Development engine choice for newbie. Requires: "hidden" interactions, text-based

[Sartain]

So, I'd like to try my hand at making a game. I have no art skills and very little coding skills but I have at least a basic grasp of the latter so I could probably teach myself some cargo-cult programming. Initially, I was thinking about Renpy except for two issues: As mentioned, I have no art skills and also, I would very much like for the game to have "hidden" interactions, meaning the possibility to discover stuff through experimenting with the environment. In the classic Renpy style, everything is just a multiple-choice menu so no secrets. I realise you can make point and click interactions in Renpy but again, no art skills.

I've worked bit with RPGMaker previously but let's face it, it's dead Jim. I've also tried my hand at making ADRIFT games (text-based), which technically has the stuff I want but at this point I'm not even sure if the program is done and in any case, it's an odd bird. Might give it another shot though.

What I'm asking the community is if there are any other options/suggestions for a decent engine to use or if my best bet is to suck it up and just do something with Renpy and some stock art?

 

[Sartain]

Another feature I would also love to have possible is, somehow, have options for dialogue progression that aren't immediately visible. Is it feasible to say, set up an inventory system you can access while in the Renpy Menu mode, and have interacting with an item there progress the scene in a non-apparent way? Or would it be possible to set up a text input as Menu option and let the player type stuff to see if it work, like old-school text adventures?

 

[Saki_Sliz]

I myself have a hard time completing projects, so I always look for maximum bang per fucks given, it sounds like you would benefit from finding a similar solution.

1. Experimenting with the environment (discovering, exploration, nonobvious details)
2. nonobvious dialog progression (a mechanic to make conversations more natural)

It sounds like a game from the old game maker sandbox days might. God I miss those days, they had some of the best game making tutorials, and a competent game making community, not nearly as volatile as Newgrounds. Something happened to their company (their egos went from cup of noodles level, to over 9000) and they went freaking nuclear on their community, eventually deactivating their community website. The suggestion I have for you is based on one of their first tutorials.

So you break up the screen into 3 parts, the entire left side is like a vertical panel to view your character art (you just need a few) and stats, using what is left of the screen, the bottom was a hybrid text dialog box and inventory system, and the remaining (but most of the screen space, top right corner) was the world viewer. Most of the art assets for the tutorial was place holder art, but it worked great. The world simulated a top down view, blocks for walls and objects, and circles with arrows or triangles acted like characters who could be pointed in a certain direction. the controls were simple, and the graphics were simple. Because you were representing everything using abstract artwork (shapes and lines) and not trying to make art (ie pixel art RPGMaker) the game actually looked pretty sleek and professional. So you could walk around, interact with things the dialog box would make comments as you got near things, and all of your abilities had an area of effect where the game checked to see what was around you and what interactions would happen, walls on fire(blocks turn orange, then grey and could then be walked on), characters getting mad (turning red) and running up to you to yell at you, and if you keep trying to run from them mid-sentence, their conversations would evolve. It was pretty neat. I feel like you could take advantage of a similar system. just basic shapes, top view, easy to calculate distance to things and using that to trigger events, messages, or wait for spells. only needing a handful of character art and edits if any for the side panel. Text with the world map does the work of conveying the environment.

I would recommend godot or (best) unity. Unity simply because the amount of online resources now adays make it number 1, and is easily shareable on sites like Newgrounds. Godot is gaining popularity and is a nice 2D system, but the documentation is still in its infancy as far as I am concerned, anyone trying to code in it while the new api is still undocumented is asking for death by severed moose head.

 

[Sartain]

As interesting as that is, I think you might be overestimating my ambitions
I'm perfectly fine with doing something relatively simply using Renpy, my main issues are, as mentioned, wanting to do non-standard gameplay and ideally being able to do more in a Menu conversation than just multiple-choice. I guess I'll have to read up on imagemaps/imagebuttons and find some art free for use. I'm not doing this to make money off a Patreon or anything like that so non-commercial use should be okay. Come to think of it, I guess I could grab some of the RPGMaker screens and repurpose them.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

point and click adventure I find tends to be the easiest system to implement, ignoring graphics needs. rpgmaker games tend to be walking simulators unless you can make a game less linear, ie the use of puzzles. I like your idea of reusing rpgmaker screen shots, I have seen some artist use skyrim screen shots and blur them to act as backgrounds.

