Make a Game
Ren'Py Specific tools and resources
Make A Thing
Free Photo Assets and Tools
GUI Assets
Free Music/Sound Assets
Resources On Making Your Own Website
Website Button + Favicon Making Resources
A Few IRC Options
Options For Receiving Money
Other Handy Links Pages

I have collected many resources in my journeys. Here is a list that I hope will assist you in creating what you wish to create, with a small blurb about each to assist you further.

Make a game:

Make a visual novel. That's it. If it seems fun or cool, try it for yourself.

Nadia Nova VN tutorial
Here's a great guide for getting started. Nadia Nova is someone who made me realize I could make a visual novel myself, and helped me get into the scene with the games she made and jams she helped host. I'm no longer just a reader or a fan, I'm a gamedev. You can be one too.

Latest Ren'Py Download
I recommend Ren'Py. Ren'Py has its own tutorial to teach you about using the system and programming. If you get easily overwhelmed by information, I recommend you check out Nadia's tutorial first. You should still download Ren'Py though. Download it now, even.

VNDev Wiki: Branching Paths
If you want to make a game with choices, then I recommend taking a look at this wiki page. It's easy to get overwhelmed by adding too many choices, so use this site to form a solid plan for how you want to go about things.

Make VN Assets Jam
This is a link to the submissions page of assets made for VN game devs.

Ren'Py Specific tools and resources:

Renpy Docs
This is the link to the documentation made specifically for Ren'Py, and you would be surprised how much stuff this will help you sort.

Wattson's Wave Shader
I really love the tools Wattson makes. The wave-shader is a fun tool that allows you to make your screens and images get all wobbly and move around.

Wattson's Kinetic Text Tags
Another tool by Wattson, which allows you to apply a bunch of neat text effects, from dripping effects, to shaky text, and all sorts of other neat effects.

Feniks Itch
Feniks is another person who makes a lot of useful tools for Ren'Py. This links to many different plugins and things of that nature.

Feniks Website
And this links to Feniks' website, who creates some very helpful guides for Ren'Py.

Ren'Py Dating Sim Engine
Ren'Py Dating Sim Engine, to help make dating sims in Ren'Py.

Make a thing:

Here is where I'll put resources for just making things (general). It's fun! :D

Electric Zine Maker
This is a nice and simple tool to make zines. Might not be ideal if you want to make something especially complicated, but is a handy tool if you wanna just make something.

Free Photo Assets and Tools:

Nadia Nova BGs Guide
Here's a guide made by Nadia about how she goes through the process of making and editing her bg images. There's a lot of ways to go about it, but here's one method of doing so.

Doodad
A set of tools that can: generate repeating shape patterns, gradients, and also a really excellent dithering tool.

Image Magick
Batch photo resizing tool.

XnConvert
Batch photo converting tool. Useful for when you want to convert a bunch of PNG files into WebP or something like that for your VN.

deaddeaddeath FreeVNBGs Death has made an absolutely massive pack of 3,000 photos for use in games. You might find something you want in here, so take a peek.

Puapka's Background Pack
Art and images made by Puapka for free use.

Free use Photo Resources Pack
A small collection of links to photo resources on Itch.

VN Backgrounds Pack
3D environment images for use in games.

Errie Emilia Night BG Pack
Nighttime and black and white photos by Eerie Emilia.

Eerie Emilia Itch
Eerie Emilia actually just has multiple nice black and white photo packs (and some VNs you can check out)

bastardisgation Photo Pack
Even more photos and images. You know the drill.

Puapka Image Layer Pack
Images made by Puapka to add layers and effects on top of artwork, or to use as a background.

DiscMaster Textfiles
DiscMaster has a lot of resources. Most of this was uploaded by people from games and CDs and other pieces of media. What the copyright looks like on this stuff may be hard to find out, but most of it isn't creative commons. Whether or not someone will find out and say something, I have no idea. But yenno. It's an option.

VN BG Pack
Even more photos and images. You know the drill.

Yandex (Anime Generator)
This is a tool to generate anime style characters. Here is a video to help you sort out how to make it work.
Yandex Tutorial

If you still need something that you haven't gotten in the above image packs and resources, then try these image searching tools for creative commons or free use photos.

Unsplash
Image search website.
Pixabay
Image search website.
Pexels
Image search website.
Open Game Art
Free images made for games or intended for games.
WikiMedia CC
Creative commons wikimedia, my beloved.

GUI Assets:

Nomnomnami Designing Good UI
Here's a short tutorial about selecting and making GUI. Not super in depth but still a nice starting point to ponder.

Below are some gui packs that folks have made. They are compatible with Ren'Py (or at least most of them are) but I'm sure that some big brained geniuses can figure out how to use it for other programs.
Elegant UI Kit
Spring Calls UI Kit
Night Sky UI Kit

Free Music/Sound Assets:

WikiMedia Free Music Resources Page
This is one of the greatest links I could provide you with - this single link has such a wide array of resources and music that you'll probably find something that's right for your music needs, just in this link alone.

Pro Sound Effects
This is a tool that helps you organize your sound library to help you find your sounds faster, and can also tie in with freesound.org.

Freesound
Freesound is a great resource for music, but it's especially good for sound effects and folly work.

Discmaster
DiscMaster has a lot of audio resources as well. Most of this was uploaded by people from games and CDs and other pieces of media. What the copyright looks like on this stuff may be hard to find out, but most of it isn't creative commons. Whether or not someone will find out and say something, I have no idea. But yenno. It's an option.

Free Music Archive
An archive of free music you can search though.

Yellowstone National Park Sound Library
Public domain sounds from the Yellowstone National Park of all sorts of different animals and other natural environment sounds.

TK's Free Sound FX
A big collection of sound effects to use.

