Choosing A Game Engine: Visual Novel & Adventure Games [2022]

[@gamefromscratch]

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[@ugogatto]

i would add Fungus for unity

[@seireiart]

Ren'Py is my go-to game engine for making Visual Novel, It's easy to learn, and flexible as well. It does help me having a solid foundation of the VN game as I can focus more on the Art and Story aspects.

[@djmance198]

I love using TyranoBuilder. It's a drag and drop game engine for visual novels. Very easy to use. Also has a scripting tool if you want to add mini games.

[@jmbiv_dev]

Other people have mentioned this, but articy is an absolutely amazing tool for helping design any game that falls into the visual novel, adventure, etc. genres. It's one of the best compliment tools I've ever used, definitely worth checking it out regardless of what engine you choose. Also, as a shameless plug (and relevant to the video), I have a long tutorial series on my YT channel about building a retro text adventure-style game in Godot, if anyone is curious about making text adventures/visual novels and not sure where to start.

[@sslaxx]

Yeah, €50 a month for the basics with Articy? No thanks.

[@tlc1432]

I would love to see this become a series ❤️❤️.

[@GrounddevLF]

YESS!

[@gamefromscratch]

If views are good enough, it will. KZbin algorithms don't seem to like me that much right now though... :(

[@GrounddevLF]

@@gamefromscratch that is disappointing😒 your content is amazing and helps a lot of us!!! Thank you for everything you do!

[@korytoombs886]

Having used both Visual Novel Maker and Ren'Py, I would suggest Ren'Py for the simple fact it is more stable and has more features. Visual Novel Maker is good for those who don't want to write any code and includes tons of assets.

[@junimeme5626]

Love the idea of this series! It's already a topic of discussion with people I know that are involved in game dev so this is a very good resource.

[@starvr]

Please continue the series, very much interested in all the styles of the games and what is available.

[@tanglingheadphones]

I was blown away with Heaven's Vault's dialogue system and it was made with Ink. Nice to see it included here.

[@Amelia_PC]

About the UE4 Visual Novel Framework system. It can have a first-person/third-person mode in an "exploration mode" outside the dialogue system (meaning: the player can walk/jump/climb/etc and explore a 3D or 2.5D world.). I've run some tests and it works great.

[@ChaonicMew]

I'm surprised that Visionaire Studio didn't make it on the list of engines for adventure games.

[@VeeZzz123]

i'm impressed, you don't have a script so you say "ah" a lot, an there's 0 editing, but those are details, the actual information in the video is 10/10, you went out of your way to include and explain many of the ones others would have omitted

[@ElasticGiraffe]

Love this idea for a series! My tastes might be a little retro, but I'd be interested in engines and tools to create MUDs, online side-scrolling aRPGs like MapleStory, isometric RPGs like Baldur's Gate or Fallout, free-roam blobbers (first-person, party-based RPGs) like Might & Magic VI-VIII or Wizardry 8, and other classic cRPG genres.

[@billyoung9538]

This was incredibly helpful, because I've been interested in making a game of this genera for a while, and having a comprehensive list of what is out there and works with each game engine has allowed me to focus on figuring out which of these tools is going to be right for me. As I have experience with both Unity and Godot I was pretty sure they were going to be my first choice, but this video introduced me to the Bladecode Adventure Editor, and after watching a few videos and playing with it, I'm pretty impressed. I'm not sure of what it's shortcomings are yet, but what it is already set up to do makes a lot of the tedious stuff that I've always disliked dealing with in the past, compiling for each platform for example, look incredibly easy. I know very little about the Blade Engine, but I do know Java well enough, but it's been a few years since I've used it.

[@skulltrick]

Great video as always! Thank you so much for what you do to inform and inspire the young game devs!

[@StudioScents]

Wintermute used to be a point-n-click adventure game engine that was fairly regularly updated....but I haven't heard anything about it in yeaarrrrss; thanks for some great content!

[@c0dexus]

I recommend Adventure Creator for Unity, it can do 2D or 3D it's super easy to use and very powerful.

