VN Ren'Py Learn to Win [Development Thread]

[BigPipeGames]

Hey guys and girls, starting this thread mainly as a journal of my process of learning and developing my first visual novel. I have no experience whatsoever with any of these tools and am learning as I go. I thought it'd be good for me to do this to keep myself on track and could be interesting for others to see how I progress through various stages of creation/learning. Up to this point I've been learning the basics of HS2 Studio Neo, created a bunch of different characters, conceived a good amount of the main story and written around half of the script for episode one.

Introduction
Learn to Win is a slice of life visual novel. You play an MC who will experience a tough setback in life and experience his journey to rebuilding, while meeting (and having fun with) a lot of hot girls along the way!

Gameplay
The game will follow a pretty standard and simple route of choices leading to gaining (or not) various points with the girls. These points will unlock new dialogue, open or close sex scenes, potential endings, and also change the flavour of sex scenes based on the players choices (think love/corruption/domination etc). I do not plan on implementing much if any sandbox/free roam elements as this is all new to me, but I won't rule it out completely. If it does get added later it will certainly not be grindy or particularly time consuming.

Characters
The following is a list of most of the characters that I have created so far, I have left one or two out as not to spoil some interesting things that will happen in episode one.

MC

The protagonist of our story. A confident, funny and friendly guy who's just taken a bit of a licking. Time to get back on your feet.

Mike

Mike is the MC's best friend since high-school. He works as a lawyer and enjoys good banter.

Rachel

Rachel owns and runs the local cafe that MC and Mike frequent. They have become fast friends with this bubbly outgoing girl.

Rebecca

Rebecca is the principal of Farnell College, she's a confident and in-control woman married to one of the town's elite.

Libby

Libby is Rebecca's daughter and works as a secretary for a powerful company. She's impulsive, fun and enjoys a good night out.

Maria

Maria is a teacher at Farnell College who the MC will befriend early on. She's smart, quick-witted and knows how to get what she wants.

Emily

Emily is a bright young college student who comes from a sheltered background. She enjoys books, loves animals and is trying to broaden her horizons.

Katie

Katie is a stereotypical e-girl studying at college. She loves to game and stream, try out new make-up and outfits and generally cause trouble!
​

Planned Tags
3DCG, Animated, Male protagonist, Anal sex, Big ass, Big tits, Cheating, Creampie, Dating sim, Drugs, Exhibitionism, Female domination (?), Groping, Handjob, Lesbian, Male domination, Masturbation, MILF, Oral sex, Romance, School setting, Spanking, Teasing, Threesome (MFF), Vaginal sex, Virgin, Voyuer

There will be no NTR. Your best friend is just your friend. The game will not be a full-on harem game but will have some poly/threesome elements and possibly endings.

TLDR
Making my first game. Slice of life romp about loss and learning to win again. All sorts of hot girls to have adventures with.

Any comments/questions/feedback are more than welcome as I'm just starting out and learning all this stuff. I will be posting regular updates whenever I do some significant work going over what I've done and learned along the way.

Thanks for checking out the thread! Also big thanks to the guys in the HS2 help thread and card sharing thread for answering all my dumb questions.

Feel free to drop by the discord server if you wanna chat about the game or anything else. I'll be posting more previews there and a beta version of the game when it's eventually ready.

 

[bobdickgus]

Hopefully his setback in life was not getting cheated on to begin with.

 

[BigPipeGames]

So for my first update of what I did today was basically, making this thread

Took quite a while to make the banner as the University map runs very slowly once you add more than 3-4 characters to it, so posing and lighting everything took ages. Then had to find a font I liked and learn how to fuck with it in GIMP to make it look decent. After that took all the individual screenshots and put this up. Since then I've been working on getting the first scene rendered. About halfway through so far. I'll post one up later once I've finished for you guys to critique. No girls in it I'm afraid

Hopefully his setback in life was not getting cheated on to begin with.

Nah, it's a work related setback.

