Just think about what you’re making as interactive experiences that someone might remember one day. Classifications are useful for marketing, and still important, but also creatively limiting. So, at the core, just make sure the experience you’re creating is a meaningful and interesting one at the abstract level.

It was the tool with the least friction capable of making what I needed to make. I think an important rule for me is to choose not the most elaborate, fancy or feature-heavy tool, but rather the simplest one that’s capable of doing what I need for the project. Friction is the enemy of making multi-media projects, and I tend to become my own obstacle when choosing a needlessly complex tool for the job.

If the player can customize characters, statistics, equipment, abilities, routes, schedules, or other aspects of the game, the question isn't whether customization exists. The question is what the customization is trying to accomplish. If customization primarily changes the player's interaction with the game, that's something other than a visual novel. If customization primarily changes the story being experienced, that's more of a visual novel.

A visual novel is a type of narrative video game that provides a written narrative experience accompanied by visuals. Visual novels focus on reading and/or listening to a story above any other form of interaction. When a visual novel presents interactions or customizations, they will primarily influence or appear to influence the story.

A Visual Novel (VN) is a digital narrative focused game that requires interactions where the player must be able to impact the story world or the story’s progression. The story and interactions are most commonly presented through a text box and often employ additional forms of interac- tion including menu choices—which often contain sets of actions that the player character can perform—or dialogue options representing the player character’s speech or thoughts. Crucially, VNs have On-Click Progression, where the player clicks, taps or presses a button to see the next part of the story. The aesthetics of VNs are most often conveyed through static images of characters, background art, sound effects (SFX) feedback, and soundtracks.

until now, my approach hasn’t been to create a game around a story, but rather, to develop worldbuilding and narrative within the game system.

However, in a world overflowing with games, getting a slice of that pie of gamers is a difficult task. So, I figure there are about six people in the world who love everything I make, and I’ll do my best to cater my games specifically to them.