Novelty

Novelty is a comprehensive software solution that can be used by both novices and professional visual novel developers to create unique games and stories that can contain numerous chapters and characters.

The interface is modern and well-organized, divided into several panels, such as story and action windows, asset library, and property inspector. It's recommended to study the help file before proceeding, in order to understand what each function does and how to properly create your story. Plus, you can opt for the template model to get familiarized with the options and how it looks like.

The story pane comes with three distinct tabs that display the chapters, all the designed screens and the scene elements. Novelty comes with predefined characters, background pictures, sounds and scripts. However, it lets you import only images, bitmap fonts and audio files.

To add new items to your story, simply browse the asset library and choose the desired background, textures, objects (e.g. moon, actor), animations, and audio tracks. Each element may be customized from the property inspector. For example, an actor can be placed in the center or left, sent to the back, and introduced into the story by fading in or sliding.

From the bottom left corner of the window, the app lets you insert dialogs, waiting times and new characters, as well as show menus, change the backgrounds, shake the screen or a specific object. An item can be rotated, cropped, rescaled and flipped at any given time. To preview your work, just press the "Play" button situated in the upper toolbar. Last but not least, the project can be saved as NOV and XML files and exported as a stand-alone game.

Taking everything into account, Novelty is a reliable application created to offer a professional method to design stunning visual novels and indie games with complex characters and unique dialogs.