How hard is it to add a gallery?

[HalGLC]

For starters I'm asking this as someone with 0 dev experience and it's not meant to be a condescending question

But from where I'm sitting one of the features I think most players would agree wold make a game better is a gallery. You don't have to go through pages upon pages of saves and all that (and in one particular game on my mind it has so few save slots it's almost criminal). And if you have a quality game on you then players would probably want to revisit a lot of these moments later.

But I never really thought about what effort goes into the gallery. I know how much effort in general goes into these games and I never thought a gallery was as easy as hitting the "on" switch or anything.

 

[danteworks]

It’s effort intensive. For the gallery in my game, it looks quite simple. Just a 3x3 grid of pictures. When you hover your mouse over a picture, it lightens up, and if you click it, you get taken to a full screen image of the picture you clicked on. In reality, you have to create a set of those small versions of those images that are used as the thumbnails. Then you have to create another set that have some light up filter applied for the mouse over effect. Then you have to create a seperate screen that imposes itself over the gallery which is the full sized image. This is in renpy anyway.

 

[HalGLC]

It’s effort intensive. For the gallery in my game, it looks quite simple. Just a 3x3 grid of pictures. When you hover your mouse over a picture, it lightens up, and if you click it, you get taken to a full screen image of the picture you clicked on. In reality, you have to create a set of those small versions of those images that are used as the thumbnails. Then you have to create another set that have some light up filter applied for the mouse over effect. Then you have to create a seperate screen that imposes itself over the gallery which is the full sized image. This is in renpy anyway.

I appreciate the answer but I don't think I was specific enough. I mean a scene gallery so you can replay scenes you've already seen.

 

[danteworks]

My scene gallery is the same. Instead of bringing up a screen with a full size image when you click the button, it instead jumps you to a scene.

 

[ItsEricBoi]

Lol the tittle of this thread makes you seem so low-key frustrated

 

[SeventhVixen]

I think galleries should be a must, but I'm thinking right now that some in development games will not put them on purpose so players have to grind the game all along in every update (specially when there is farming).

And maybe because the lack of galleries in some major games, maybe new devs don't think about them.

 

[polywog]

My scene gallery is the same. Instead of bringing up a screen with a full size image when you click the button, it instead jumps you to a scene.

A very nice feature. The memory lane gallery. Reloading a whole game from save points, to revisit a scene, is time consuming.
Players save at random times, which can clutter up their saves pages. A gallery on the load screen, independent of the game, lets them get straight to the naughty bits, after they have unlocked the scenes, of course.

 

[Aeilion]

It's not always easy. There are many things that can make a replay gallery either simple to set up or long.

Already it is necessary to take into consideration the moment of creation. If it's early enough in development it's fine but when you're already in patch 7+, there can be a very large number of scenes to put in the gallery.

There is also the basis of the code to consider. If the developer has a code that is a little complex or not organized for a gallery at first, it may be necessary to make a redesign for the gallery to work properly.

Then there is the question of stats and choices. For a game where the choices do not affect the scenes enormously, that's fine. But for some game you have to implement buttons to allow the player to replay the scene with the decisions that suit him. (See the Dreams of Desire gallery)

And finally when we put together all this, comes the question of choosing between investing time in the development of the next patch or in a replay gallery.

This is why for many of the most popular games, the gallery has arrived at the end of development. Obviously some have made the choice to pause the development or slow down to add the gallery. It is a choice to make.

 

[HalGLC]

Lol the tittle of this thread makes you seem so low-key frustrated

I couldn't really find a wording that wouldn't be interpreted that way so I wanted to put that disclaimer as the first sentence in the post

 

[DrPinkCake]

What you basically need to do:
1. Define the gallery (renpy has a built in Gallery() function) and a button to reach it.
2. Make the screen for the gallery. Populate the gallery with image buttons using miniature images for the scenes.
3. Define the following for the lews scenes: labels to jump to, persistent variables keeping track of if the scenes have been unlocked or not, conditional statements in the scene that handles the replay functionality (ending replay and setting up variables that haven't been defined but are needed by the scene).

It's very labor intensive, but not difficult (depending on your coding skills). Unren any game that has a gallery and see how it's implemented.

 

[redknight00]

For RPGM, it's pretty much the same as what Pink said, create an environment, organize triggers and variables and populate the gallery. It's a fairly easy job, the big problem is that it's very time consuming as the game grows and tedious work.

 

[whiskeyrose]

Its another task to add to the game, which isn't required for the game to actually work. Depending on how the game actually works it can be a bit of a bitch to implement.

This is especially true if the game isn't completed yet and you don't actually know how many scenes there will be for whatever characters. Not to mention if you go back and do scenes differently or change something, meaning you have to go into the gallery you built and fix eventually.

It's basically a lot of unrequired work for a slavic dev to do between cashing their patreon check for beer money while generating the monthly daz3d render.