New dev, engine choice question

[archer3334]

I've decided to learn a bit of programming, and among other things I thought, "why not try making one of these games I enjoy?" So first I need to choose a game system, and was wondering what might work best.

My plan is to have an interactive map, where each location has certain associated actions (like buying a drink at a bar) and a list of events which could happen each time you go there (like running into your friend at the bar). Within each event, the player should be able to select a wide range of actions which will then affect the game from then on (like getting drunk at the bar and feeling ill).

I don't think this is especially complex, though there would be quite a lot of flags for the game to track. Any thoughts on what might work for this?

PS: I really don't want RPGmaker because I don't like the gameplay experience it gives.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

For anything that involves only static images, videos, or not really complex animations, Renpy is a good choice.

 

[79flavors]

For a first time project, with little or no programming experience... I too would say RenPy is a good choice.
Maybe start here:

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Based on your description. You'll almost certainly need to take a look at

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.

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is also an option using rectangular hotspots. But personally, I prefer imagebutton because it allows you to create buttons based on irregular shapes using focus_mask.

There's a discussion about imagebutton's here :
https://f95zone.to/threads/finding-...-point-click-game-on-renpy.25325/post-1565217

Though undoubtedly there are other threads that talk about it too. This was just one I was involved with.

You're also going to want to keep track of where things are up to within your game. How many drinks has your player had. Did the player just drink beer... or tequila shots? Oh, I dunno. Anything you need to keep track of.

You'd store those sort of things in variables. Variables can be numbers (like drink count or drunk level) or character strings (the player's name perhaps?) or boolean (Yes/No, True/False ... did your player hit on the waitress?).

Variables are anything your game needs to remember when the players returns to your game after a week and loads their auto-save or saved game (Don't worry, RenPy will take care of all of that for you).

I wrote up some stuff about variables a while ago, it goes into a bit more detail and explains why you probably want to use default to create each variable your RenPy game uses.
https://f95zone.to/threads/newbie-guide-to-basic-variables-in-renpy.22709/

Also keep in mind that a game isn't just the programming. Visual Novels tend to be a lot more visual than they are novel. You're going to need some pictures. That could be screen grabs from porn videos (don't), something drawn in MSPaint or something painstakingly created and rendered in a 3D package like Daz3D. There are of course other choices (Honey Select probably being the other big alternative). Those images through are going to be needed whether you code something in RenPy, HTML, Unity, RPGM or Unreal Engine.

Plus if you end up using imagebutton, you'll almost certainly end up needing to do some graphics editing in something like Photoshop, Paintshop-Pro or GIMP.

 

[archer3334]

Awesome info guys, that sounds really promising. Pictures will be tricky, but I guess I can start with some simple illustrative placeholders and get something better later.

 

[lancelotdulak]

79flavors awesome post man.

Op im going to 100% agree and disagree w them. Renpy is an awesome choice for visual novels with simple branching. Its biggest upsides are the code is right there for you to read and you can use frameworks from other games to get started and learn from there. The other upside is that people can decompile your game easily and fix your fuckups. One of the most repeated laws and these games is that the devs expected players to know what to do to progress the game when it is often completely illogical or random. Mods here regularly fix that and radically improve the games

On the other hand Unity is infinitely more powerful and it's probably actually easier to use. You will still need to learn some programming but basically you can just drag an image onto a screen and put some choices etcetera right there. Unbalanced red pie would win this but if you ever want to go beyond what ramp I can do having started in unity would be a big plus and frankly it allows you to make piracy a little harder if you want to

 

[lancelotdulak]

In the spirit of what 79flavors posted.

First all programming is at its very core the same all languages rely on the same basics

The first is as he said variables which work exactly like they do in algebra except some variables are strings that is they can contain anything as sentence a letter numbers and letters but you can't use them as numbers without conversion
The second type are numbers like integers doubles floats and integer is just a number without a decimal place that isn't incredibly large doubles and floats are floating Point numbers Etc
There are also matrix's and arrays Etc but that's way down the road
Then their operators plus minus divide greater than less than equal to set qaual qual to Etc. *×÷=+/ == != etc. These are mathematical and Boolean operations

Then there are tests like if then ,tests are also called switching. There are more complex and Powerful forms of switching like switch case but you can actually build one of those out of if then

Then there is flow control and all of this overlaps a bit. Lux like for next while wend etc do something til a test is met. There are a lot of different forms of flow control depending on the language

All programming uses very simple straightforward logic.

Example
If male protagonists charisma it's greater than female protagonist resistance then she likes him more

If a is greater than b then c equal C + 1


A is charisma. B is resistence c is love

Programming is simple at its heart

 

[polywog]