 

[polywog]

 

[Sartain]

Would you like to somehow contextualize what this has to do with my question? I don't make it a habit of clicking on YouTube links with titles that sound like a pyramid scheme, without some sort of explanation for why I should

 

[Papa Ernie]

So, I'd like to try my hand at making a game. I have no art skills and very little coding skills but I have at least a basic grasp of the latter so I could probably teach myself some cargo-cult programming. Initially, I was thinking about Renpy except for two issues: As mentioned, I have no art skills and also, I would very much like for the game to have "hidden" interactions, meaning the possibility to discover stuff through experimenting with the environment. In the classic Renpy style, everything is just a multiple-choice menu so no secrets. I realise you can make point and click interactions in Renpy but again, no art skills.

I've worked bit with RPGMaker previously but let's face it, it's dead Jim. I've also tried my hand at making ADRIFT games (text-based), which technically has the stuff I want but at this point I'm not even sure if the program is done and in any case, it's an odd bird. Might give it another shot though.

What I'm asking the community is if there are any other options/suggestions for a decent engine to use or if my best bet is to suck it up and just do something with Renpy and some stock art?

Check out

You must be registered to see the links

. No art reequired but you can easily add it later if you so choose.

 

[SSWorldMaker]

I recommend Twine too. It's not too hard to make what you wan't with. And it's pretty well documented.
I've just posting a tread with my project here Fall 4 Love, I've almost make all you want to do, if it's help you to chose your game engine.

 

[79flavors]

Okay, you've asked for "other" suggestions. So feel free to ignore this - because this isn't that.

[...] Initially, I was thinking about Renpy except for two issues: As mentioned, I have no art skills and also, I would very much like for the game to have "hidden" interactions, meaning the possibility to discover stuff through experimenting with the environment.

You probably need to separate out in your head "graphics" and "engine".

Whatever engine you end up using... you're going to need some images to populate your game... Unless you go for something like Unreal or Unity... in which case, you'd need true 3D models (Not that Unity or Unreal can't do flat pictures too).
Those images might need some art skills. But the engine doesn't care if you use photorealistic images, cartoons, hand drawn art or even a doodle drawn in Microsoft Paint. They're just pictures. Where you source those pictures from is irrelevant to the engine.

• So for example. You could have a pure black screen and just text. No artwork required. Even HTML games don't get this basic... but you COULD.
• You could just grab some photo stills from porn movies staring your favorite porn actor/actress. Write a story that stitches those images together and voila... you have a game. Lots of HTML DO use this method.
• You could (as many others have done) dip your toe into Daz3D. Daz isn't really about art skills. It's about learning the technicalities of how to add lights. Where to position the camera. Where to download free/stolen assets from. But mostly, how to pose characters so the don't look like they've got a broken neck or dead eyes (preset poses help a lot as a starting point). Once you find a set of render settings that work 99% of the time for you... you're sorted.
• Finally, as has been my mission lately, I'll also mention Honey Select. Not because I've ever used it (I haven't) or even because I like it's art style (I don't hate it either)... but because it looks a simple way to create scenes with characters in - at least to my inexperienced eye.

In the classic Renpy style, everything is just a multiple-choice menu so no secrets. I realise you can make point and click interactions in Renpy but again, no art skills.

And it's that "point and click" capability that could implement the hidden interactions in RenPy.

Short version is that you take a full image and cut out an object and add that 2nd copy of that part of the picture to something called an imagebutton:. You can assign a 3rd copy of the the same part of the image to the definition so that it changes color... or gets a colored halo... or something that lets you've moved the mouse over something special... Or NOT. You could make your game particularly hard by not giving the player any hint they've moved the mouse over something important. The player clicks the object and the game does something (usually jumps to a section of the code that shows a new scene).