[@NDjuggle]

Yes, my recommendation as well. It has a powerful visual scripting tool, it is really well documented and has an incredible community at it's forum. My tool of choice for all kinds of narrative focused games :)

[@StudioScents]

@@NDjuggle I bought Adventure Creator for Unity many moons ago - do you have any tutorial for it that's modern/updated that you would recommend?

[@NDjuggle]

@@StudioScents I would recommend to go to the source :) this is a channel from the creator of Adventure Creator. kzbin.infovideos You have tutorials for different kind of games (classic 2D, 2,5D, 3d and first person) The 2d one is the basic one and a great place to start. Even if you just want to make a 2D game going through other tutorials would also be a good idea because there is a lot of great stuff there that will help you a lot. The new video "First Person Primer" for example has a lot nice things in it. The "Prefab puzzle logic" video is great for getting the hang of the different kinds of variables and so on. Whatever problem you run into you can just post the question on Adventure Creator Forum and someone will answer shortly, probably Chris himself. Hope this was helpful :)

[@LaloMartins]

Bit of linguistic nerdry: Escoria: Spanish for scum (thus, probably a reference to ScummVM) - Portuguese is the same but with an accent (escória) Rakugo: a traditional form of storytelling in Japan

[@6-6-6-meow]

WwWŴWWwwwwwwwWŴWWWWWWWWwWWWWWWWWwWwWWWWwwWWWwwWwwWŴWWW2wwWŴW

[@Giantpenguin]

Fungus for unity is amazing as well ,I use it for pretty much any game with dialogue. Also very easy to plug other scripts into it, which makes it extremely flexible.

[@SamuelSarette]

My favorite tech hands-down for writing interactive fiction is Ink. Web, Unity, Godot support (more but those are ones I've used). But if I wanted a noob to write a visual novel, specifically? RenPy.

[@estudiodkamigurumi]

It would be nice if you created a series of tutorials for beginners in visual novel maker this is a great software but not many people are talking about it because it is a little difficult to use

[@MarcosCodas]

I think you also missed TyranoBuilder, which is super easy to use and performs really well.

[@Nkanyiso_K]

What perfect timing. I'm busy working on Art & Story so the Game Engine is still really flexible right now

[@Brice31]

There's also the adventure creator addon for Unity that wasn't mentioned.

[@ЕвгенийКожевников-я3я]

I would also mention Wintermute engine. Yes, it's discontinued, but you can still download and use it. Back in a day it was quite popular, it seems.

[@StudioScents]

That's exactly what I commented! Was super cool when first introduced, and a ton of games were in queue

[@srmarcosx]

Another unity addon that is usually overlooked is Fungus. It's an awesome tool for building VNs and totally free. I haven't used it in a while so I don't really now If it's still maintained, but it definitely worth giving it a look

[@Billioncompany786]

I used Fungus, I even used modified version of Fungus when I worked in a Visual Novel game based Company. It's really good if you watch all the tutorials properly.

[@nikosurfingYT]

​@@Billioncompany786i used fungus few years ago. But I didn't know that now it's deprecated. So sad😢

[@Metal-Spark]

I really enjoyed this video but I would've loved to hear your final recommendation or maybe top 3 engines at the end.

[@DraconianRain]

Tyranobuilder on steam is also a great VN maker

[@kaikun2236]

Came here to say this. It's SO easy to use, doesn't require any programming, continually updated and it's only $15!

[@NoCodeFilmmaker]

BRO! How did you forget about Adventure Creator for Unity? There's games currently released on the Nintendo store made with it. Also, Fungus is a free open source add-on for Unity that is still very powerful for creating not only visual novels and adventure point and click games, but also can be used to make interactive FMV games.

[@annunakiflow215]

Is it good for hybrid games like Policenauts?

[@lion9575]

A series of this would be fantastic!

[@felsenstern]

The only other game concept that I can see being used as often as Visual Novels is RPG-Maker which is combination of a simple visual novel with a tile based top down game part and a turn based combat system which seems to be strangely unrivaled.

