Creating an Interactive Phone Simulation

[Cartman-Brah]

I want to create a smartphone simulation where players can text people, receive photos, and so on. You might have come across similar examples before. Now, I’ve found a few guides on how to do this in Ren'Py, and I’ll be researching them. However, I have no knowledge of other game engines outside of Ren'Py. Before starting a project, it's important to explore all alternatives. What other game engines could help me create an interactive phone simulation besides Ren'Py? I know most engines could do it, but could you give me a few links or suggestions to start with? I’m not a coding expert, so I’m looking for something beginner-friendly.

 

[FromOtherSpace]

There are code free engine. It must be the most beginner-friendly you can find. I don't how powerful and flexibles they are.

Godot aim to be beginner friendly and a full engine. In my opinion it do a decent job within its way. It use a custom language, which is (mostly) easy to learn.

You should take a look at an alternativeto site and search for Renpy, Unity or else.

 

[Cartman-Brah]

After reviewing various engines, I realized that Ren'Py is the most suitable for me. I have analyzed three games that I can describe as phone simulations. One was made with Unity, another with Ren'Py, and the last one with an unknown engine. I don’t know how to check the code of games made with Unity or other engines, but I had the chance to review the code and images of the game made with Ren'Py. From what I understand, each image represents a single message. So progressing through the conversation is essentially a slideshow. To view older messages, you use a forward-backward feature. However, in the game made with Unity, you could scroll the chat up and down. Anyway, that's not too important.

The question I want to ask is: If I make a phone-messaging simulation with Ren'Py, should each message be represented by a single image? Or should I handle this somehow with code? I hope I’m explaining myself well. A message = a single image / a message = a line of code in the background. Of course, you need to use code to display an image, but I hope you understand what I’m trying to convey.

 

[60Points]

For something like that, I would go with an engine based on HTML (like Twine, for example). But without a doubt, I think Unity could be super easy to scale by basing it on ScriptableObjects — a ScriptableObject for each contact, a string for the name, a profile image, some questions/answers, and an array of images, etc. It wouldn’t be hard to do in C#, but you can also use Unity's visual scripting system, which is pretty intuitive and quite connected to C# syntax, so it can also help you learn the language.

But it comes down to personal preference; Godot is also a good alternative (though the times I tried it, I didn’t really like it, but for many, it’s a favorite). Unreal is overkill for this. And Ren'Py feels like it could end up becoming a code labyrinth.

 

[aereton]

Personally, I'd go for any browser-based solution for this kind of project, since basically, your whole game is "just" UI. Hell, even Discord (which has all the technical features you'd want to emulate in a story format) is basically just a web-app packaged into a standalone program via Electron.js so you'd definitely get the best results.

If you really want to use RenPy for this, this is a pretty good breakdown on how to achieve a basic messaging system:

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I don't think you will be able to create an authentic phone UI within RenPy, though. At least, not without heavy heavy work. You will, however, reach a greater audience if your game has a RenPy tag compared to HTML tag.