VN Questions Regarding Programs

[Studio Errilhl]

That's because you're a coder, and it's what coders do.

The bulk of websites are hacked up by a designer, smacked into a DW (or these days WordPress) template, and whoever just wanted a web-presence as cheap and easy as possible got it.

That is true. The lack of understanding for the media (ie, web) most designers out there have is... mindboggling. And, unfortunately, the "you can make your webpage in 5 minutes" crap sites, like WIX pop up every day it seems, making the web worse by the minute.

 

[HiEv]

The goal is going to be for a Visual Novel (hence the tag), and I was wondering if there were opinions on Ren'Py v. TyranoBuilder, and what formed them? I'm not looking to start a debate, just get a feel for which one people think is more user friendly to a beginner, and better at design.
[...]
And in honesty, I'm also looking at Twine and Quest, but Twine makes my brain turn to mush, and Quest feels... off somehow (can't really explain beyond that at the moment).

Well, if you're able to make enough art, Ren'Py is the way most people are going. However, if you're only able to do a little art and it's going to be mostly text, Twine is pretty good and actually is pretty easy in the SugarCube format. If you can put brackets around text, you can make a simple Twine game.

The other nice thing about Twine is that it's HTML/CSS/JavaScript, meaning there are tons of resources out there for web developers that also work in Twine. There's also a pretty good Twine community out there who love to help with it (including me). I'm currently writing a JavaScript "plugin" for Twine to make inventory manipulation much easier for people with little coding experience.

I'd actually recommend explaining a bit more about what you expect to do inside your game, and then people will be better able to recommend which tool is the best for the job.

Good luck and have fun!

 

[Agent HK47]

In my eyes, Tyranobuilder is way more user friendly, in that you can easily jump into it, without any coding knowledge and still make a simple game without much trouble, just by using the demo game and provided tutorials for information about how the program works. However, you pay for the simplycity by being limited in the amount of details you can make, and TB is infamous for it's amount of glitches and bug, especially on large games.
Ren'py, on the other hand, is strictly code-based, but is the most stable engine of all, and since it has existed for over 10 years, it has massive amounts of documentation available, and many users on this site will have knowledge about it and can probably help you if you have problems.

I decided to go with the "middle choice" you can say, in a fairly new addition to the scene, with a program called "Visual Novel maker", which is made by the people who made RPG maker. This program is kind of a mix between TB and Ren'py, with a somewhat userfriendly interface, where you can drag/drop elements, but also has options to go much deeper into scripting than TB.
However, VNM is a very young player on the market, and the available documentation is not very big yet. There are also many reports of glitches/bugs, but most of the reports are either from earlier versions, or by people who didnt spend a lot of time with the program. I haven't started messing around with VNM yet, myself, but most of the people I have spoken to, who have used VNM a lot, seems to agree that the program work very well, even it has some rough edges here and there.

If you feel confident in yourself, I would definately say Ren'py is the best choice though. As for me, I kinda like doing things different, so I am sticking with VNM for now and see where it takes me.

 

[ThousandMasks]

<snip>
I decided to go with the "middle choice" you can say, in a fairly new addition to the scene, with a program called "Visual Novel maker", which is made by the people who made RPG maker. This program is kind of a mix between TB and Ren'py, with a somewhat userfriendly interface, where you can drag/drop elements, but also has options to go much deeper into scripting than TB.
<snip>
If you feel confident in yourself, I would definately say Ren'py is the best choice though. As for me, I kinda like doing things different, so I am sticking with VNM for now and see where it takes me.

I've actually got that on my Steam Wishlist (my shopping list), and am waiting for it to be on a Steam Sale (how I got RPGMMV, which doesn't work on my computer), because I've got a lot of faith in the company to put out something robust but manageable.

To the second point, I am in no way confident in my coding abilities, hence my initial reticence to go balls deep into Ren'Py without getting some feedback from people. I'm not a person who who easily retains stuff that I struggle to understand, unless I have an exterior framework to base it on.

To everyone:
Again, thank you for the replies and discussions; even things that might seem off-topic are helping me get a better understanding of where things sit and the depth of the discussion.

