Ren'Py A Scene or Image with dialogue in Ren'Py

[Deleted member 4879170]

I am very new to game development and I am working on a small-scale project just to "test the waters" essentially and I decided to do that on Ren'Py. So, I wanted to create a scene or a dialogue between two characters but all the tutorials show you how to do that in the basic or the "Japanese VN" way, which is a background and a character in front of it.
Example:

Picture from: Katwa Shoujo - Four Leaf Studios

But what I wanted to create was something like the following picture but with dialogue.


Picture from: Being a DIK - DrPinkCake

I tried my best to explain the issue, hopefully, it will be enough. I just want to know what code to use in Ren'py or how to do it in general.

Also, please leave me any tips that you think might help me out.

 

[Perverteer]

Just define a scene like so: scene guytalkingtoroommate

Ren'Py will look for an image file called guytalkingtoroommate somewhere in your game directory.

If you want it to appear with a certain effect you do the following: scene guytalkingtoroommatewith dissolve

You can find out more

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of the framework and about transitions like dissolve

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.

 

[Deleted member 4879170]

Perverteer that helped greatly, thank you!

 

[LfkCn]

it's good that I came across this post. i'm going to ask a slightly different question using the pictures here. i don't want to create a crowd by starting a new post.

which dialog style do you think is better in a game? the one on the left is much simpler and can save the producer a lot of trouble. (rendering troubles) is this style considered lazy in the adult gaming community? will it negatively affect people's perception of your game? or do you prefer a being a dik style that offers renders from various angles?

 

[osanaiko]

i don't want to create a crowd by starting a new post.

Actually, standard forum etiquette is to ask new questions in new posts. Tagging on the end of another post means any new answers are much harder to find for other users, because the Title of the post no longer matches the additional content in the thread.

which dialog style do you think is better in a game? the one on the left is much simpler and can save the producer a lot of trouble. (rendering troubles) is this style considered lazy in the adult gaming community? will it negatively affect people's perception of your game? or do you prefer a being a dik style that offers renders from various angles?

I think you are asking about what is preferred between "Standing images (Tachie) in front of background" vs "full rendered images".

For hand drawn content, it would be impossibly expensive (in time or money) to have the artists draw every scene. This is where the traditional VN style comes from, because it allows re-use of the images for all the dialogue scenes, and saves the expensive full images for Sex scenes or special cut scenes.

Now that reasonably good quality amateur rendering is easy with Daz (or even easier with Illusion game engines), it became feasible to render a new image for every 4-10 lines of dialogue. So you end up with the new common standard - Daz + renpy, with 1000s of full screen images in large games. Once you have a good workflow, it's arguably almost as fast and perhaps simpler for some devs to do the game creation this way because you don't need to mess with the "programming" of showing/hiding/moving/expressions on the Standing images in your script.

You ask which is the preference? I guess the full renders approach is better, as you can "show don't tell" the story points more easily. But I'm sure some people prefer other styles more.