Me and My Devlogs

Hello friends! I'll come clean right now - I didn't do much - I've binged Arcane on Netflix, and it was pretty awesome.

I started to work on a map where the players would choose which locations they wanted to visit on a given day. Once it's done, I'll use the same method to make rooms interactive.

I spent some time on isometric-room-design and found this excellent tool:

https://icograms.com/

With this, prototyping should be easy. Long way to end-product, but hey, I'm not in a rush here - I'll take my time.

The last thing I did was some small notes/ideas on narrative. If you wonder, my game will be about a time-travel experiment. The time humanity is trying to time-travel for the first time. Even though the experiment looks like a vast and unexpected success, strange things start happening, and the world around Clara (main character) is changing drastically. Yet, at the same time, no one else seems to notice. Oh and... there will be a time loop ;).

Things to do next week:

Re-do the project and set it up in 1080p (I'll clean up testing code, adjust the map with my placeholder graphic)

Work on main menu customization

Research dialogue window customization and options.

Create one prototype room with icograms.

Work on narrative.

Hello, world! Let's talk a bit about design today, shall we?

Two reasons for that: 1) I wasn't able to work with code yesterday 2) I have a... strange (?) idea for this game.

I've decided that this will be a VN because I'm a writer, and also, Renpy seemed super easy to start with (Unity, I'm looking at you and hundreds of tutorials I've never finished). But as Renpy is easy to work with, it also has a predefined way of how your game will look. Of course, you can work around this, but the basic setup looks like this (epic art incoming!):

We have a background, a dialogue window, an image (usually a character) shown somewhere on the screen. Sometimes menu in the middle will pop up, but you get the feeling. It's straightforward to notice that this is a Ranpy game (or just traditional VN). Ofc you can adjust the screen, add minigames on top and stuff like that.

Here I want to say: IT'S OK IF ANYONE WANTS TO MAKE A GAME LIKE THAT :D THERE ARE HUNDREDS OF EPIC VNs AND I LOVE PLAYING THEM <3

That being said, it seems like I cannot keep anything simple in my life, so I'm thinking about something like this (early draft incoming):

There is an isometric view of the room with a description on side (additional narration or some essential info our player already discovered about this location). Highlighted elements/ppl you can interact with (and that will take you to the next screen with description/minigame or dialogue).

It seems like an exciting approach, and it should be doable in Renpy. Or at least I hope it will be achievable. So for now, I'm off learning more about basics and checking if my idea is possible :D

Morning guys! Yesterday was frustrating. But I've learned new things. How are you doing? Good? Good. Let’s keep it that way :) 

Now... let’s talk about my “dev progress”.

What was I trying to achieve? I'm still poking around Renpy and wanted to try some stuff related to animating and transforming pictures on the screen. Sounds easy, right? It was even easier because I'd decided to copy-paste some code and then adjust to my needs.

The code in question:

My "Implementation":

I know - nice copy-paste ;)  thank you for mentioning that ;D

But... it... didn't work. 

Renpy seemed to skip this label altogether. If I added ANY text like: k "Test text." Everything worked. So: a) It wasn't the fault of the code. and b) I was missing something.

I didn't want any text on my screen, so I've poked around and discovered the  "pause" statement. That was what I needed. My understanding of the situation is that Renpy, as a Virtual Novel engine, is created to display text. In my case, there was nothing to communicate to the player in the script I was trying out (just pictures, no text), so Renpy just quickly skipped to what was next. However, once I've added text, everything worked. "Pause" was bypassing this issue by telling the engine that HERE you are pausing for a determined number of seconds (pause 5) or as long as the player won't give any input (pause).  Boom! My copy-paste code is now working!

It’s a small progress but still a progress :)

Time for my awsome placeholder graphic... here it comes! Say hi to my second main character Hazel and our supporting character William.

Good morning ppl of the internet. I hope you all doing great!

Some minor progress on my game was made yesterday. I wanted to share great sources of knowledge I’ve discovered on my way.

Things I learned yesterday:

How to use “jump”, “labels”  and a simple menu. I had some problems with that and then discovered that Phyton (or Renpy’s Phyton interpretation) is much different than C# in how important it is to stick to the proper formatting. Jump or menu is not working? Do you have it in the right row and rightly spaced? 

