Ren'Py How would I go about making an interactive phone in Renpy?

[Deleted member 4844183]

I'm interested in creating a game based completely on an in-game phone. Essentially, you'll be texting multiple partners, and assuming a conversation goes well, you will be rewarded with an animated scene with that certain partner.

I'm a bit overwhelmed on where to start on something like this though. I've made a few simple visual novels in Renpy before, all with branching stories and options to choose. But making a "fake messaging app", complete with animated, incoming texts is something I'm not sure how to tackle.

Any tips/advice is welcome!

 

[Winterfire]

It would work the same way as normal dialogue, but with delays and structured in a more fancy way.
I'd start from playing around there, otherwise look up for examples on Google.

 

[MidnightArrow]

You'd need to use a custom screen. Dynamically add each "text" as a label to a vbox and animate it with ATL. TBH I'm not even sure if Ren'py is capable of that. You should look into Godot instead, it has a similar GUI style to Ren'py but it handles dynamics and animation better.

 

[79flavors]

There are a couple of predefined phone systems already out there these days.

Here's a couple...

You must be registered to see the links

You must be registered to see the links

They do require a certain understanding of both RenPy and Python to use effectively.
Though realistically, if you can't make either work - you probably wouldn't have been able to write one from scratch yourself either.

 

[anne O'nymous]

You'd need to use a custom screen. Dynamically add each "text" as a label to a vbox and animate it with ATL. TBH I'm not even sure if Ren'py is capable of that.

screen phone( thread ):

    vbox:
        viewport:
            yinitial 1.0

            vbox:
                for incoming, message in thread:
                    text "[message]":
                        if incoming:
                            style "incoming_message"
                        else:
                            style "outgoing_message"

        textbutton "advance":
            action Return()

default sisterMessages = []

style incoming_message is text:
   [whatever style you want]
style outgoing_message is text:
   [whatever style you want]

label whatever:
    $ sisterMessages.append( ( True, "Hey dickhead, mom want you to buy some bread before you come back home." ) )
    call screen phone
    $ sisterMessages.append( ( False, "Are you sure she didn't asked your lazy ass for this ?" ) )
    call screen phone
    [...]

And it's just the most basic approach, it's possible to go further and have something way better.

As I said, less than one month ago on this section of the forum, you can even do this without the need for a different syntax than the basic dialogs. Or there's this a bit more advanced approach.


There's really no need for an engine like Godot for something as basic as this kind of game feature.