Heck, maybe one of you reading this will make your own game as well! Many, many devs have also used Ren’py to create commercial (read: paid) visual novel games that you can even find on Steam. It’s simplistic, works like a charm, and completely free.
Most if not all of these games were made with the Ren’py engine, an open-source, visual novel game engine. The top 10 that I will list here are those that garnered quite a bit of a following for its niche, and I hope many of you end up understanding how that came to be. Most of them are romance-based, or have strong elements of romance, but many come with a whole new imagined world, rich in story and characters, and tons of endings for the player to get as is expected in both visual novels and otome games. It’s been a very long time since I last checked on those two sites, though, but I do have memory of some of my all-time favorite indie games that I honestly wish I could relive for the first time. I would check online forums such as LemmaSoft, a forum dedicated to self-made visual novels (VN), almost every day just to play a new release or a demo for a highly-anticipated game, or Renai, an online archive for new releases. Not many people were as immersed in the indie otome game scene like I was.