[@nun1nh0Productions]

For the next video, A JRPG genre would be nice

[@PontusWittenmark]

To anyone looking to do any type of narrative game - Ink (discussed last here), is 👌

[@Roger709Bautista14]

For choose your own text adventure builders for web browsers like Twine or Yarn, you forgot to mention Quest or the PC only interactive fiction text adventure builders INFORM 6/7, TADS and ADRIFT to play the classic text adventure games like the Zork choose your own adventures series or Colossal Cave Adventure. The RPG Maker series are one of the best commercial rpg design engines to make JRPG games, MZ has the Final Fantasy like side view battle screen with so many resources to choose from for an $80 price on Steam.

[@HE360]

Yayyy, now I could make the next Shenmue

[@programmingsabrina127]

Please continue the series !

[@johnpekkala6941]

Scumm VM is indeed not really to create new games but to make it possible to play old games on modern computers. I use it to play MYST and it takes care of everything including a runtime for QuickTime required for the videos in the game and wich is not avaible for Windows but only on Mac since many years. Anyways some interesting tools here to check out and ill keep out looking for new episodes in this new series.

[@jlewwis1995]

I'm surprised you didn't bring up Inform when talking about interactive fiction engines considering it seems like one of the more popular ones

[@groovygrover6178]

nice, like this new format! :D great idea! :)

[@JonnyRocksAW]

What a great idea. I'm here for it.

[@antonionotbanderas9775]

I like Dialog2 data structure but I want my ansi novel to run from terminal, lol. I also like Dialog2 text parser, and scripting language. I did find their style system to be too complicated. I should be focusing on story anyways, looking forward to your review of the latest Dialog2.

[@breadman7733]

I would love to see one on the city builder/sim topic. Like simcity, Stellaris, roller coaster tycoon, stuff like that

[@ChrisLeeW00]

I’d love to see you set something up in escoria

[@The6thRonin]

Very good idea for a series

[@noxen1402]

Great video Mike, a series would be very interesting! I suggest Zelda a Link to the Past like games to be the next one (in 2D or 3D...). Thanks!

[@noxen1402]

@@BListed2k24 Yes, thanks!

[@JadeAislin]

I'd. love to see you cover role play games and action adventure games. Not that I will change the game engine I'm using. Most of the assets I bought are Unity, so that's what I'm going to use.

[@luxalba1731]

There is also Yarn Spinner. It is a solution similar to INK

[@tonywtyt]

TyranoBuilder was inexpensive, but it has no learning assets and the online tutorial dead ends at different links, so I immediately got a refund from Steam. If the was an example story, they certainly failed to point you to it! VN Maker has mixed reviews so I'm wondering if its over priced. It sounded like it has a confusing workflow, or un-intuitive features. There are a lot of text based engines and some like Squiffy can use JS to bring in art, but it that sounds counter productive when RenPy has this built in.

[@T0mT4yl0r]

Great topic!

[@13101s]

Why mix it up, and leaving out most point and click adventure editors, and the extensions for unity and unreal for those?

[@BrunoCaxito]

For those who like Ink and Ren'Py I invite you to look about Snowfall Storytelling Plugin and language for Unreal Engine.

[@fablewalls]

How much and how hard please? I use Twine and am hoping I can find a runtime for Unreal

[@BrunoCaxito]

@@fablewalls You can check it here kzbin.info/www/bejne/nYWsYXRprM6GaNk

[@izumichan31]

Honestly if you're just making the average VN and aren't planning to do too much with things like minigames, UE is a bit overkill for a visual novel. And definitely overkill for something purely text-based.

[@fablewalls]

@@izumichan31 - I don't have the choice. The developers use Unreal and I have been asked to produce something for it. It's one of those times where it doesn't matter what your advice is - and I don't mean to sound horrible about it. Either that or I walk away from the opportunity - the Developer is not about to redo 2 years of work in Unreal just because of me.

[@izumichan31]

@@fablewalls I'm mostly talking about if you have a choice. Of course if you're working for someone, you have to go by what they use. It's just if you were going to make one on your own or with your own small team, there's plenty of options better suited for VNs/text-based games.