This will work:

But this won’t:

Yeah yeah :) I know it’s basic, but HEY, I have to start from somewhere!

Anyway, let’s jump to tools and knowledge sources I’ve found:

I’ve also discovered pretty cool tools to brainstorm. Mostly with myself, but yeah.  

If you didn’t try miro yet -it has a free version (which I’m using), and it’s a pretty slick tool for visualization of mechanics/brainstorming/anything, really.

I also started to use Trello, but probably everyone knows Trello, right?

Now tutorials/knowledge sources I found up to this point: - Renpy documentation [here]

- YT Tutorials:   Zeil Learnings [here]

- YT Tutorials:   Learning With B and E [here]

- YT Tutorials:   Elaine [here]

Sadly some of those great ppl stopped publishing new videos, but their channels are still a significant source of knowledge.

- Renpy Reddit [here]

- Lemma Soft Forums [here] <- I can’t even describe how great a source of information this forum is.

That’s all for now - hit me up if you know a cool place I can find helpful tutorials and stuff :) Last but not least - I have to share my high polished new art for my game, right? Ok, jokes aside - I’ve added some more placeholder art to have something I can work with.

Take care friends!

Hello, world! How are you guys today?

 I’m still hyped and achieved some minor (really minor) victories.

  1) Created a test project with renpy and changed a bunch of stuff. 2/3 of my changes didn’t work buuuut 1/3 did! So I’ll take that. 2) Created some placeholder art for Map and one of the characters. And you’ll see that it’s REALLY a placeholder... ermmm “ART”. But it’s enough to keep me poking around and experimenting.

  Oh, you want to know what this VN will be about? First of all, it won’t really be a VN. It’ll use Renpy as an engine and use some concepts, but I’m thinking about this as a board game on PC? At least, this is the thing I’m going for.

The story? Well, time-travel, pandemic and solving mysteries. Have I mentioned some romance options? Well, not really “options”, just one scenario to get our 2 female chars together - the game won’t be romance-centric, but I simply had to add it. Representation of not over-sexualized lesbian couples is still tiny in games.

That would be all for my daily update :)

Have a great day and fun everybody!

Annnd here you have... my placeholder... map. Insert **IT’S SOMETHING** gif.

Hello ... someone? Well, anyone who somehow find this. 

Today I'm starting another day of my game-dev journey, and you know what? I'm feeling stressed. Funny because, in theory, there is nothing I have to worry about. Will the game be bad? Well, I've got experience. Won't it work on the first try? It won't. Won't it be pretty? I don't have to show it to anyone. It's just my little project I'm working on. 

But still, I'm stressed AF. 

In a minute, I'll go - make myself a cup of tea and then I'll make first... thing. A small working prototype (I'm using renpy, so it's relatively easy to do), and I won't judge myself. I'm officially giving myself permission ... to create imperfect things. 

Can anyone relate? I'll take silence as a confirmation ;)

So may first try on designing a game was not sucesfull. I’ve got the typical “we will call you back” answer - but hey I’ve tried. 

Also... It gave me an idea - If I cannot apply for a job of a game-designer and cannot work with developers/artists etc... I can always make a simple game of my own. Really simple. Like Visual Novel with small minigames simple. 

So here I am. Designing another game :D And for sure it will have a lesbian paring in it. I don’t want it to be romance game - more a mystery game... but I want one of the endings to have f/f paring (2 main characters).

It looks like... I’ll be designing a video game. No. I’m designing a game. Right now. This was always my dream, but I didn’t believe I would ever get the chance. And here it is. I have 4 days. I need to finish this up before Monday. And I’m soooo not prepared. To the point, I’m reading “Game design 101″ books. Wish me luck, I guess?

I know, I know - I don’t have many followers here, and even the ones I have probably are not really interested, but geez... I just had to get this out. My brain is buzzing with so many thoughts, and I’m actively trying NOT to panic. Too much. Because I’m panicking on a manageable level all the time.

Alright... It’s 3 AM - need to get some sleep.