 

[voronkov]

Мне нравиться смотреть на игры сделанные в HoneySelect 2 так как и сам тоже делаю там игры. Почитал, посмотрел, есть вопросы и советы ну и просто мысли.
1. Будет в игре анимация, видео или сделанная из картинок к примеру?
2. Во многих играх сделанных в HoneySelect 2 картинки формата png. Из за этого они занимают много места и даже первый выпуск игры может много весить. Если не нужно что бы фон у изображения был прозрачный или то можно использовать другой формат. Попробуй сделать одно и тоже изображении в разных форматах и сравни качество. Это для размышления.
3. Будет несколько сюжетных линий в зависимости от выбора. Сильно они будут отличаться?
4. Персонажи это хорошо, но всё таки хотелось бы увидеть пару изображений из игры чтобы понять как будет выглядеть сама игра.
5. Сценарий написан или он добавляется по ходу создания игры?

Пока из той информации которая есть можно спросить только это.

I like looking at games made in HoneySelect 2 as I also make games there myself. I read, I looked, I have questions and advice, and just thoughts.
1. Will there be animation in the game, video or made from pictures for example?
2. Many games made in HoneySelect 2 have png format pictures. Because of this, they take up a lot of space and even the first release of the game can weigh a lot. If you do not want the background of the image to be transparent, or you can use another format. Try to make the same image in different formats and compare the quality. This is for contemplation.
3. There will be several storylines depending on the choice. Will they differ greatly?
4. Characters are good, but still I would like to see a couple of images from the game to understand how the game itself will look like.
5. Is the script written or is it added as the game is being created?

So far, from the information that is available, only this can be asked.

 

[BigPipeGames]

Мне нравиться смотреть на игры сделанные в HoneySelect 2 так как и сам тоже делаю там игры. Почитал, посмотрел, есть вопросы и советы ну и просто мысли.
1. Будет в игре анимация, видео или сделанная из картинок к примеру?
2. Во многих играх сделанных в HoneySelect 2 картинки формата png. Из за этого они занимают много места и даже первый выпуск игры может много весить. Если не нужно что бы фон у изображения был прозрачный или то можно использовать другой формат. Попробуй сделать одно и тоже изображении в разных форматах и сравни качество. Это для размышления.
3. Будет несколько сюжетных линий в зависимости от выбора. Сильно они будут отличаться?
4. Персонажи это хорошо, но всё таки хотелось бы увидеть пару изображений из игры чтобы понять как будет выглядеть сама игра.
5. Сценарий написан или он добавляется по ходу создания игры?

Пока из той информации которая есть можно спросить только это.

I like looking at games made in HoneySelect 2 as I also make games there myself. I read, I looked, I have questions and advice, and just thoughts.
1. Will there be animation in the game, video or made from pictures for example?
2. Many games made in HoneySelect 2 have png format pictures. Because of this, they take up a lot of space and even the first release of the game can weigh a lot. If you do not want the background of the image to be transparent, or you can use another format. Try to make the same image in different formats and compare the quality. This is for contemplation.
3. There will be several storylines depending on the choice. Will they differ greatly?
4. Characters are good, but still I would like to see a couple of images from the game to understand how the game itself will look like.
5. Is the script written or is it added as the game is being created?

So far, from the information that is available, only this can be asked.

Hi, thanks for the questions.

1. There will be video animation in the game.
2. I will be using WEBP format for the final renders. I render in 2560x1440 PNG and downscale to 1920x1080 WEBP which reduces the file size considerably. The renders I post here will be JPG or PNG because the forums doesn't like WEBP but Renpy is fine with it.
3. The overall story of the game will be mostly the same regardless of the choices made. Individual storylines with certain characters will change depending on your choices.
4. Check out the renders below and let me know what you think!
5. Script for episode one is mostly written. 90% of the important dialogue is done but the script is still shorter than I'd like so needs to be "fluffed out" a bit. The story has also mostly been conceived but I will be writing the actual script on a per episode basis.

