Ren'Py Where to draft dialogue first? In Ren'Py or in word document?

[BluePigtails]

Hi y'all, I recently gain interest in with writing a very bare bones VN, not looking to go too crazy with dialogue trees or branching paths.

In any case, I did the Ren'Py tutorial and was hit with a dilemma, I had initially drafted the story in a personal word document, which was great for getting my ideas onto paper, but entirely incompatible with the Ren'Py ecosystem. I had no "issue" with transferring dialogue from the word document and reformatting character names and whatnot, however I recognize how ineffiecent that process is, however writing dialogue directly into Ren'Py felt sluggish, I much prefer having an uninterupted train of thought when writing on a word document.

My question is what does your dialogue drafting process look like? Do you all have it done in Ren'Py on the first draft or do you workshop it on a seperate word processing program before copying it over to Ren'Py?

Thank you for your time and consideration,
-BluePigtails

 

[Turning Tricks]

Honestly, I tried doing it in Word then transferring that to Ren'py but I quickly stopped that. My process is now like this...

1. I create a storyboard, outlining the main points of each scene for the current release and possible path choices and variables to use.
2. I make an Excel sheet for that storyboard, with pages for each scene as I track each render I do. Plus I add all sorts of other useful stuff like a summary page, DAZ settings, changelog, bug list and general notes ... etc.
3. Then I start rendering each scene, making minor changes and what-not as I am working with the visuals. Anytime I have a good idea on how the dialogue should go, I note it in the Excel page for that scene right beside the applicable render.
4. I then do post processing of the renders and animations.
5. I start writing the scene code and dialogue at the same time. I work with the renders up on one monitor along with the Excel sheet and on my other monitor I have whatever editor I am using for Ren'py (Atom originally and now Visual Studio Code)
6. Finally, I add music and play test the update, scene by scene as I work. Then again at the end with a full playthrough to get a rough time estimate and another bug check.

The reason I prefer to write the dialogue at the end, directly in Ren'py, is because I work render by render and having the renders up puts me in the story more. Writing the dialogue render by render is also sort of like doing script work for a TV show. You are not actually writing a novel here, as the visuals convey a lot of the story for you. I only do the dialogue when I have a nice free day and can focus on the story and get into the 'zone' that I love when putting everything together finally.

A few other things I do...

- Sometimes, when I am unsure of the grammar, I'll just check the line of dialogue I am writing with an online grammar AI.
- When I am done writing the dialogue, I have Ren'py extract it for me into a text file, which I then put in Word and run a full spell check and grammar check on it and also remove the variable tags. This also gives me an accurate word count.

Finally, I'll let the project sit for a couple of days and work on something else. Then I circle back and play test the release some more, making changes to the dialogue with a fresh mind. I used to do the same thing when doing art work a long time ago. You spend so much time doing something that you think it sucks, so you need to step away for a day or so and then look at it again with fresh eyes.

At the very end, I'll run the LINT test and make the builds and start doing the file uploads and other housekeeping stuff.

 

[HELIO CESAR]

Bro almost all forms of storytelling mediums, movies, cartoon, comics, come from a written script where the person can detail all that happens in the story and scenes, like this:

[Chadonius Chadson knells before Shawty Hotcheeks body, puting his hand in her face]
{GrassStep sfx, ClothRustling sfx}
CC: Shawty please open your eyes, i cant live without the warm of your hot... cheeks.
[Shawty Hotcheeks slowly open her eyes and turns to Chadonius Chadson while a tear run down her face]
{WindChime sfx, ClothRustling sfx, SoftBreathing sfx}
SH: Oh Chadonius, thats what i always wanted to hear, lets make babies so we can have a chad son together.
[Chadonius and Shawty have a passionate kiss holding each other in their arms]
{Kiss sfx, Careless Whisper music}

While some could work writing direct in Renpy why do it when you could work in a way that helps with all the rest of content creation and material gathering?

