Turn your story ideas into playable, interactive experiences. Hikarin is a simple, powerful tool designed to help you write, build, and share visual novels and interactive stories with the world—no coding required.
Instead of creating a clunky game file, Hikarin transforms your story into a single, universal file that can be played almost anywhere—in a web browser, inside other games, and even in Minecraft.
No coding? No problem! Drag and drop blocks to build your dialogue, create choices, and design complex story branches. It's as intuitive as putting together a puzzle.
With the click of a button, you can play through your creation right in your browser. See your characters, dialogue, and choices come to life instantly, making it easy to spot mistakes and perfect your narrative.
Manage all your stories, characters, and scripts from one clean and simple dashboard.
Bring your characters to life in the character editor. Upload their portraits, add different expressions, and manage all your art assets like backgrounds and music in one place.
- Create Once, Play Anywhere: The magic of Hikarin is that it exports your entire visual novel as a single, portable
your_story.jsonfile. If a game or platform can read a simple text file, it can run your story. This means your creation isn't trapped in one place. - No Code, All Creativity: Focus on your story, not on programming. Our intuitive visual block editor makes building complex narratives as simple as connecting the dots.
- See Your Story Come to Life Instantly: No more waiting for your project to compile or load. The built-in preview lets you test your story in real-time, so you can focus on creating, not waiting.
- Your All-in-One Studio: Manage your characters, art, and sound effects from a simple, integrated library. No more digging through folders!
With Hikarin, bringing your story to life is a simple, three-step process:
- Dream & Build: Write your script and design your story's flow using the visual editor. Add your characters, art, and music.
- Play & Perfect: Use the instant preview to play through your story again and again, tweaking the dialogue and choices until it's just right.
- Share Your Masterpiece: Export your finished story as a single file, ready to be shared on the web or loaded into another game.
Here’s how it works:
- You create an amazing, interactive story in the easy-to-use Hikarin editor.
- You export it as a universal
story.jsonfile. - The companion Hikarin Visual Novel mod for Minecraft reads that file, allowing players to interact with characters and experience your visual novel directly inside the game.
Hikarin is fully-featured and ready for you to start creating. The core vision is complete, providing you with everything you need to build and share your stories today.
- Powerful Visual Editor: Build your story with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.
- Instant In-Browser Preview: Test and debug your narrative in real-time.
- Full Asset Management: Organize characters, art, and sound with ease.
- Universal Story Export: Package your entire project into a single, portable file.
Ready to start creating? Follow these steps to get Hikarin running on your local machine. We're working on a simple, one-click installer for the future!
Installation Guide (Click to Expand)
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Download the project files: You can get them by cloning the repository with Git:
git clone https://github.com/yourusername/hikarin-vn-framework.git cd hikarin-vn-framework -
Set up a virtual environment (this keeps the installation clean):
# On Windows python -m venv venv .\venv\Scripts\activate # On Linux/MacOS python3 -m venv venv source venv/bin/activate
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Install the necessary components:
pip install -r requirements.txt
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Run the editor!
python main.py
You can now access the Hikarin editor in your web browser at
http://127.0.0.1:8000.
Hikarin thrives on its community. You don't need to be a programmer to contribute! We're looking for passionate creators of all kinds to help us grow:
- Writers & Storytellers: Create amazing stories with Hikarin and share them! Your feedback is invaluable in helping us improve the tool.
- Artists: Design beautiful characters, backgrounds, or UI themes. Create asset packs for the community to use.
- Testers: Use the editor and help us find bugs or areas for improvement.
- Dreamers: Share your ideas for new features and what Hikarin could become!
If you have feedback, ideas, or just want to share your work, please open an issue on our GitHub page. We'd love to hear from you!
Hikarin is licensed under AGPL-3.0. This means it will always be free and open for the community to use, share, and improve upon. Our goal is to empower creators, not to lock them in.