Ren'Py Ritzy Titz Station

[docclox]

Overview:

Your cousin Vinny sends you a message. Apparently he's got a job managing a high class Spa. It's on some sort of space station, apparently, somewhere between Earth Orbit and Mars, but out of the legal jurisdiction of either. Of course, there's no reason why that detail should be important...

Vinny offers to pay your fare out there and comp you a couple of weeks stay. If you like it, he can probably get you a job. It'll probably mean six months of tending bar for weary asteroid miners stopping off on their way Earthward, but what the hell! It's not like you've got anything better to do at the moment.​

This is just a placeholder/discussion thread at this point - there is no download yet.

Basically, I'm excited enough about the idea that I wanted to talk about it, and I wanted to share some screenies, because it's programmer art. I think it's decent enough in its way ... but then obviously, I'm biased. I'm also not sure what to do about sex images. I'm not sure my command of Inkscape is up to doing decent vector art sex, but the only alternative I like is text only scenes.

Once I get things written past the prologue point I'll add a download. The plan is for a mix of VN story arcs and open ended sandbox training. Not a million miles away from the format used by Strive For Power for those familiar with the game.


Developer/Publisher: docclox
Censorship: Nope
Version: 0.0
OS: Win/Linux/Mac
Language: English
Genre: S/F, Humour, Male or Female protagonist, crime, slave trade, prostitution, and more as I think of them.

Installation:
No game yet.

Change-Log:
Nope.

Download link(s):
None yet

​

 

[wep]

title fixed

 

[Cult of Ape]

Sounds like an interesting concept I hear you about the placeholder art, mine is even worse, lol.

 

[docclox]

title fixed

Many thanks

Um... not wishing to be a pest, but I don't seem to have edit rights for the top post any more.

Sounds like an interesting concept I hear you about the placeholder art, mine is even worse, lol.

I think I'm going to call it my "style" and run with it

 

[wep]

Many thanks

Um... not wishing to be a pest, but I don't seem to have edit rights for the top post any more.

LOL this is unexpected. We need someone with superpower, an hero.
@Pepé Le Pew or @muttdoggy
Sorry to bother you, but i changed the title as requested and now loxlox has lost the permission to post in the OP. I was wondering if you could help him, please. Thanks a lot!!!

 

[Pepé Le Pew]

Um... not wishing to be a pest, but I don't seem to have edit rights for the top post any more.

give it a try now...

 

[docclox]

That works. Many thanks to you both!

 

[docclox]

OK. Seeing as how I have a thread and all, and since this is the game dev forum, I thought I might blog up bits of the design process. Partly in case anyone's interested, and partly because I feel like it.

I'm about at the point where it's getting difficult to proceed without having the protagonist take part in conversations. But, since I'm using faces to indicate who's speaking, that means I need faces for my protagonists. Which has always been a bit of a challenge for me.

So I spent a couple of hours running down "how to draw cartoon faces"

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and trying to adapt them to inkscape. This was the first result:

I want a humorous tone for the game, so the protagonist is going to be somewhat hapless. Which means he can't look too cool or too competent. A touch of gormlessness is called for. I'm pretty happy with that as a first attempt. (Although the hair highlights seem to have come out a lot stronger when posted here than they first appeared in Inkscape. I might tone that down a touch).

Of course, the intention is to play as either gender, so I wanted a female face. So I thought I'd soften the jawline a bit and ... well it didn't work. What I ended up with looked like the first guy's slightly chubby, brown-haired brother.

Not a problem, really. I wanted to have a choice of faces anyway So I deepened the shading on the jaw and nose to suggest a little more curvature and mirror flipped the whole thing to slightly disguise that apart from the colour the hair is identical to the first one. It'll do.

That still didn't give me a female face though, so I went back to googling how to draw female faces specifically.

The eyes and hair came from

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. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the style for those eye, but they'll do for now. I couldn't make the tutorial's mouth and nose work at all. The nose is easily suggested with a smudge of shadow. For the lips, I found

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. The combination seems to work quite well.

Drawing tool used in all cases is

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, which is free, open source and lets me fix mistakes by dragging lines and nodes around on the screen.

