I gave the soft a real chance. I made a full game with it. Now that the game is finished I can give a real objective opinion that is not based on a couple of hours of use.

I can't recommand Visual Novel Maker. There are too many flaws and problems with it to encourage anyone to buy it (even on sale, cause it's not a question of price vs content but just quality of developping time). I'm working with a professional javascript programmer and according to them, VN Maker is the worst nightmare they've ever faced. Compared to it, RPG Maker is heaven (and that's a lot to say considering how RPG Maker could be easily improved on that side.) Doing simple things like aligning text boxes, changing the UI etc... takes way too long.

The constant 0.5 sec lag everytime you want to do something with the live viewing enabled is terrible, the recurrent crashes force you to save almost everytime you write a sentence, the fact that some basic function buttons like "going back to title screen" aren't implemented tells a lot (you can do it, but it's much more complex than it should... RPG Maker have had that button ever since RPG Maker 2000...).

What finished killing everything for me is the whole text import/export for proofreading/translation purposes. It's as bad as it can be. You write your game in english and just want to proofread it? No sweat, you simply just CAN'T export your text. You have to duplicate your whole text data (so have 2 versions with the same text) to be able to export it into csv. And even that put aside, the csv result looks terrible for anyone willing to proofread/translate a VN. It's so terrible I've allowed my proofreader to not use the base formating of VN Maker so he could see clearer in the text. He has to reorder everything, giving him more work, cause it's so awful to watch that he prefers having that extra work just to be able to work properly. And it also means that I'll have to re-implement everything line by line since it's messing up VN Maker's formatting. It's THAT bad. And it's even more infuriating that this feature was 50% of the reason I originally bought the soft...

Of course they've pushed two updates these last weeks (some supposedly meant to correct some of my concern), but the last software update was in January 2019. When you need to wait one year and a half to get an update, it tells a lot... And honestly, I don't think those corrections are enough to make it much better.

There are few good points, of course. The live preview is nice, the possibility to animate mouths and eyes separately too (and the whole voice thing is probably well-implemented too but I didn't have the budget to implement voices). I really wanted to give VN Maker a good review, but it's just not possible. It's just not good enough to be enjoyable to work on...

I gave the soft a real chance. I made a full game with it. Now that the game is finished I can give a real objective opinion that is not based on a couple of hours of use. I can't recommand Visual Novel Maker. There are too many flaws and problems with it to encourage anyone to buy it (even on sale, cause it's not a question of price vs content but just quality of developping time). I'm working with a professional javascript programmer and according to them, VN Maker is the worst nightmare they've ever faced. Compared to it, RPG Maker is heaven (and that's a lot to say considering how RPG Maker could be easily improved on that side.) Doing simple things like aligning text boxes, changing the UI etc... takes way too long. The constant 0.5 sec lag everytime you want to do something with the live viewing enabled is terrible, the recurrent crashes force you to save almost everytime you write a sentence, the fact that some basic function buttons like "going back to title screen" aren't implemented tells a lot (you can do it, but it's much more complex than it should... RPG Maker have had that button ever since RPG Maker 2000...). What finished killing everything for me is the whole text import/export for proofreading/translation purposes. It's as bad as it can be. You write your game in english and just want to proofread it? No sweat, you simply just CAN'T export your text. You have to duplicate your whole text data (so have 2 versions with the same text) to be able to export it into csv. And even that put aside, the csv result looks terrible for anyone willing to proofread/translate a VN. It's so terrible I've allowed my proofreader to not use the base formating of VN Maker so he could see clearer in the text. He has to reorder everything, giving him more work, cause it's so awful to watch that he prefers having that extra work just to be able to work properly. And it also means that I'll have to re-implement everything line by line since it's messing up VN Maker's formatting. It's THAT bad. And it's even more infuriating that this feature was 50% of the reason I originally bought the soft... Of course they've pushed two updates these last weeks (some supposedly meant to correct some of my concern), but the last software update was in January 2019. When you need to wait one year and a half to get an update, it tells a lot... And honestly, I don't think those corrections are enough to make it much better. There are few good points, of course. The live preview is nice, the possibility to animate mouths and eyes separately too (and the whole voice thing is probably well-implemented too but I didn't have the budget to implement voices). I really wanted to give VN Maker a good review, but it's just not possible. It's just not good enough to be enjoyable to work on...