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BrownBag64

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Recent community posts

Man I LOVE the art-style from Oblivion!  Totally keeping this in my back pocket for a future project!

I'm interested in discussing it; what is the best way to reach out?

Any chance of a darker version to fill that rough/police look?  :)

Howdy mate, any chance that you would be willing to make a view more shots for this set?  I'd be willing to pay if needed.  Nothing commercial, just working on a second prototype and I would love to get a few specific angles/close-ups if possible!

Not sure that I would call it a "game", but my first prototype/test in Ren'Py is called "Vorfal".  It's German for "Incident", not because I am German but honestly just because it sounded cool.  (Although wife actually is of German decent).

About a month ago I started looking into Visual Novel development after learning about Ren'Py via some random video.  I have been writing a story (just for fun) for around 8 months, when I realized that I wasn't satisfied with the limitations of the normal "book format" as compared to what I wanted to express...  After learning about Ren'Py, it rekinkled my desire to continue working on my story, but with the goal of converting it to a Visual Novel.

Anyway, so yeah I decided to challenge myself to create a prototype game in order to learn a lot of the basic mechanics in Ren'Py.  When I started, I decided to use some actual real photographs I had taken while on a trip years ago.  I ran them through a compression tool to give them an "old console compressed look".  Sadly, I ended up only having 3 actual decent images that made sense when used in a VN format... But since it was more of a test/demo, I said "ah well I'll see what I can come up with". 

The end result was the Vorfall Prototype... Which is a very short and silly "game" where you take wake up in an unknown place, have to solve one puzzle, take a dump, and then escape by jumping out the window... Lol...

As silly as it sounds... I had a lot of fun learning through trial and error.  There's something special about seeing something work correctly, after you've been fiddling with it for an hour... Lol.  I literally could not stop smiling when I figured out how to properly add a sound effect for navigating between the rooms.

Anyway, by no means would I claim my prototype is a "full game", I guess it still counts as part of the learning progress.   :p

Some general/universal coding advice that I can give is to use comments creatively to creation "Sections.  Break up your code into sections that make sense to you so you can work faster/easier.

Personally, for work (and for ren'py) my code will have a lot of section headers like "#----------------------Such n Such Variables---------------------------".


Make them as wide as you want for visibility.  You could also have long headers as "Primary Sections" and then have shorter ones insider as "Sub-Sections".  Also, as a rule of thumb I say to separate specific lines of code by two spaces, to make it more visually obvious that "this is not part of that".  In Ren'Py specifically I use a variation of these technique to visually group "rooms" as seen below:

"#-----------------------------MC House - Upstairs Bedroom One----------------------------------"

etc.



   

Not sure if I am asking this the right way, but one of the first issues that I am running into with Visual Novel creation is maintaining the same Art Style between the backgrounds, characters, and especially "items".  Am I missing something obvious here when it comes to sourcing these items, or is it just something you gauge by eye?

While my current projects are more like prototypes, I am totally open to paying for art in the future, but I'd like to better understand this all so that I even know how to word what I am looking for... haha!