[@corimyers4985]

NaniNovel had me wowed, until I saw the price and the horrible way they talk to customers. That’s even after being given money and a 5 star review. I refuse to pay that kind of money for a plug-in AND get talked to like I’m crazy

[@BIGOTEMACHINE]

I would like to see some videos about openbor and MUGEN or any other free Beat'em'up engine

[@Pumpkinwaffle]

Never heard of rakugo before. I'd be interested in a video about it.

[@arhamsanzid1662]

More please!

[@vintprox]

The Finger of Phoenix points towards Godot. *I see what you did there* :))))

[@Supreme-Emperor-Mittens]

Don't forget... TYRANO BUILDER.

[@GrounddevLF]

Awesome!

Im kinda stuck between Ren'Py and VN Maker. Am I correct in thinking both of them are equally powerful, one just has a point-n-click UI and the other has a more 'get under the hood and get dirty' approach? Or is one of them vastly superior than the other? What I'd like to do is try making my own game menus and add brief motion feature cut scenes; just to give an idea of my attempted use case

[@6-6-6-meow]

What did you end up picking? I also want do those things

@@6-6-6-meow I downloaded Ren'py since it was free and still pretty dang powerful. I'm sure VN Maker is good too but the cost of entry with no demo to see it it was right for me is what ultimately chased me away.

[@Dude_Slick]

e, Why have you not covered Visionaire Studio?

[@pedrooswald]

Question: I am an Illustrator and 2D animator looking to create a point and click adventure. I have no programming skills, and would love to know which one should I pick to work with. Based on your list it seems that the most user friendly software would be Visual Novel Maker, although I´m not sure and would love some thoughts. Thank you for your content! Awesome videos as always.

[@3polygons]

Hello... Which one did you pick, at the end? If it's not much to ask...

[@drbb6757]

If you want something like AGS under Unity, try PowerQuest by Powerhoof. It's free.

[@emoneydatruth1]

Are there any new Visual Scripting Game Engines Available?

[@baerthe]

Could be great to see tools related to RPGs (but not jRPG style RPGs, no RPGmaker etc, what else exists?).

[@josef-c-6126]

Graphics editor, game engine, spreadsheet for management of characters and dialogs, sound effect editor... Tools you need to create a rpg. Or you need special feature?

[@skaruts]

The problem with RPGs is that they can come in many shapes and forms. They can be 1st person, 3rd person, 3D top down, 2D isometric... There used to be an app called RPG Toolkit, but this is very old, and I've no idea if it even still exists. Iirc it focused on 2D isometric. Apart from that I only know of Solarus, but this is already in RPGMaker inspired territory, although it had some extra features for more versatility, iirc. I could be wrong, but I think you can stray somewhat from the JRPG style with it, but I can't remember how much.

[@izumichan31]

@@skaruts Ah, I remember RPG Toolkit. It was the first game engine I ever used. No, it wasn't focused on 2d isometric. It was basically free RPG maker just more flexible and more code-focused. Its scripting language was also c-like. It basically got me into programming. I actually have the source code and had been meaning to tinker with it, but never had the time.

[@skaruts]

@@izumichan31 It's been too many years for me to remember, but I think my own interest in it was related to isometric. So maybe it at least supported it, along with other perspectives.

[@brodriguez11000]

@@skaruts : Sounds a little like 'RPG in a Box' on Steam.

[@ViRiXDreamcore]

Fungus is a free VN maker in Unity.

[@seansmailes9981]

on a similar genre,, are there any game engines that are specialized for creating a Choose Your Own Adventure style game?

[@renatosardinhalopes6073]

If a engine made for a single genre is easy to learn and pretty powerful.. it's usually better to use it than other general purpose engines, no?

[@GeraldOwens1954]

Correct: the equivalent in programming languages are called Domain Specific Languages, and there are compiler generating compilers designed specifically to generate DSLs. Nekovm is one I know about, and I am sure there are others.

[@renatosardinhalopes6073]

@@GeraldOwens1954 thats a cool fact to know!

