I started out in AI Shoujo and had a first chapter finished, but felt so limited by the tool and disappointed by the end result that I bit the bullet and transitioned to Daz. I'm probably a few weeks away from rebuilding that first chapter, but I'm starting to think big picture about the structure and workflow moving forward. Is Renpy still the only game in town in terms of speeding up the post-render process? How is it accepted relative to a pure image set? If it matters, I still haven't decided if this will be a linear VN or if I will have branching paths, since I can see the workload getting out of hand with the latter. Help me decide which way to go here!
- Sep 13, 2016
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The advantage of renpy are mostly ease of life.
Since it comes with all preferences most vn players expect by default, saves, rollback, text skip, text speed, text history, and so on. It's just pretty straightforward to use which is why many devs go for it.
If you plan to have a simple kinetic novel or visual novel without any complex mechanics renpy is an easy choice because it has everything ready to go and you barely need programming knowledge, download the
Since it comes with all preferences most vn players expect by default, saves, rollback, text skip, text speed, text history, and so on. It's just pretty straightforward to use which is why many devs go for it.
If you plan to have a simple kinetic novel or visual novel without any complex mechanics renpy is an easy choice because it has everything ready to go and you barely need programming knowledge, download the
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and check for yourself.
- Sep 13, 2016
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Fonts are easy to change.
Custom chat bubbles will require a bit more messing around, there is a lot you can do to the
If you really wanted you could even use
Download the sdk and check the complementary tutorial to get an overall idea of what can be easily achieved without much coding.
Custom chat bubbles will require a bit more messing around, there is a lot you can do to the
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to make it look a bit less generic.If you really wanted you could even use
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for dynamic text positions in each dialogue, but this will give you some unnecessary extra work when writing dialogue. Honestly most renpy users don't expect you to reinvent the wheel so don't feel obliged to do it.Download the sdk and check the complementary tutorial to get an overall idea of what can be easily achieved without much coding.
it takes you years to untangle the convoluted mess of how things must be done in renpy, you only learn the tricks by error and months of pain, and in the end the answer always is "you should do that in python because the renpy thing X isn't really meant for what you're trying to do" which negates any reason to use renpy in the first place. you'll be using massive amount of time just fighting renpy.
that said, if you restrict yourself to the VERY basics of ONLY showing still images with dialogue over them, don't make anything clickable nor in any other way try to stretch your wings, then renpy is EXTREMELY easy and requires almost no work. but we never do that but instead want to do 'fancy things' that would take 5 minutes coding from scatch. that's when you waste months and the result is still klunky shit.
the bare basics can still be amazing as light of my life shows. it uses only the most basic functionality, attempts NOTHING fancy, but looks amazing. it's like a rembrandt painted in finger colors.
also if you're proficient in python then you're golden and can just code around renpy and do anything.
that said, if you restrict yourself to the VERY basics of ONLY showing still images with dialogue over them, don't make anything clickable nor in any other way try to stretch your wings, then renpy is EXTREMELY easy and requires almost no work. but we never do that but instead want to do 'fancy things' that would take 5 minutes coding from scatch. that's when you waste months and the result is still klunky shit.
the bare basics can still be amazing as light of my life shows. it uses only the most basic functionality, attempts NOTHING fancy, but looks amazing. it's like a rembrandt painted in finger colors.
also if you're proficient in python then you're golden and can just code around renpy and do anything.
I'll take a look at all of these, thank you. And it's not so much that I want to reinvent the wheel, it's just that my main issue is that plain text, consistently on the bottom of the image and overlaying a large part of it, is less desirable than artistically incorporating the text into the scene. If I can find a quick workflow for it, perhaps a workaround would be to display the dialogue within custom overlaying images... Need to play around with it.
- Sep 13, 2016
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Understandable, but know that you can make that part as transparent as you like and most renpy users know that "middle click" hides all text to see the full image underneath, so you don't really need to worry about hiding the image that much really.
Noted, that was my fear with Renpy, from the little I read about it. I do know a few other languages somewhat, maybe its time to add Python to the mix. Thanks for your input!
I guess I'm not most users, I had no idea about middle click! Hah. I'll give a few different options a shot, though in the end the basic approach might just have to do. Would rather work on renders than spending loads of time on getting the text "just right".
- Nov 27, 2018
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Most Ren'Py games keep the understandably-repulsive "why would I need help with clicking through a visual novel" Help button in the main menu, but that page can still be accessed with the standard F1=Help key if it's missing.
In the past I think it linked to
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, but I'm seeing it built-in in games using newer versions of Ren'Py.The hiding mechanic can be disabled; that's what Winter Wolves did in, if I'm not mistaken, Queen of Thieves, because some NPC spirtes done by a different artist lacked legs (it'd look unprofessional to let the player see them floating in the air while the main characters were fully-bodied).