A point coming from what Turning Tricks wrote above, i would argue a dialogue in a Visual Novel (mainly western's) comes after the visual part and narration.

transferring dialogue from the word document and reformatting character names and whatnot, however I recognize how ineffiecent that process is

What exactly did you find ineffiecent ? The editing of the the dialogue to conform the engine script? Because my pre conception were that a well structured script written in any medium would be rather trivial to transfer to renpy, so please elaborate, maybe we can give you some insights.

 

[Turning Tricks]

Bro almost all forms of storytelling mediums, movies, cartoon, comics, come from a written script where the person can detail all that happens in the story and scenes, like this:

[Chadonius Chadson knells before Shawty Hotcheeks body, puting his hand in her face]
{GrassStep sfx, ClothRustling sfx}
CC: Shawty please open your eyes, i cant live without the warm of your hot... cheeks.
[Shawty Hotcheeks slowly open her eyes and turns to Chadonius Chadson while a tear run down her face]
{WindChime sfx, ClothRustling sfx, SoftBreathing sfx}
SH: Oh Chadonius, thats what i always wanted to hear, lets make babies so we can have a chad son together.
[Chadonius and Shawty have a passionate kiss holding each other in their arms]
{Kiss sfx, Careless Whisper music}

While some could work writing direct in Renpy why do it when you could work in a way that helps with all the rest of content creation and material gathering?

But see... all that above is extra work. Most of that anyhow is done on your story board (in whatever format you prefer to use for that - I use Excel because I have a lot of experience in Office)

The problem when writing the dialogue outside of Ren'py is that when you cut and paste 50K words, you're going to have a lot of bugs and missed punctuation. It's really much easier to bash it out in Ren'py and then spell check the word dump after (or use the editor spell-check, if it has one... but that can be tricky sometime when you have a lot of variables in the text)

All those descriptive adjectives are conveyed in a VN by the visual art. The dialogue is mostly ... just the dialogue. You rarely have any written narrative.

Honestly, if you structure your main dialogue code well, it's actually very natural feeling after a while to write dialogue in Ren'py. For example, when I am done with my render post processing, I cut and paste all the "scene s46_r001" stuff and then work from the top down on the dialogue. Hopefully you also made the character coding as simple as possible (There's a reason they always use 'e' for Eileen in Ren'py, lol)

At the end of the day, each Dev has to decide on their own work flow. Everyone has a different favorite. For me, I tried writing the story in Word but it was disjointed from the actual renders and I didn't want to be pigeon-toed by the story, when it came time to make the renders. For me, it's better to make the renders to fit the actual storyboard outline and then go back and get in character (while reviewing the renders) and writing the story then.

 

[HELIO CESAR]

But see... all that above is extra work. Most of that anyhow is done on your story board (in whatever format you prefer to use for that - I use Excel because I have a lot of experience in Office)

The problem when writing the dialogue outside of Ren'py is that when you cut and paste 50K words, you're going to have a lot of bugs and missed punctuation. It's really much easier to bash it out in Ren'py and then spell check the word dump after (or use the editor spell-check, if it has one... but that can be tricky sometime when you have a lot of variables in the text)

All those descriptive adjectives are conveyed in a VN by the visual art. The dialogue is mostly ... just the dialogue. You rarely have any written narrative.

Honestly, if you structure your main dialogue code well, it's actually very natural feeling after a while to write dialogue in Ren'py. For example, when I am done with my render post processing, I cut and paste all the "scene s46_r001" stuff and then work from the top down on the dialogue. Hopefully you also made the character coding as simple as possible (There's a reason they always use 'e' for Eileen in Ren'py, lol)

At the end of the day, each Dev has to decide on their own work flow. Everyone has a different favorite. For me, I tried writing the story in Word but it was disjointed from the actual renders and I didn't want to be pigeon-toed by the story, when it came time to make the renders. For me, it's better to make the renders to fit the actual storyboard outline and then go back and get in character (while reviewing the renders) and writing the story then.

Not disagreeing, maybe my edit could explain better what my point was, i do agree that each Dev must use what works better for them.

