You’ve just started your Twitter account for your brand new visual novel. You’re excited to finally reveal the big project you’ve been working on. You spend an hour coming up with the perfect tweet… only for it to get absolutely no attention whatsoever. One of the biggest pitfalls of social media is that you need followers for your post to get attention, but you need interesting posts to get followers. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. Wouldn’t it great if there was a social media platform that could push out your posts to people, even if you had no followers? How great would it be i ..read more

Hello, everyone! Welcome to another blog post on the topic of marketing your visual novels. Today, we will be discussing a powerful strategy for boosting wishlists and sales on Steam. As many of you may already know, having a large number of wishlists prior to launch can greatly increase your chances of appearing on Steam’s “Popular Upcoming” list, which in turn can lead to even more wishlists, and ultimately, more sales. But how do you go about achieving this? Whether you’re a developer looking to achieve the 7000-10000 wishlists needed to appear on Steam’s “Popular Upcoming” list, or if yo ..read more

Hi everyone! March already! Lets jump into answering some of your questions on visual novel development! As always, you can send in your questions here.   Hi! I've just gotten started using Ren'Py and have loved reading your blog posts about visual novel creation. My question is this: you've mentioned using google docs to outline your script. How do you format this for diverging storylines and scenes that correspond to player choices. Do you do multiple files or all in one long document? Also, do you ever use any flowchart software for plotting your games? I saw some people recommendin ..read more

Recently, we’ve been asked a lot about our stance on fan merchandise, fanfictions and other related derivative works. As a studio, we’re so happy that others feel passionate enough about our projects that they want to create their own little part of it. We don’t want to discourage this at all, and we just ask that you respect and follow the below guidelines. Merchandise Creating and selling merchandise based off of our games is generally fine, for profit or not, as long as the scale isn’t large. If you are a for profit or large business, we ask that you contact us for licensing. Please d ..read more

Hello again everyone! Today I have another blog post answering some of your questions from our CuriousCat. Thank you all again for sending in these questions, and you can still send in more if you need help with anything. Let’s get straight into the first question. I read your last blog and I'm not too sure how layeredimages and sprites work, especially side images (of a character who would show up in the lower left hand corner). Could you explain? Thanks! Thank you for the question! I’d be happy to go over the multiple ways you can program your sprite, as well as how side images work.&nbs ..read more

Hello, everyone! Today, I have an interesting blog post to share with you.  We’ve talked before about marketing your game for Kickstarter, and ways you can advertise and reach a wider audience – but what about the parts that come before that? How do you create a game from scratch, with (perhaps) no prior experience? It might seem like a daunting task, but I’m going to break it down into steps that should help you to get on your way to creating your very own Visual Novel. You can also use this post as a kind of masterlist. 1) Choose your Engine First things first, you’ll want to look ..read more

It’s been a little while since our last “how to” post, and today we’re revisiting an oldie but a goodie – recoloring sprites inside Ren’py using Matrix Color! As you know, we have an older post up with some details on how to do this, but the process is quite long and messy – you end up having to add the matrix to every single piece of your layeredimage, which is just too much of a hassle! Now, I have two brand new ways to show you how to do it quicker and easier. Firstly, why don’t we start with an example of what recoloring sprites could be used for… …Tada! We use it a lot in The Divine ..read more

We were lucky enough to be invited to the wonderful FujoCon 2021! A big thanks to everyone that made the con such a success. We held a Q&A with fan submitted questions, which we’ve gathered below for those that couldn’t attend! We’re always happy to answer further questions at any time, so feel free to get in contact with us. Mod ProfHotMess Hello! And welcome to our live Q and A on discord with #2halfstudios! We got lots of wonderful questions and we will try to get to get to at least one question from each person who submitted as time allows First question is from C.L: “How do you bala ..read more

Hi everyone! Happy New Year! We took a break from answering questions over the new year period, but we’re back to it now! As always, you can send in your questions here.   Do you ever experience burnout because of high expectations for your game, either from others or from yourselves? How do you cope with the pressure to try and make your game the best you can and ending up more stress/overwhelmed because of it? In the first few months of developing The Divine Speaker, it was all very exciting and new. It felt like any kind of burnout or stress would be impossible, since this was just ..read more

Hello again everyone! Today, I have even MORE questions to answer! Thanks again for sending these through, and keep them coming. Lets jump straight into it! What is the process of publishing a game on Steam like? Is it easy or plausible for a solo developer to publish on their own if they do enough marketing on social media sites? Do you need to contact a publisher to publish your game for you? I think I’ll answer this question in sections, since there’s a few parts to it. Lets talk about Steam first: it sucks. It seriously sucks. They make it as difficult for you as possible to get your g ..read more