This is the second devlog, following up on the Year 1.5 devlog. It's also a recap of late 2025 and our plans for 2026.
In December, we made RouteVN Creator Client available for public download. This is actually the first time it's been publicly available after almost 2 years of development.
The app isn't perfect, but it's slowly becoming more stable.
It's usable for the basics: creating a full Visual Novel from scratch and exporting it to a web-runnable format.
We also revamped the website with a new demo.
We hope that more people will be able to try the software and let us know what they think.
The project has been planned to be open source from the beginning, but we never actually open sourced it because a lot of the code was exploratory and rewritten frequently.
We have finally stabilized the code and open-sourced all our code under the MIT license.
We plan to write a technical blog post in a couple of weeks to better explain the whole architecture of how the engine works.
We've had some intern hires in the past few months. They have all been working on various parts of the codebases. Here's what the team has been working on:
Rewrote route-graphics. We have re-written the codebase with a parse and render and plugin system. It's now able to support more features, it is better tested leading to less bugs and more maintainable code. Here's some of the early work of cool features we're developing on it:
Rewrote route-engine itself. Over the 2 years, we have explored and rewritten this engine many times, maybe 4 times, we lost count. The current version has reached its simplest form. This is the Visual Novel runtime that will power both the editor and actual executable. With the latest re-write the codebase itself is less than 3000 lines of code.
RouteVN Creator Client: We've implemented a fully functional editor to create Visual Novels. The latest addition was support for choices. Over the last couple of weeks, we've been focused on finding and fixing bugs.
We've also conducted internal research comparing our engine with many VNs out there to see which features we can currently support and which we can't.
We have classified all these features by priority so we can focus on which ones to work on first.
I have to say, we still have a lot of work to do! We will be very busy for the whole of 2026.
We're trying to see how we can make our roadmap more public, so users have better visibility on what we're working on.
Below are our top priorities for the year. This is just an initial plan, it will adapt as we learn more.
Make the application stable and usable. This remains the top priority. Without this, everything else can't follow.
Make it even easier to use.
Feature completeness and advanced features. We've put a lot of effort into designing and creating a strong foundation for this application. Although it started with only simple features, it was never intended to stay that way. We'll add advanced features while being careful not to make things too complex. Things like variable management.
Better publishing experience. This means supporting more export formats beyond web. We also want to build tools to better support self-publishing.
Last year, we spent most of our time building, but that alone won't make an engine successful.
This year, we're putting a lot more effort on marketing, community building, and engaging users for feedback.
Blog posts every week. They will cover various topics. Some will be technical, some more about introducing features that are available. There's a lot of interesting stuff we want to share.
We plan to be more active on social media — sharing development progress, behind-the-scenes content, and engaging with the VN community. We primarily operate on Discord, but will post updates across all our channels:
We are exploring what upcoming events are out there that we should sponsor.
To be honest, it will be a lot of learning and experimentation on the marketing side for us. We're open to learning more about how to better engage the community.
There is a lot of work to do for us in 2026, but it is also an exciting time because we are going from a phase of just building the Visual Novel engine into putting it in the hands of people and having them use it to create real Visual Novels.
If everything plays out well, we hope that by the end of the year, RouteVN Creator will become a compelling engine that people will seriously consider when choosing which engine to use for a new Visual Novel.
Thanks for reading! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or feedback.