heromachine and use them as part of a visual novel story.

If you’re interested, here is a page of story/planning resources for Ren’py (another visual novel maker, and the biggest player before Tyrano Builder’s release). That resource page, under software, includes a number of pieces of flow-charting software like Chatmapper which could be used to script/plan a branching visual novel story pretty well. And, here is a collection of free backgrounds and character (sprites) for use with Ren’py or Tyrannobuilder:

Visual novels seem to be having a bit of resurgence recently, likely because of services like STEAM and the Apple/Android app stores making them easy to actually sell and distribute as content. Heck, technically even stories like the critically acclaimed Walking Dead “game” are really just a form of visual novel, just with much more playability and advanced graphics. As a result, many different types have popped up, from Space Opera like Sunrider to deep Historical pieces like The Rainy Port Keelung.

If I had the time, I’d probably do a little visual novel making myself! Looks pretty fun and easy!

Enjoy!

Rob

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