OK. That was the productive part of my day. Someone finds it useful, or at least interesting. Or failing that, that I haven't bored too many people. Assuming I don't get too many objections, I'll probably do a few more of these when I feel I've learned something useful.

 

[docclox]

Ren'Py imagemaps are fun!

 

[docclox]

Time to start adding UI elements to the screen.

So ... who thinks I'm being too subtle about this?

Dead easy to do, in fact. The "Ahem" placard is an image, so I just show that at true center. The arrow blinks red-and-white and uses the same code for the happy/very happy Eileen sprite in the Renpy ATL demo. Show both, with dissolve on the "Ahem", pause to suspend things until the user clicks, and then hide the arrow and dissolve the text box. Easy peasy.

 

[docclox]

On Glass Walls And Starfields

One of the background ideas I'm playing with is the idea that the Station is based around an asteroid cluster. Basically you take any amount of mined out or otherwise worthless space rocks and you smush them all together. Fuse them, weld 'em, epoxy 'em or lash 'em together with cables and girders - whatever works. Then you tunnel into the conglomerate to make your habitation spaces, adding walls and sealant where needed.

So that's the idea, and it lends itself naturally to mapping it out as collection of linked bubbles, which is good becuase that's how I've done it And I started to think it would be cool if the walls were largely transparent so you see the stars through them. (I was thinking more "Glassteel" then "General Products Hull, but anyway).

Then I thought that it would be good to have one big bubble, more or less clinging on to the side of the station, with floors inside it to make proper use of the space. So I got this:

... and at some point I',m going to have to work out how to integrate that into the imagemap navigation screen. But it also gives me another headache. How do I draw that?

The top one isn't so bad. The curvature reduces the useful space there, so I decided to make it an elite dining area. Just one table, and most of the other things tucked away so as not to obstruct the view.

So I tried drawing it:

I actually quite like that. The perspective is shot to hell, I suspect and I'm not really sure how to construct it properly for a scene where there are no straight lines at all (nor a hroizon for that matter), but that said, I'm reasonably happy with this one. I can always redo the table later.

The next level down is the bar. I can cheat a little here. One side of the bubble is anchored to the rock of the cluster, so I set the bar against that:

Kind of boring, and I've just realised that the floor at least needs a bluey shine to it. Still, it works.

Thing is, if that's the first thing you see when you enter the bubble, it kind of undermines the feeling I'm trying to set up. So I really need an image facing away from the bar:

And this is where the Perspective issues really start kicking my ass. I have a wall around a (too-small) central void that's more likely to trip up passing drunks than it is to stop them falling in. I've got an access ramp that's probably too steep to climb and that I'm not sure doesn't twist back on itself somewhere and I've not no idea how I'm going to scale the spray-on LED patches so as to give the right impression of size.

That said, I think this is probably good enough for now and I can always revisit it later on. It just bothers me that I can't think how to do it right, you know?

 

[muttdoggy]

Your answer to a clear, strong material

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[docclox]

A keyboard! How quaint!

 

[docclox]

So I had another shot at getting the perspective sorted out on this thing. I set up a vanishing point, set up a bounding square for the main ellipse, subdivided that into quarters and then built the central well in that square.

This works, perspective wise, but the space inside is tiny! I can probably fix that by lowering the VP and dropping the height of the wall, since a smaller wall means smaller people to lean on it, which means the space becomes larger relative to the people.

This is the frustrating part. The image I have is so clear in my head. How can it be so complicated to translate that into an image?

 

[docclox]

OK. So I can't leave this alone. This works better:

That's starting to get the proportions right and the perspective is right on the floor and the well. Not sure about the upper floor ... but I think I know how to fix that.

The trouble is that when I try and take the shot I want - the view from inside the bubble ... it still looks pokey:

So I'm thinking maybe half the height of the well wall and the people along with it, and then move the whole thing up closer to the VP so the foreshortening gets a bit more aggressive ... and I might be close to what I had in mind originally.

 

[docclox]

No new visuals to show. I have been messing around with Blender trying to get those glass bubble levels right. Turns out that I had the perspective about right there.