I said I'd post some renders for you guys and remembered there are actually a few renders with girls in the first scene so I thought I'd render those so you don't just have to see MC walking around half naked







As you may have noticed, none of these girls are actually main characters in the game. They are just extras (or supporting artists as they prefer to be known ) who you may see pop up in the background from time to time. I still have some work to do to get the renders as popping as I'd like but the difference from a week ago to now is huge. In time they'll get even better.

 

[BigPipeGames]

Today I've been working towards finishing the script. Wrote a couple more scenes one of which is the first H-scene of the game. The script is about 80% done I'd say and sitting at 650 lines and 5000 words. There's a couple more scenes to add and some touching up to do. I estimate episode one will be around 30 minutes or so of playtime but hard to say at this stage.

Also been working on rendering the second scene where MC meets Mike at Rachel's cafe. Some preview renders below. As always feedback is much appreciated.

 

[voronkov]

Никто не спешит делать комментарии так что напишу снова я. Новые изображения выглядят красиво и хорошо сделаны.
Что сценарий готов это хорошо. Я иногда пишу сценарий уже под сделанные изображения. Прочитал в другой теме про вопрос выбора в игре. Довольно легко запоминать простой выбор. Оставлю ссылку на свою игру для примера того что я обычно делаю, там кстати есть экран который показывает инфу об персонаже и тд. Так же недавно писал про выбор в игре на другом сайте. Там всё в примерах того что нужно знать когда делаешь игру с выбором. Если интересно могу прислать в личное сообщение, там текс и rpy файл где показано и рассказано как это работает.


No one is in a hurry to make comments so I will write again. The new images look nice and are well done.
That the script is ready is good. I sometimes write a script for images already taken. I read in another topic about the question of choice in the game. It's pretty easy to remember a simple choice. I will leave a link to my game for an example of what I usually do, by the way there is a screen that shows information about the character and so on. I also recently wrote about the choice in the game on another site. It's all in the examples of what you need to know when making a game with a choice. If interested, I can send a private message, there is a text and rpy file where it is shown and described how it works.

Spoiler

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[BigPipeGames]

Никто не спешит делать комментарии так что напишу снова я. Новые изображения выглядят красиво и хорошо сделаны.
Что сценарий готов это хорошо. Я иногда пишу сценарий уже под сделанные изображения. Прочитал в другой теме про вопрос выбора в игре. Довольно легко запоминать простой выбор. Оставлю ссылку на свою игру для примера того что я обычно делаю, там кстати есть экран который показывает инфу об персонаже и тд. Так же недавно писал про выбор в игре на другом сайте. Там всё в примерах того что нужно знать когда делаешь игру с выбором. Если интересно могу прислать в личное сообщение, там текс и rpy файл где показано и рассказано как это работает.


No one is in a hurry to make comments so I will write again. The new images look nice and are well done.
That the script is ready is good. I sometimes write a script for images already taken. I read in another topic about the question of choice in the game. It's pretty easy to remember a simple choice. I will leave a link to my game for an example of what I usually do, by the way there is a screen that shows information about the character and so on. I also recently wrote about the choice in the game on another site. It's all in the examples of what you need to know when making a game with a choice. If interested, I can send a private message, there is a text and rpy file where it is shown and described how it works.

Spoiler

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Thanks for the feedback. My plan was to write most of the script, then work on renders so I have a good idea what poses and expressions to use, and get those finished prior to figuring out the Renpy side of things so that I'd have most of the content done and ready to put in while I learn to write the code for the game. Feel free to DM any Renpy tips I'll add them to the growing to-do list of things to learn about Renpy

 

[BigPipeGames]

Over the weekend I've been working on the first H-animations for the game. Managed to finish 8 animations in total. It was a great learning experience even though it took quite a while getting all the posing, lighting, cameras etc done. They aren't perfect but for a first attempt I'm really happy with them.

Current progress of episode one looks like this:

Script: 90%
Renders: 10%
Animations: 25%
Coding: 0%

Here's a few stills from the scene for you guys to enjoy...

 

[BigPipeGames]

For the last few days I've been working through renders slowly but surely, while trying to improve the visual quality of the images as I go. It's a blessing and a curse as it makes me want to go back and re-do so many of the images I created earlier!