I don't have much experience with making works in renpy just tried a bit some time ago, but i do have with code in geral, and i am a bit more 'conservative' in some points, so i would probably write the story as a movie script / explainer storyboard and make some code scripts to conform it to renpy and tweak it.

 

[osanaiko]

Turning Tricks - very comprehensive. I've seen a similar comment from another dev before about "render first, then write the details", because it's easier to adjust the dialog to match the image than the other way round. There are scenes that are possible to create in daz relatively easily because the assets are already available (i.e. choose any of the 1578 different skin-tight mini-dress outfits for women), but other are near impossible without starting a whole side quest creating your own 3d assets (for example: 1910's-1930's style hair, clothing, interiors, vehicles.)

Personally I just use a text editor (VSCode at present).

- One master text file for high level plot and notes
- Then one Renpy file per chapter,
- in each chapter file, I write a multi-line comment in the header section listing the story beats, which generally are 1-1 to scenes
- then write each scene as a separate renpy label, initially as comments in a "story board" style, and make notes on images needed
- then work on images / dialog in whatever order suits my mood and situation (hard to work on images when others are present in the house, but dialog is easily disguised)

This process works(*1) for me because i'm a coder first, writer second, and an "artist"(*2) in very distant third place

One thing I like to do when in the mood to pound out dialog without concerning myself about formatting.
This works as follows:
in the scene label, open a multi line comment, then use very minimal formatting rather than valid renpy syntax inside it.
Just one letter and a space (i.e. 'm ' for mc and 'x ' for the the other character) at the start of each line, no double quotes around the text, no image/scene/python commands.
It's easy later on to come back with a REGEX that will replace the formatting to be valid renpy, and then sprinkle in all the stuff that makes it a *game* as you playtest it.

Final word: The trap of starting by writing a *story* in Word, especially if you were an author before you tried game dev, is that you end up with a novella, not a movie/game "script"

*1: "works" is a carrying a heavy load, given that I have not yet released anything
*2: not going to call myself an artist given that I am using AI tools for artwork

 

[Quintillian]

I'm using the free version of

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for planning and drafting, which I greatly recommend. I have the project right into the game/ folder, which will get excluded when

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the distribution. Because everything on Obsidian is written using Markdown, it makes very easy just copypasting the entire thing into RenPy script with no changes, the one thing that will make it perfect is the option to have both the renpy syntax highlight and the spellchecking enabled at the same time, but at this stage I'm mostly just focused on the drafting part anyway, so lacking the highlighting is okay.

 

[osanaiko]

Quintillian makes an excellent point:

1. Game dev will have a bunch of assets that are IMPORTANT to not lose, but are not part of the thing you will distribute. This includes notes, drafts, non-final image assets such as Photoshop files, or daz DUFs or whatever.

2. including them with your game folder is a good idea, because that makes it easier to put them all into SOURCE CONTROL.

3. when you make a renpy build, setup so that those non-shipping assets are excluded from the build. it is easy, just read the manual.

4. USE SOURCE CONTROL - gitlab, github, bitbucket, anything... even your own git that you backup regularly to dropbox or whatever. and having a single folder with everything relevant makes it super simple.

5. If all the binary assets get too big, use a GIT LFS (large file storage) setup.

you'll thank yourself when (not if) you have a data-loss event

 

[Eezergoode]

The problem when writing the dialogue outside of Ren'py is that when you cut and paste 50K words, you're going to have a lot of bugs and missed punctuation.

Except that not everyone copy/pastes 50k words at once. Some of us work one scene at a time. I personally find it easier to throw it in a word doc first, fix/rearrange/spell and grammar check, etc, then after I am happy I copy it into Ren'Py. It really depends on what you are most comfortable with, and what feels more efficient for you and your workflow. Me? I'll probably have the entire game written in full before I even start on full art, right now I just have some quickly rendered BGs and sprites, basically for pre-vis. BUT I think that's because I am NOT by any stretch of the imagination an artist... I'm a storyteller first and foremost, so in my mind, words come first. My Daz-Fu is still weak, so it takes a back seat.