[@tjreed7797]

Trying to figure out which engine I could use to make a VN in with side scroller portions

[@MarekBorecki]

As programmer: * Twine is very hard to maintain * Ink is awesome

[@ravanin]

you missed fungus for unity. the most popular vn framework for unity, free and open source.

[@eivis75]

RPG games would be nice.

[@cultofape]

I´m just using Godot to make my own engine. 3 years later, and multiple aborts and restarts, I almost regret that, lol...

[@imakeinternetdev]

No mention of Adventure Creator? The king of Adventure Game frameworks? Do my eyes deceive me?

[@jlewwis1995]

When/if you get to FPS games there will be way too many options 😂 from unity and godot all the way back to the original doom engine, I mean some are definitely more usable than others but there's definitely not a lack of options lol

[@ElasticGiraffe]

My hunch is that Unreal is undisputed king of the FPS, but I'd like to know how other options measure up.

[@Zer0Flash]

mmorpg next?

[@nocultist7050]

If you are not making AAA don't do UE. If you don't know if you are making AAA use Unity because you can change your mind (and renderer) later.

[@mrcyberpunk]

this is good advice.

[@fablewalls]

“If you are not making AAA don't do UE…” Yeah but what if the guys offering you a chance to showcase are Unreal Developers? I don’t have the choice but if there was a runtime for Twine to Unreal, I’d be happy.

[@hiromichael_ctranddevgames1097]

Awesommmeeee

[@JanDalhuysen]

hey Mike, great video! 🔥 Can you make a new video about game engines related to VR/AR or "Metaverse" games 😃

[@brodriguez11000]

Simmetri on Steam is a VR/3D tool.

[@ORANOID]

Continue please.

[@Kruku666]

w8 point and click adventure games are still a thing ? 0-oi'm getting flashbacks from king's quest 5 XD

[@ElasticGiraffe]

Nostalgic indie devs are bringing back their favorite genres that haven't been popular since the 80s and 90s. It's a beautiful thing.

[@HarryPujols]

Escoria means scum in Spanish

[@LordMystirio]

For Point 'n Click, for me Visonaire Studio is hands down the best. VNMaker has been a huge let down. Bugged to the bones.

[@daniel-zh9nj6yn6y]

Has anyone here used Adventure Game Studio ?

[@brandynnolen921]

I have. I made a small demo fan game of Monkey Island that I no longer have and never released, it was mostly me testing the waters to making a game. AGS has been used for some commercial games too. If I'm not mistaken Kathy Rain and Whispers Of A Machine. A Date In The Park. There's some others too.

[@murderedcarrot9684]

I was gonna make digital core rule books for a home made DnD esq game just using buttons for turning pages and jumping too chapters and charts.

[@banned0404]

Godot all the way

[@keithtam8859]

FUNGUS??

[@lucasabratti598]

Escoria... why did they choose that name? It litteraly means 'human waste' or 'excrement'... that is an unfortunate choise of branding

[@LaloMartins]

Because it's an open source/Godot equivalent of ScummVM. Also, escoria doesn't mean only human waste, but also slag or scum.

[@lucasabratti598]

@@LaloMartins I mean... I get the scummVM thing... but at least here in Argentina escoria is exclusively used as huma waste (if used literally)... I think that they could have gone with a better word... but I guess is weird only for spanish speaking / Argentines people

[@haxidenti6001]

RenPY not renpi!

[@donwald3436]

Python is great if you're not a programmer, real programmers hate Python lol it's like BASIC but teaches worse habits lol.

[@Amialythis]

Renpy is stupid because it could easilt be done with no actual programming and the whole thing is programming

[@JVJF7]

That's why VN Maker exists

[@izumichan31]

Eh... Renpy is fine, it's mostly just copy/pasting a script in after you've written it. You barely need much programming experience. If you don't wanna code, there's VN Maker and also Tyranobuilder.

[@DevJeremi]

Here is new Rakugo (mentioned at 04:08) devlog: rakugoteam.github.io/devlog/2022-02-18-rakugo-3.3-devlog-05/