Current status looks like this:

Script: 95%
Renders: 50%
Animations: 25%
Coding: 0%

 

[voronkov]

Выглядит хорошо и старательно. Последняя картинка совсем хорошо. Надеюсь так же примеры кода которые я отправил в личное сообщения тоже помогли в освоении программы. Вопрос насчёт одной картинки. Картинка где девушка сверху на парне. В студии у персонажей можно делать анимацию анатомии. Есть по крайней мере три простых способа показать эффект проникновения. Просто я пытался рассмотреть итак и не увидел. Это не нужно при создании или просто нет навыков делать такое в студии. Если надо могу написать как делать.

Looks good and well done. The last picture is really good. I also hope that the code examples that I sent in private messages also helped in mastering the program. Question about one picture. The picture where the girl is on top of the guy. In the studio, the characters can be animated anatomy. There are at least three easy ways to show the penetration effect. I just tried to see it and didn't see it. This is not necessary when creating, or simply there are no skills to do this in the studio. If necessary, I can write how to do it.

 

[BigPipeGames]

Выглядит хорошо и старательно. Последняя картинка совсем хорошо. Надеюсь так же примеры кода которые я отправил в личное сообщения тоже помогли в освоении программы. Вопрос насчёт одной картинки. Картинка где девушка сверху на парне. В студии у персонажей можно делать анимацию анатомии. Есть по крайней мере три простых способа показать эффект проникновения. Просто я пытался рассмотреть итак и не увидел. Это не нужно при создании или просто нет навыков делать такое в студии. Если надо могу написать как делать.

Looks good and well done. The last picture is really good. I also hope that the code examples that I sent in private messages also helped in mastering the program. Question about one picture. The picture where the girl is on top of the guy. In the studio, the characters can be animated anatomy. There are at least three easy ways to show the penetration effect. I just tried to see it and didn't see it. This is not necessary when creating, or simply there are no skills to do this in the studio. If necessary, I can write how to do it.

Thanks mate. Better Penetration is active in this scene but either the position of the body or camera is making it quite subtle. I'll see if I can make it look better later.

Over the last couple of days I've been working on a bunch more renders and learning way more stuff. Got to about 60% complete on renders when I realized... I am going to have to re-render about 75% of them




This is the difference in rendering/scene quality from my first renders to now. It will probably take me a week or so to remaster everything but it's a lot better to do it now than later. Hope you guys are enjoying your weekend and I'll be back with more updates soon!

 

[voronkov]

Очень хорошо. Довольно заметно визуальное отличие между двух картинок. Согласен с тем что переделанная намного лучше. Это же не стандартная настройка визуальной части, а скорее всего включение графический мод в игре. Я до этого не включал их при создании по нескольким причина. Во первых трудно настроить что бы был одинаковый стиль в разных сценах, так же иногда при записи видео отличается от того как выглядит картинка, ну и по большей части мод на графику требовательна и нагружает комп почти как ДАЗ 3д . Но последнее время не записываю видео, так что можно попробовать такую графику, так что интересны настройки студии для создания такого изображения.

Very well. The visual difference between the two pictures is quite noticeable. I agree that the redone is much better. This is not a standard setting for the visual part, but most likely the inclusion of a graphic mod in the game. I have not included them before when creating for several reasons. Firstly, it is difficult to set up the same style in different scenes, sometimes when recording a video it differs from how the picture looks, well, for the most part, the mod for graphics is demanding and loads the computer almost like DAZ 3d. But lately I haven’t been recording video, so I can try such graphics, so the studio settings for creating such an image are interesting.

 

[BigPipeGames]

Очень хорошо. Довольно заметно визуальное отличие между двух картинок. Согласен с тем что переделанная намного лучше. Это же не стандартная настройка визуальной части, а скорее всего включение графический мод в игре. Я до этого не включал их при создании по нескольким причина. Во первых трудно настроить что бы был одинаковый стиль в разных сценах, так же иногда при записи видео отличается от того как выглядит картинка, ну и по большей части мод на графику требовательна и нагружает комп почти как ДАЗ 3д . Но последнее время не записываю видео, так что можно попробовать такую графику, так что интересны настройки студии для создания такого изображения.