Dova-s
A massive repository of searchable songs and sound effects. Due to many things being in Japanese, you may need to search for things using the tag system to find what you are looking for.

Below I've shared a bunch of links to filmcow's sound packs on Itch. (Filmcow is best known for making things like Charlie the Unicorn and Llamas with Hats.) These sound packs are massive and have all sorts of things. The sound packs are also labelled on Itch and the download for what categories they have. Check them out.
Filmcow SFX 1
Filmcow SFX 2
Filmcow SFX 3
Filmcow SfX 4

Wangleline SFX and Stems WangleLine has a nice mix of sound effects and also some music stems.

Below is a bunch of artists who have creative commons music. Double check the CC license, but these are some of my favorites.

Moby Gratis
Free (Moby) music resource designed to empower creative projects. There's a wide range of stuff here, very handy resource.

Vbhuh NWOB Songs
All of the songs labelled for NWOB are open source and you can freely use them in your projects ( iirc credit is still requested.) Some of the music is like a mix of DELTARUNE and ULTRAKILL if that tickles your fancy.

Kyou System
It's Kyou! Use their music!

Lilithpad
I am one of the ultimate lilithpad fans.

Jeremy / Red Means Music
Really awesome droning music and liminal and slightly horror vibe music - but also lofi hip hop, fantasy game tunes, and more.

continuum.mid
MIDI and DOOM style musics.

Archive.org Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts
Nine Inch Nails Ghosts has so much versatility and range.

How Capitalism Will End Album
Some nice noise.

LMNL Records
This is a small record label - some of their stuff is free to use, but you gotta check stuff individually.

Mahorka - Making Things Happen
I saw this album and was just impressed with how much good music was here.

Net Label Day
A small internet label that releases CC music from a whole bunch of people.

Resources on Making Your Own Website:

Neocities
The classic option for making your own lil website.

Netlify
If you don't want to use Neocities, or want a different vibe, or want to link with GitHub, or want to have options to use your own custom domain in a free tier, Netlify is a solid option.

Bear Blog
A website that allows you to make a simple and small blog based website. You can't do everything with it, but boy howdy can you use this thing to blog.

Mala / Ophanimkei Self Hosting Guide
Guide by Mala for hosting your website on a VPS (a rented server). Get fully decentralized.

Fuck it Let's Make a Website
Website making guide for folks who are looking for one. Also has a bunch of tools and resources linked in it.

This is the holy trinity of sadgirl website resources. These resources are solid and helped me get started with making my website:
Sadgrl Neocities Guide
Sadgirl Website Template
Sadgirl Background Image Tiles

porkbun (not the artist/vn dev)
A solid place to buy your web domain name.

OGP
This handy website gives some information to the fellow html noobs out there on how to put some handy meta tags into your website. This means adding stuff like a title, description, and preview image to your website.

Real Favicon Generator
This website is great for making a favicon that works with everything.

Indie Game Store Template
This is a bunch of code and resources to make your own website to sell your games. It does use stuff like Stripe to handle payment, so technically selling freaky adult content wouldn't be allowed.

Lume
Static site generator that you can also put template information into. Do I fully know what that means? Nope.

11ty
A different static site generator.

phcode
Website where you can create documents for your website, and see a live preview as you work.

Scritch Editor
Allows you to add an HTML music player to your website. This isn't fully supported by all web hosts though.

Strawberry Starter
Tool to blogify your Neocities website easily.

Atabook
Tool that lets you add a guestbook to your website.

Below is a bunch of website templates. Go wild, go crazy, use a template if you wanna:
nomnomnami Templates
Petrapixel Layout Generator
Wikitable Layout
Eggramen Stylesheets
Angel's Layouts
Teppy's Layouts
Itinerae Templates

Website Button + Favicon Making Resources:

If you want a tool to help you with making a button for your website, then here's a few websites to help you do exactly that. If you make your button in image editing software, just make sure it's 88 x 31 pixels.
Sadgirl(?) 88 x 31 Button Maker
Hekate Button Maker
Datakra Button maker

And here is a w3 guide on how to turn an image into a link:
w3 Schools Image as a Link

Favicon.cc
This is a tool to help you make a favicon, which is the little icon in the top left of the browser tab.

Also I'm going to post this website again too:
Favicon Generator
This website is great for making a favicon that works with everything.

Some IRC Options:

Here's some IRC chat options, if you want to use something besides or in addition to discord. There's ultimately plenty of options out there for IRC though, so this is nowhere near all of them.
The Lounge
Halloy

Some Options For Receiving Money:

Throne
From what I've seen, Throne is an alright option for NSFW creators. It's a service that allows people to purchase items for you on wishlists or online platforms, but you are also allowed to get a direct cashout if you specify it as a physical item. (Like, a cup of coffee, for example.) Basically for use like a tip jar.

Alright so here are some options I have found for things that people use to receive payment for their work directly or with subscription models. However, there is still the chance that the thing you are making or selling won't be allowed. Even SubscribeStar prohibits "Bestiality, rape, or incest" on the site, or even if you are directly or indirectly involved in profiting from it. Yup, options are limited folks. Some people will still do this and fly under the radar, but in truth you never really know how long that will last. I wish you all luck out there.

Subscribestar
Subscribestar is a classic option for people who make NSFW art and media and want to get paid on a monthly basis for it.

Payment Nerds
A service to provide a virtual storefront and options to receive payment that works with a wide range of folks and services. Seems accommodating to NSFW stuff.

Jast
VN Selling and Localization website - but will still sell indie vns originally made in English.

There's also plenty of people who make NSFW content and still use Patreon or ko-fi - but they seem to be a bit more active in removing people if it becomes known that they are making NSFW content that is against their terms of service.

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