Post by Requiem in Ink Visual Novel Lite Template comments

Ink Visual Novel Lite Template » Comments

Viewing post in Ink Visual Novel Lite Template comments

I use this template for my jam entry https://requ.itch.io/six-of-swords

It’s more powerful than I thought. I wonder if there’s a plan to develop this tool or would you prefer to keep it simple and sweet? (It’s already very nice).

As a note for people who are thinking of using this: inky 0.15.0 has just landed today, and it changes some stuff under the hood. If you download this and it doesn’t work, check your Inky version. If you’re working with this on Inky 0.14.0, don’t update Inky before you’re done editing story.js.

JoshGrams159 days ago

Yeah, the plan is to keep it sweet and simple. This was a one-off engine for Fix Your Mother's Printer and then we decided it was useful enough to release for other people to use.

I'm not against revisiting it occasionally to make smaller changes (what did you have in mind?) but it could easily turn into a project that eats up an unbounded amount of time and I'm definitely not looking to compete with Ren'Py or anything.

I'm in the middle of another project just at the moment but I'll see if I can find time to update it for Inky 0.15.0 sometime this week; thanks for the heads up!

Requiem159 days ago

The only thing I wish I could do is to have the image accept four arguments, with the third and fourth being width and height specifically (instead of the way it’s currently done, both proportionally resized at once). I don’t know how hard it would be, so I definitely understand if you decide not to change it.

This is really a beautiful little template! I get that it would be easy to fall into the rabbit hole with feature creep.

JoshGrams159 days ago

Ah, so you could squash or stretch the images? I think that would be in-scope for this, and pretty easy. I've also been thinking about adding a separate command for flipping so you can face the same sprite left and right (and up/down? hmm) and also get a fun card-flipping effect for free (which I discovered by accident when doing the code for Bez's Charlie HasBeen). And I don't think you can walk a sprite off an edge to make it disappear?

So a couple potential expansions, but I've been holding off until I have time to sit down and have a good think about how far I want to go with features. Glad you had fun with it!

Requiem159 days ago

Yes. I think with simple squashing and stretching you can already achieve a lot with 2D sprites. Flipping is a nice bonus, but it’s relatively simple to achieve out of engine (nice to have it in, though). Walking a sprite off an edge is also nice to have, but I can live without. There’s no pressure or anything. The simplicity is the strongest feature. I’ve been teaching ink as an entry to interactive fiction writing, and this template complements it nicely. Visual appeals to many people, but getting writers and artists to Ren’py can be…daunting. Sometimes you don’t need bells and whistles and the whole shebang.