Very well. The visual difference between the two pictures is quite noticeable. I agree that the redone is much better. This is not a standard setting for the visual part, but most likely the inclusion of a graphic mod in the game. I have not included them before when creating for several reasons. Firstly, it is difficult to set up the same style in different scenes, sometimes when recording a video it differs from how the picture looks, well, for the most part, the mod for graphics is demanding and loads the computer almost like DAZ 3d. But lately I haven’t been recording video, so I can try such graphics, so the studio settings for creating such an image are interesting.

The difference in render quality is much more to do with using lights correctly than the graphics mod. Graphics mod does make a small difference but the lighting and putting more objects in the scene to make it feel more alive are the biggest changes.

 

[SatinAndIvory]

How many hours have you put into the game so far? I've just started on my own HS2 game as well, but like 10 hours have been spent on character design alone .

Also, what resources have you been using to learn lighting in HS2? Are you just picking it up as you go or are you following a guide? There's like scarcely any resources on the internet pertaining to HS2, its lighting system, and the mods that add more features to it.

 

[BigPipeGames]

How many hours have you put into the game so far? I've just started on my own HS2 game as well, but like 10 hours have been spent on character design alone .

Also, what resources have you been using to learn lighting in HS2? Are you just picking it up as you go or are you following a guide? There's like scarcely any resources on the internet pertaining to HS2, its lighting system, and the mods that add more features to it.

It took me several days to make all of my characters, but there are around 10 of them and each had 3-5 revisions until I was happy with them. After that I started working on renders for the game which was the same day I started this thread. Have done around 3-400 renders but will be re-doing a lot of them. So around 10 days of working on renders probably around 6-8 hours each day.

Yeah resources for HS2 are pretty sparse. It's been a combination of experimentation and help from others. The HS2 Guides and Help thread on this forum is a good resource, I read through that from start to finish and picked up some really useful tips along the way. Also various discords for HS2 games. And then just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks

 

[BigPipeGames]

Not a whole lot to report, just remastering renders which will probably take the whole week. Here's a another before and after

 

[BigPipeGames]

Another day of redoing renders in the books. Should be caught up by the weekend. After that I'll be finishing up the last few scenes/animations next week and then moving onto coding the game!

 

[BigPipeGames]

Finally finished with remastering all the early renders and on to working on new scenes which is a great feeling. Was quite a job pushing through hundreds of images that I'd already made before. Will probably take me most of this week to finish the renders and animations for the last few scenes and then I'll be starting on coding and finishing up the game.

Current progress:

Script: 95%
Renders: 80%
Animations: 50%
Coding: 0%

 

[voronkov]

Довольно хорошо всё выглядит. Написал очередной раз. Насчёт источника света на карте. Я знаю что можно добавлять и устанавливать своё освещение. Согласен с тем что это нагружает комп. Помимо того на некоторых встроенных локациях которые можно скачать для студии есть встроенный свой свет. Всё это знаю и всё равно не очень у меня получается настраивать свет что бы картинка выглядела так как выглядит на скриншотах которые демонстрируешь. Я даже немного писал про то как в студии и что делать. Для ознакомления ссылки.

Everything looks pretty good. Wrote again. About the light source on the map. I know that you can add and install your lighting. I agree that it loads the computer. In addition, some built-in locations that can be downloaded for the studio have their own built-in light. I know all this, and still I’m not very good at adjusting the light so that the picture looks like it looks on the screenshots that you demonstrate. I even wrote a little about how it is in the studio and what to do. For reference links.


what loads the computer when working in the studio
https://f95zone.to/threads/creating...2-hs2-so-where-do-i-start.127364/post-8768005
light in the studio.
https://f95zone.to/threads/illusion...lect-2-card-sharing-thread.44248/post-8696647