Lemma Soft Forums

I wasn't sure if I should post this here, or in the cookbook section, but I figured this was safer. This is a REQUEST for a cookbook. I was wondering if anyone knows how to create a journal. I'm not a very advanced programmer, so the best I could do is copy/paste a large block of code and try to make minor edits to it.

What I'm after is a journal functionality. I have a game I'm creating with five characters, and the point of view rotates. It has a lot of branches, so I'd like to create a journal function that is specific to every character that sums up their experiences in the game so far, and lets players review past information to remind them of where they are, and what they've done (it's a long game). For each character, the journal information and appearance on-screen would be different, and I'd want it accessible from the game screen (like a button on the text box, I suppose). So ultimately, I'm asking for either a cookbook, or if someone's willing to come in and program it in FOR me, because if I try to research and do it myself, it will end in disaster, as I am NOT a programming guru of any sort.

I DID check the Ren'Py cookbook, but wasn't able to find anything like this.

Well, now that I'm done sounding needy, thanks for reading.

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What kind of way do you want to use to show it?
I've heard of it been done as scrollable screen items (using text buttons), and menus similar to the option menus.
In the case of screens, you'd also need to decide what you would like to look like.
There are probably other ways too.

Personally I went for a scrolling screen, which is what lead to making a smartphone.
Right now it's displaying around 250 items, which change during the course of the game, and can be broken into different categories.

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Working on a VN to teach lower-conversational Japanese, and a guide to living in Japan.
It's a very long dev process.

You could help me with my game A LOT by filling out this anonymous 10 question survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/6GR57YB
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This was made a while back. I'm sure you could play with it a bit to get the effect you desire viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14367

I'm going for having a book on screen where you can flip the pages, like in Myst when you read a journal (for four of the characters), and a smartphone for one character.

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I think it depends on how you want the pages look when they're turning.

I looked up the Myst example on YouTube and there's not a complex page-turning animation, the pages just change. You can easily use Sven's code to do that. You'd keep the increment function and the entries list and apply it to a screen with an open-book background. Then just set up the styles you want for the text and so forth so each character has a unique-looking journal.

If you want a page-turning animation... I guess ATL is the answer? I'm just about to start learning ATL so I can't help, but if I were trying this I'd look at older games that have a similar mechanism and see what they did. I would try to make a neutral page-turning animation that would look right no matter what the actual journal pages look like (i.e. I assume you don't want to "turn" a blank page and have paragraphs of text suddenly appear after the animation is done).

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Lucky Special Games - Locked-In - Young Earth Road Trip - The Censor (Nano 2013) WIP

Nah, I don't want the actual animations, just the sound effects with the text changing.

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