I was right about that wall too. The secret of having a lot of floor space is to keep the wall around the central well short in relation to the size of the level. The idea is that the wall is about four foot high or so. Low enough that you can lean over it and look down, but high enough that people are unlikely to fall over it accidentally.

I'm tempted to get the Blender model right and then just use that for the graphics where they just involve the glass. Either that or use renders as a reference and chase them in Inkscape.

I've also been doing some Python:

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That gives me a list of places, links between them that can be locked or hidden, or asymmetrical with a little fiddling, and a manager class to hold it all. There's also a class that collects the info needed to calculate a label string based on the location chosen.

What that means is I can define my rooms with a list like this:

#
#   List of places
#
    spec = [
        Place(
            "loadingbay",
            "Loading Bay",
            coords    = [ 877, 529, 197, 181 ]    # co-ords for the navigation imagemap hotspot
        ),
        Place(
            "engineering",
            "Engineering",
            coords = [ 724, 558, 153, 164 ]
        ),
        Place(
            "kitchens",
            "Kitchens",
            coords = [ 877, 380, 175, 149 ]
        ),
        # etc ...
]

and then define the links like this:

#
#   list of links. S1 is "here" and s1 is there.
#   links are one way, but get added in pairs so you don't
#   need to add them twice. If you want one way doors or
#   doors that are only locked from one side, you'll need to
#   tweak things a bit
#
#   "locked" and "hidden" are optional fields.
#   Both default to False, which is probably what you want most of the time.
#
    link_list = [
        {   "s0"        : "loadingbay",
            "s1"        : "engineering",
            "locked"    : True,
        },
        {   "s0"        : "loadingbay",
            "s1"        : "kitchens",
        },
        {   "s0"        : "kitchens",
            "s1"        : "bar",
        },
        # etc...

And I can use those to build my data structures.

Once that's in place, my navingation map quite literally writes itself:

#
# menu screen. The main advantage here is that we make it by looping over the place list.
#
# With a little tweaking it can make image maps and the like as well.
#
screen my_menu:
    imagemap:
        auto "explore_%s.png"
        for i in navman.spec:
            if navman.layout.reachable(i.name):
                hotspot (i.coords[0], i.coords[1], i.coords[2], i.coords[3]) action Return(navman.layout.go_to(i.name))

So that generates a hotspot for every known or visible room and returns back the name of the label to handle that location, or the same string with "_locked" on the end if the passage is inaccessible.

About this time it started to become apparent that I was going to need separate icons for Inspection, Navigation and Speech. I mean I was anyway, but I'd been trying to do it all on the basis of number of times a location was visited, and it wasn't working so well.

So this is what I came up with:

I didn't like the old map icon anyway, so this is probably an improvement. Now I just need to split out the mixed speech, inspection and navigation stuff I already have and make it work with the new buttons.

So that's been most of this week

 

[docclox]

So. The station has an AI. Like just about everything else on the Station, it's kind of fucked up.

It doesn't show on the screen, but there's a subtle shimmer effect for that background glow. I did want to have a stream of words and phrases floating past in the background, as if her inner dialogue was leaking onto the display, but I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to get that working any time soon.

I've also got a ton more dialogue done, most of the navigation text is debugged and (Heaven help me) I'm nearly done with the prologue.

Anyone interested in a little playtesting in a week or two's time? It's going to be pure VN at this point and no sex beyond some innuendo and a little smutty language. Still, I'd like some feedback on the style and also to know if anyone apart from me finds the actual jokes funny.

 

[Cirro84]

... Anyone interested in a little playtesting in a week or two's time? It's going to be pure VN at this point and no sex beyond some innuendo and a little smutty language. Still, I'd like some feedback on the style and also to know if anyone apart from me finds the actual jokes funny.

Why not?? It's Ren'py, should even run on any of my toasters. Might playtest on wes, just post the link and shoot me a line or ping me when ready.

 

[muttdoggy]

I'll give it a shot.

 

[docclox]

Cool! I have playtesters. Now all I need is something resembling a game...