I am working on my first VN and I'm just getting out of that "playing around with daz3d" stage and I'm entering a phase where I can finally do some actual scene building. I'm wondering if you guys had any tips for how to actually organize your work? For branching storylines do you use Excel for the script? For storyboarding, can I just use the script itself since I suck at art? And what do you even name your renders to keep track? scene1_shot1.jpg? Thanks for the help!
Can't help much with storyline as mine is a mess planning wise. most of it is in my head as whatever I tried was just as confusing as no plan at all, that's just the way I think, I have just kept my branches simple for now. The renders though I name them like this.
jennybedroom1
jennybedroom2
etc
amycar1
amycar2
etc
loungesit1
loungesit2
etc
That way they sit alphabetically in the folder and when I make scenes I can just right click to rename the folder and copy the name jennybedroom1 or whatever without a typo and paste it in (its stupid easy to type jennybedrom1 in your code) and then just change the 1 on the end when I add the other scenes.
Also if you have say 5 renders called pennychat1 to pennychat5 sort of like one of my scenes and are putting them in your code back a forth for a chat scene, lets say pennychat1 is a her holding a cup, in your code you can type scene pennychat1 with fade #penny holding the cup, as renpy ignores anything written after the # just another way I do things sometimes.
I'm not too good with drawing myself, but I still storyboard. I find storyboarding really helps organize my ideas. My "system" for that is to draw the storyboard as well as I can. Which usually results in all-most stick man quality art. If I feel it doesn't quite capture what I have in mind I'll mark the panel something like "A-1" in the corner as reference and make a brief note describing what I was going for on a separate page.
For organizing I usually label things like scene1_image1 and also make folders sorting into scenes. I'll have like a "mycomic" folder then within that i'll have "Scene1" "Scene2"and so on.
I'm wondering if you guys had any tips for how to actually organize your work? For branching storylines do you use Excel for the script? For storyboarding, can I just use the script itself since I suck at art? And what do you even name your renders to keep track? scene1_shot1.jpg? Thanks for the help!
For branching story lines, if you're a visual learner like me, Is better if you use a flowchart, you can keep track of the events with text, shapes, arrows, and colors.
I'm not really sure what you mean by "the script", but if you're talking about the scripting language then that depends on what software you're using to code your game.
If you mean the written story as a script then use your favorite text editor and then translate the story into scenes while you're coding.
Try to keep the render names short and easy to understand, you can also keep a simple text file that tells you what the names mean, like a simple tracker.
Is a good idea to make a main folder for your renders and then sub-folders to organize events and locations:
So lets say you're working on the introduction to the game, you can call your renders intr000 and just raise the value for new renders (intr001, intr002, intr003...). Then just add a letter to the name to list a different location:
home render = intrh000 and so on.
My organizng is in folders by characters. policeman,Bethany, Sophia etc. and image naming like this:
policeman_s35_bikini_competition## *character name*_*scene number*_*scene description*##- image number.
