Development team

A Visual Novel Development Team can be composed with as little as a single, independent individual to sprawling organizations. The exact responsibilities of these roles may vary from team to team. Depending on the size of a given team, some roles may be combined and performed by the same person.

Roles

Creative Director

The creative director, or just director, of a visual novel acts as the funnel that guides all of the different creative aspects of a team’s efforts into the final product as a cohesive whole. In small indie and game jam teams, they may also act as the producer and manage the project's schedule and time investment. Usually, they are considered the project’s lead developer because the nature of this task obliges them to have the final word on whether or not something adds to the whole of the project and/or might add too much to development time.

Because of the heavy reliance on text and programming in VN development to control direction, a VN director may work directly with the writing and/or programming teams. At the very least, they are the ones interpreting any points of direction not covered by the script writers or altering direction notations in the script that don't come across as intended on-screen. If they are not writers themselves, they should have a feel for stage/film direction and understand how to draw a reader's attention correctly.