Hey folks, I’m Stella De (she/her). I’m a visual novel developer, technical artist, community organizer, shader gremlin, event runner, and professional hyper-fixator.

I’ve been involved in visual novel development communities for over a decade and have spent most of that time building tools, organizing events, teaching developers, and aggressively pursuing the global conquest in the name of visual novels.

These days I run Make Visual Novels and the Visual Novel Developer Network, where I organize conferences, speaker series, game jams, resources, educational material, and a frankly alarming amount of infrastructure held together by my bot-daughters, a lot of volunteers and even more caffeine.

... what do you even do?

 I mostly participate with other visual novel developers and those that make tools for them as a sort of consultant, providing perspective on the industry and industry practices, evaluating their content and scenes, and helping them reach their creative and business goals.

My work occasionally takes on a more pre-package, monetizable state. Sometimes that means writing shaders to fake cinematic lighting in Ren'Py. Sometimes it means accidentally creating four hundred transition effects because I thought it would be funny.

Doing things because I think they'd be funny is the majority of the reason I do anything, so here we are.