I've always wanted to make a VN but coding is draining. Any recommendations?

[Crescentdune]

I see that you already coded some renpy games, so your problem isn't horror vacui about learning the language: you know already all that you need to know. It's just plain boredom at writing mc "Hello world" and stuff.
I don't know any VN maker engine that hasn't been already suggested, but I want to suggest you an alternative route, you'll decide what suits you best.
You can put up an ad for a coder in the "Recruitment and Services" subforum.
Just take your time to make your project attractive, don't forget to write a Project Document where you detail your whole story: coders really appreciate those.
If you look for a beginner coder that needs a simple project to learn the ropes. your game is probably a good place to start.

Thank you for the advice. I have thought of getting others to code for me but the thought of having someone else for such a small-scale project is kinda scary for me (I am usually on the side of the one being hired not the other way around)

 

[Crescentdune]

A C# programmer my self, I've only just recently dabbled with renpy programming. So far programming in renpy is way faster than anything I've done before, since its super high level stuff (as oppose to low level code, such as creating game mechanics). So I'm a little mystified by this post of yours. I will say programming in renpy is the most painful and frustrating programming I've ever done... when I'm actually doing programming, but doing general scripting is fine.

looking at your mock up, my only guess as to your concern with programming is if you are trying to get deep into tailoring the look and feel of the user experience by customizing the screens, animations, etc. I will say, I'm not a fan of having to 'hard code' in the behavior I want the game to have, as opposed to a custom game where if I wanted to animate the characters in a scene, rather than using transforms and commands, I would just animate it in blender as an FBX and run it in godot/unity. But setting that up can take a lot of prep work, one of the reason I started using renpy recently is I'm tired of 'designing' games and actually want to focus on making game/content, hence renpy's script focus design encourages content creation, I'll worry about customizing the UI another time.

I totally understand your point of view. I personally am not well-versed in any programming language (I only knew the basics of Renpy) but looking back after reading your comment I guess it's true that I wanted to make the actual game look pretty while neglecting THE ACTUAL GAME itself. Maybe that's why I had such a poor experience making them.

Maybe I should just scope down and finish making one before worrying about the fine details.

 

[hardwire666]

Gdevelop.

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Hands down is the easiest thing you could use. As a test, I tried to recreate the basic framework of Big Brother using it just to see what I could do, and it got pretty far. At least as far as an open-world navigation VN kind of thing goes. Obviously, there is more to it than that, but I stopped there as it didn't support the ability to do incremental content updates. This was important to me because I don't want to force people to download the entire game every time there's a content update. Also why I passed on Godot as doing the same thing was problematic (at least at the time). I ended up building everything from scratch with Blueprints in UE4....except the dialogue system... I bought part lol. I wanted a fancy flowgraph-type deal to create dialogue with. So I picked one up for like $30.


However, if none of what I went through is a factor for you Gdevelop is surprisingly capable and ridiculously simple. Check it out.

 

[GNVE]

I think it's this. Unsure if were talking about the same thing but in essence it's having to repeat tedious lines of code to make a picture show two inches slightly to the right (to give an oversimplification)

Well there are a few things you can do to help with this:
1.) Make sure you use shortcuts like copy and pasting. Sure you can name each image totally different but it might be better to use the format "scene currentscene-XX" so you can copy/paste "scene currentscene-" every time. Over the long run this saves a lot of time and makes things less tedious.
2.) Some things are good enough. Sure it is great to customize the entire style of Renpy to match your game. The standard style of Renpy is good enough however. Don't change the style unless you really like coding or can pay for someone else to do it for you.
3.) Consider making a kinetic novel. Sure it is great to think about making a magnum opus with a million side-paths and endings but a simple story without choices cuts down a lot on the amount of coding you have to do.
4.) Less conventional is to use OpenAI chat GPT to do a lot of the heavy lifting. I tested out the following: I "trained" the AI using an example of a natural text and how I want it formatted to use in Renpy. then feed it new text and ask it to format it in the same way. While not perfect it can do a lot of work that just needs to be checked and adjusted a little.
I haven't tried it out but I am sure you can do the same with menu's.

 

[Jables]

You can try to use GitHub Copilot. It is an AI for coding, it takes care of all repetitive stuff for you, a huge time saver, at least for me. You might need to install VS Code for this though.

I want to say that it's going to be great as a prototype. I would be interested to see the performance of a game programmed by AI. It's probably as gnarly as Yandere simulator.

 

[GNVE]

Apparently there are mods out there fully programmed by ChatGPT. Don't know about full games though. I think it might be possible we see something like that in the next few years.

 

[Rell games]

I want to say that it's going to be great as a prototype. I would be interested to see the performance of a game programmed by AI. It's probably as gnarly as Yandere simulator.

It is not as advanced as you might have imagined it, better not to expect it to code everything for you. Although you could try. It is a tool for programmers to make their life a lot easier, it predicts what you want to code and suggests it for you. For me, all it suggests is valid in 90% of cases, which let me avoid doing all the repetitive and boring stuff.