Spent the last few weekends building a 6-chapter, 4-route, ~6500-line visual novel solo. Total active time: somewhere around 10 hours. Yes, really. I'll explain.
The honest version: AI tools handled first-draft writing, image generation (sprites, backgrounds, CGs), and music via ComfyUI. The not-so-honest version is "AI built me a game." It didn't. It built me a pile of drafts. Turning that pile into something playable is where the actual work lived, and the work is, basically, editing - at scale, across chapters, while keeping characters from drifting into nine different versions of themselves.
What surprised me wasn't finishing. It was how fast the production phase moved and how slow I was, in comparison, at being the editor my own pipeline needed. I was the bottleneck in my own system, which is humbling.
Honest takeaways:
Posting this because I'd assumed solo VN dev was a 6-month minimum and 10 hours seems borderline absurd. Curious whether anyone else working solo in 2026 has hit similar timelines, or whether I'm wildly off and people are quietly doing this in 4 hours and laughing at me.
