Thanks you for downloading Novelty.
My name is Erik Benerdal and in 2007 I started working on Novelty as a small side project. The editor was first meant to be used by me and only me, but it didn't take long for me to ask around and realize that there was a need for a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) visual novel editor so I reconsidered and decided to create something that everyone could use.
Novelty is a visual novel engine and editor designed from the bottom up to be very easy to use. It is the first VN engine ever that doesn't require any programming. It has a WYSIWYG interface that constantly gives you visual feedback on everything you do while providing you with a system that lets you control the flow of your games without writing a single line of code.
This is where Novelty differs the most from all other VN engines (and other game makers for that matter). Novelty employs a very flexible asset management system that is based on a markup language called NoveltyML. What this means is that objects are composed and designed through text. You describe assets in NoveltyML and Novelty will interpret it and deal with things like rendering, animation and other behaviours.
A side effect of this descriptive nature of assets is that they can be reused over and over and easily shared between friends. Objects may also be composed of other objects.
Fig. 1: Composition of assets through NoveltyML
Fig. 2: Using assets in a scene
If you find the idea of writing markup daunting, don't worry. While the format is easy to learn, Novelty has great tools for importing images, fonts and sounds that will write the NoveltyML for you. However I still recommend that you get familiarized with the format and the easiest way to do that is by reading the NoveltyML reference or checking the step-by-step tutorials.
Novelty is resolution agnostic which means that games can be created and played in different resolutions. This applies even down to individual scene objects. If an object is scaled up it will remain looking crisp as long as the source texture has enough pixels to support the new size. If you make a game for 800x600 but use high-res textures the game will remain sharp in higher resolutions.
However, it's recommended that you keep your textures no bigger than 2048x2048 as any higher may lead to inefficient rendering.
This is an important part of Novelty's design philosophy. When an error occurs in Novelty, it will acknowledge the error but not break the game or produce an error popup. For instance, if an action refers to an object or an asset that no longer exists in the project - deleted or renamed after the fact - the activity won't be able to perform correctly. Instead of breaking the game and alerting the user that something has gone wrong, the action will be silently ignored and the next action in the queue will be triggered.
Silent error handling is a convenience to the end-user as insignificant bugs can be ignored without halting the experience altogether. But it is something that you as the author need to keep in mind. If something doesn't seem to work correctly, check the log file in the Novelty directory if any errors has been silently reported.