A visual novel is a 2D game with the walking taken out

A visual novel is a backdrop, portraits over it, and text, and a flat project in Flockbay is built for exactly that.

The brief settles which kind of game you are making, 2D or 3D, before anything is built, and there is no default. A visual novel is 2D-native (a backdrop, portraits over it, and text) and those are exactly the things a flat project is built to handle: sprites at an exact position, rotation and scale, each sitting on its own drawn bottom-centre so a character stands where she belongs instead of floating by whatever transparent margin her file carries.

The other half of the trade is unchanged, and it was always the good half. The unglamorous engineering of a visual novel — a dialogue system that reads a script, a branching structure with flags and conditions, a save format that survives you adding a chapter, a backlog, skip and auto modes, and a way to test a route without clicking through forty screens to reach it — is code, and Flockbay writes code.

Where a specialist visual novel toolkit still beats this is the first hour. It opens on a script format somebody already decided, and you type into it. Here the brief comes first and the scene is built from it. If what you want is text and portraits and you want it tonight, the specialist tool is the honest recommendation. The reason to be here is that what you are building on is a whole engine, and you find out you needed one later rather than sooner.

More on this: Godot 2D game templates: what they hand you, and what they leave

Describe the structure you want: chapters, choices that set flags, choices that only appear if an earlier flag is set, an affection value per character that gates the final route, and a gallery that unlocks scenes you have seen. Flockbay writes the GDScript for it inside your project.

Ask for the presentation too. Text that types out at a speed the player can change. Portraits that swap expression on a cue in the script. A choice timer for the scenes where hesitation should cost something. Music that ducks under a line and comes back.

You never open the script that does it. You play the scene and say the text is too fast, or the choice window is too short, or the route flag is not sticking, and it gets fixed.

There is still a version of this where 3D is the point. A story that moves into a room you can walk around for two minutes. A murder mystery whose examination scene is a space with objects you can pick up. A dating sim where the date happens in a park with weather and a time of day that shifts across the story. Terrain, water, weather and time of day are the 3D side's own tools, and if those scenes are why your novel exists, say so in the brief and they get built in 3D.

If your novel is backdrops, portraits and text, which most of them are, pick 2D, and you are working in the half of the app built for that, not in a world builder with the world switched off.

Either way it is the same download and the same chat, which is told the tools of whichever world the brief chose. The decision is made once, in the brief, and it decides which set of tools the project carries.

More on this: Godot visual novel templates, and why Ren'Py is usually the answer

Backdrops, props and character art come from a library of ready-made objects, from generated pictures, or from your own files. The library is 55,073 sprites out of 60,648 objects, which covers scenery and props far better than it covers your particular protagonist.

Flockbay generates still pictures, which happens to be the shape a portrait or a backdrop already has. What it will not do is generate an animated one (no frames, no sprite sheet), so a character who has to move rather than swap between drawn expressions needs art from you or from an artist. Many visual novel authors already have one, and importing what you have is the normal path rather than a workaround.

The writing is yours. This should not need saying, but a page about an AI visual novel maker should be plain about it: the tool writes code, not your story. A novel whose prose was not written by a person is a novel nobody wants to read, and it is the one part of the genre where automating it removes the reason the genre exists.

The same caution applies to voice. Generated readings are getting good and they are still the fastest way to make a scene feel cheap. If you use them, listen to a full scene rather than a line, because the tells accumulate.

Flockbay is a desktop application for Windows and Linux. You download and install it, and the novel runs locally on the copy of Godot bundled with it, on your own machine.

You need an internet connection to build, because Flockbay, generation and world data come over the network. Reading the novel you built does not need one.

The download is free, and so is the AI. Flockbay is free, AI included: free hosted AI every day, or your Claude or ChatGPT plan, your own agent, or an API key.