RouteVN Devlog 3

This is the first devlog of 2026, covering the first 4 months of the year. We made steady progress during this period and reached several significant milestones, including the first Visual Novel made with RouteVN Creator being published.

The product continued to improve. We shipped weekly releases until version 0.17.0 on 14 February.

After that, we paused weekly updates to work on a bigger major update. It took much longer than expected, but version 1.0.3 was finally released on 17 April. It was a big release, and you can read more in the RouteVN Creator v1.0.3 announcement.

We were a little anxious about migrating older projects to the new version. A few users reached out for help with project migration. There were some technical issues, but overall it worked, so we are relieved about that.

The great thing is that many features we had planned and worked on a while back, such as particles, spritesheets, and variables, have finally landed or will land very soon. They will be available for all users.

Alongside the new features, we also released 40 pages of documentation to help users learn how to use the application. This is part of the initiative to make RouteVN Creator easier to use.

Coding and software engineering have changed completely in the last several months as AI coding agent tools have become more advanced and capable. This has directly affected the way we build and ship features. Things can be built much faster now. The irony is that as these tools become more capable, more things become possible. The backlog continues to grow instead of shrinking, and there is more work to do, not less.

Luckily, this translates to better outcomes for users. They should get a better product at a faster pace.

I have been saying for a long time that we should stop only building and do more marketing. It did not really happen because we still focused on building. But we did make a lot of progress in marketing overall.

We have reached over 200 followers across X and Bluesky, and 70 users in the Discord server. These are not huge numbers, but they mean a lot to us. Thank you to all the followers and users for the continued support and engagement. We really appreciate it.

There has been an increasing number of users asking questions in the last month, and we are also getting real bug reports. This is a great signal that people are actually using the application.

Dev & Draft was our first offline event. It was great to meet other developers and artists, and we made a couple of new contacts with people who are interested in creating Visual Novels.

The event itself was relatively small and short, but definitely high energy.

DiaLune was a huge highlight of the past few months. It is technically the first published Visual Novel made with RouteVN. Try it out and share your thoughts. We are expecting a small update with quality of life features to land soon.

Two Straws is expected to be completed and published by June 2026. It will also be used to test a couple of new features, such as variables and inputs.

I have been having calls with the artist regularly for the last few months, and we have been impressed by how much care she has put into this project.

There is a new Visual Novel collaboration planned to kick off in May 2026. We are really excited about this and will share more after we make more progress.

We are interested in collaborating with or sponsoring other Visual Novel creators who want to use RouteVN Creator to create their Visual Novels. Please reach out to us if you are interested.

We think the product has become good enough. It is not perfect, but it is good enough. All basic functionality has essentially been built. We will always continue improving it, but right now the bottleneck for more users is not product functionality.

We plan to spend more time on:

• Doing more marketing, so people actually know about us. You can expect more visual and video content, and we will also start posting on Instagram and TikTok.
• Improving the presentation, so people can quickly understand what RouteVN Creator is and the benefits of using it. We are working on a demo Visual Novel to showcase its capabilities.
• Creating video tutorials. These should be an easier entry point than our text-based documentation and can help onboard new users more quickly.

The above will greatly complement the product.

As of today, the application is only available on Windows. We have shared that it will soon be available on macOS and Linux.

We actually have more exciting things to say about multiplatform support, but we will share them later when we have made more progress.

Another thing we hope to get done in the coming months is to provide more starter templates, especially for the GUI. This should let users start with a nice template and quickly fill it with their own content.

The final thing we wanted to share is that we have hired an illustrator for a short-term project. She will work with us to improve the overall branding and visuals for RouteVN.

We will work on Makkuro, the mascot character, and create a demo Visual Novel as an introduction to RouteVN.

Expect the overall visuals to become more pleasant. Visual Novels are visual after all, so this is definitely good for the brand. We are very excited to see the outcome.