Novelty or Visual Novel Engine are plug and play. You plugin your images, audio, and script and then add premade transitions. linear stories are easy to make and they are capable of choice based story lines. Renpy has a bit of a learning curve, but these are very user friendly and you can build a VN game in a day with image placeholders. I've used Novelty before and while it isn't robust, it certainly gets the job done and I recommend you start with that. Storyboard your story first so you know what assets, poses, and scenes you want to make. Save each scene and delete any assets or parts of assets that are not in front of the camera for faster render times. Render double the finished size then scale the images back down to remove noise and other artifacts. Create a filter in Photoshop to bring the saturation/noise reduction/etc. down to a more realistic level (if realism is what you want) and batch process your images. Try this one for realism:
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Spellcheck your script and search for other errors. Honestly, the script is the most important part and people will just close the game if there are too many errors with spelling, grammar, or sentence structure. Read the comments and criticisms of games here to get a feel for what people like and don't like. Putting the game together is the easy part. Making good renders and a compelling story is the hard part. There's a fine line between a slow burn story and a blue-balls simulator, so if you don't give the reader/player a reward every once in a while, they may lose interest regardless of how well written it is. Foreplay is important. If the first scene is a sex scene, the reader/player doesn't have much to build up to. A lot of the games here are like that and those don't get much traction as far as downloads. If you use stock assets, make new materials for the clothing, mix and match character skins or use LIE to change makeup, tattoos, freckles, etc. There are tons of free textures available and it can make an overused asset look completely new.
