Post by yam655 in Ren'py Sprite Creator comments

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You have some great examples of the sprites. I have three suggestions there:

Those examples are most useful the first time you run the game. It would be great if they didn’t show automatically except for the first time it was started. Then there could be an option to see it, or to clear the “already seen” flag or something if people want to see it again.
The game itself doesn’t have a title screen. That would be a great place to showcase a few of the best example sprites where they can always be seen but never get in the way. It would also minimize the need to show the examples every time.
Could you turn those example sprite pages in to a functional demo of how to use the copy/pasted code? Like a RenPy project we could either use for research, or even paste our new characters in to and directly base new novels off of. It would lower the barrier of entry for new users.

Thanks again for such a nice program!

Oh wow using examples in the title screen is such a good idea, I can't believe I didn't think of it! I did this in the version I just uploaded.

I'll poke at making the examples only show up on a first playthrough.

The example sprites are intended as, well, examples, since they use dollmaker output and you can see how they're called in script.rpy. But I guess some people could find the fact that there's also code to run the dollmaker in there confusing/intimidating, and it wouldn't be too hard to make a little example project. I'll see if I can make something that feels useful.

Thanks for the great suggestions!

yam6552 years ago

The title screen looks great!

Personally, I think an example project would be a lot more interesting if it could have an MC that used the dollmaker and had everything get saved. ;) Seriously, though, that’s functionality that other sprite creators don’t support, so being able to demonstrate that would be great.

If it demonstrated one dollmaker MC, one static NPC, and one gender-flippable NPC that would be ideal. I’d love to know best practices around having gender-flippable NPCs. (But then I think it would be fun to have a dating sim where the player decides whether it is yaoi or yuri, but the story is the same regardless… and maybe it could default to “neither” and have all NPCs be agender/genderfluid/nonbinary…)

Spiral Atlas2 years ago

I have written two games that do things like that: Pride or Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, and you are welcome to use the code if you can untangle the mess. But unfortunately I can't easily make an example game with this sort of functionality using Sprite Maker code.

Sprite Maker uses layeredimages, because they make the code relatively easy to read. But I couldn't figure out how to get a layeredimage to do all the things I wanted, such as changing based on a gender toggle. So Northanger Abbey, Pride or Prejudice, and the dollmaker within Sprite Maker, all use DynamicDisplayables instead of layeredimages.

You could turn a Sprite Maker sprite into a DynamicDisplayable but it would be a bit fiddly, and the final code would end up looking pretty different. I should probably write that up, along with how I use DynamicDisplayables in general, since some people might find it useful.

It's quite possible that there is a way to do things like this with layeredimages, I just don't know it myself.

yam6552 years ago

Ooo… I’m “welcome to use the code if I can untangle the mess”? Thank you. I may have to give that a shot.

You will be the first to know if I succeed. :)

Spiral Atlas2 years ago

Good luck! Also if you're changing pronouns in text I found this useful: https://npckc.itch.io/pronoun-tool