Cheers,
~TM

 

[NandabaCanti]

One pretty nice thing about Ren'Py is that it isn't actually an engine, it is just a VN-focused framework built on top of an engine with a lot more capabilities - PyGame. So if you ever find yourself bumping up against Ren'Py's limitations, you could always drop down into PyGame to code more advanced features and game mechanics yourself. Another bonus to that is that (as the names imply) PyGame is a Python library and Python is one of the easier to pick up programming languages out there and it has a lot of practical uses beyond just making games. There are tons of high quality learning material all over the web, I'll link a few in case you are interested.

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This guy wrote a few books that are aimed at newcomers to Python with a focus on game design, among a few other interesting offerings. You'd probably want to start with the Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python book, as it was his first Python book and starts with the most simple topics for both Python and basic game design. In fact the games he'll have you make as you follow along are all text based in that one. He followed it up with another game related book, Making Games with Python & Pygame, this time focusing on games with graphics, and as luck would have it the engine he chose to focus on in it is PyGame, so quite relevant here. As a bonus, he has all of his books available to read for free through that site, though you could also buy a paperback or ebook version if you'd like to show your support.

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This one's a real classic if you want to get more serious about programming. It won't be for everyone, but I've always really loved this book. It doesn't really focus on gaming or anything, but covers a wide range of important topics that are crucial to the understanding of any proper programmer worth their salt. You can also get a digital copy of this one for free as well if you'd like. There is also an interactive web version that looks interesting, though I've never tried it myself, and it's worth noting that it focuses on an older version of the book and Python 2 exclusively from what I've heard in the past:

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A lot of people swear by this site and its approach. I've gone through a big chunk of the content many years back and can attest to its quality and value. It starts you off at square one and tosses you right into the deep end working with Python through the command line instead of some fancy GUI editor. It holds your hand as you get those hands dirty doing things the old school way and learning how and why things work the way they do, which is invaluable knowledge to have that many miss out on.

There are plenty of other resources out there, I could probably name several more books if I took a few minutes to go check out my ebook library, but mainly Google, YouTube, and StackExchange along with the Ren'Py and PyGame communities will be your best friends on this journey if you choose to embark on it. Ren'Py in particular has a Discord server and its lead dev (RenPyTom) can usually be found on there and is generally pretty helpful if/when no one else can answer a question for you.

 

[Deleted member 167032]

That is how we made them, we had a coder in house as well. It worked really well and we resized every image so that the sites loaded really fast on the slow dial up modems back then. We never had misalignment or loading issue's. Our site's looked really good and work well, but that is the beauty you could design a site anyway you choose to do it.

Eh, no. I started making webpages in the mid-90s, and I've actually never, ever made a Photoshop mockup and butchered it into something vaguely usable with Frontpage or Dreamweaver. I've actually coded manually since I first started, and I used CSS from the beginning.

Granted, while it is possible, I've never seen an actual well-designed, well-working site made via PS / DW. Yes, it might look nice on first view (usually after about a minute or two of loading), but it rarely works flawlessly. But then, I'm a web-purist, and I prefer my sites to degrade gracefully, and be usable and viewable in things like lynx, if need be.

 

[anne O'nymous]

Haven't seen it (but can have missed it). There's two other difference between TyranoBuilder and Ren'py, the price and the update.

Ren'py have been updated five times since November, TyranoBuilder haven't been updated since 2016. It mean that Ren'py is way more up to date with actual technology (supported file formats by example) and that you can expect that a very exceptional bug will be patched soon after being discovered. The author of Ren'py even patched a bug which happen only in the console and only for some keyboard configuration. His engine isn't perfect, but he want it reliable, and he achieve this.
Also because of this, if you plan to make more than one game, you know that in the future your knowledge will still be usable if you choose Ren'py. You can't assume the same things for TyranoBuilder which can simply become obsolete and not being updated anymore.

And obviously, Ren'py is free, which isn't the case of TyranoBuilder.

 

[Deleted member 167032]

If you want to see a fairly good use for Tyrannobuilder then play Daughter for Desert... Thought i'd share it with you.

 

[NandabaCanti]

If you want to see a fairly good use for Tyrannobuilder then play Daughter for Desert... Thought i'd share it with you.

No one here's said you can't make a decent game with it. If I recall Teaching Feeling was made with it too. The problem is that its limitations and perpetually outdated and buggy nature tend to outweigh any benefits you're likely to derive from it being easier to get started with.

 

[Agent HK47]

If you want to see a fairly good use for Tyrannobuilder then play Daughter for Desert... Thought i'd share it with you.

The first chapters of "Ethan's legacy" was made with TB as well, if I recall.