The difficult part here isn't art... just learning how to cut out sections of an image in an image editor like Photoshop, PaintShopPro or GIMP to create layered images... more specifically images with largely transparent areas (transparent areas are ignored by imagebutton:. That's a technical skill... not art. (at least in my opinion).

If you can pick up the basics of cut/paste in something like Photoshop and get a single imagebutton: working... You're 80% the way there to implementing your "hidden" interactions in RenPy. If you can do it once... you can do it 100 times again.

All of which is my way of saying that maybe you don't need to be an artist and maybe RenPy is the simplest solution for what you're trying to achieve. That said, I've never tried programming any of the other engines mentioned in this thread... so I am somewhat biased.

 

[polywog]

Would you like to somehow contextualize what this has to do with my question? I don't make it a habit of clicking on YouTube links with titles that sound like a pyramid scheme, without some sort of explanation for why I should

It's not a pyramid scheme, it's a short video of a guy in a situation similar to you where he had questions and tried to work them out on a whiteboard and it revealed some hidden choices that he wasn't aware of before.

renpy isn't all text choice driven, though that is it's strong suit, you can add buttons

hidden buttons all over the place

 

[Sartain]

Check out

You must be registered to see the links

. No art reequired but you can easily add it later if you so choose.

Twine doesn't allow me to create any sort of secret interactions as everything is done through hyperlinks though, does it? I've experimented with Twine as well, it's a nice little engine but as far as I know it doesn't do what I want it to do.

Many words

I realise engine /= graphics. I suppose I mixed up my message a bit but my point was that I have a choice between doing something with an engine that will require some kind of artwork (Renpy, Unity, etc) or a text-based engine (Twine, ADRIFT, etc). I'm definitely not going to use real action stills but good suggestion regardless. Anyway, you've basically just outlined all the stuff I've already concluded on my own so I guess this is a pretty perfect answer as it means that I'll have to do what I can with Renpy and maybe look into finding an artist down the line or teaching myself how to draw (if it ever becomes relevant).

 

[scrumbles]

Twine doesn't allow me to create any sort of secret interactions as everything is done through hyperlinks though, does it? I've experimented with Twine as well, it's a nice little engine but as far as I know it doesn't do what I want it to do.

It's HTML+CSS+JS: you can do almost everything you could do on a web site.

Links? But you can make any element clickable. As for hyperlinks, you can hide them behind an image, create your own CSS class and make them invisible, or just make them look like regular text (you must also change how the mouse pointer looks, when over them).
A Zork-like text adventure? Think of F95 Quick Search feature: it's basically a text input field, where we type stuff and things happens.
Do you want to make dialogue options appear or disappear while time goes on? You can implement a hidden countdown.
As for the inventory, you can create drag-and-drop events like in old Flash games.

 

[Kinderalpha]

So far reading your thread and the responses to your thread, I've gathered that you're drastically undermining creative potential within the engines people mention. Renpy is a framework. It provides a toolset and list of default rules and instructions for you to adhere in order to build a game with it. These rules were made for easy development and efficient workflow. Especially their usage of dialog. However, you're forgetting, it's python. You're not sandboxed with renpy. You could virtually do anything you want with it. There have been some ridicously creative innovations within that framework. What you're trying to accomplish could be done in it.

Again, Twine is another example. It's HTML driven. You can extend HTML with JavaScript. JavaScript is an entire language in itself, which opens the door for literally anything. You could make a full physics based game in JavaScript if you desired.

Your problem seems to stem more from the lack of understanding your goal, rather then what tech is available. Maybe if you really dive into an example, or whiteboard like poly mentioned, you'll see the exact obstacles that you may face and be able to determine what engine best fits. Just saying, 'exprimenting with environment's is a very inspecific goal.