Looking for Ren'Py "Tutor"

[Lishy]

I agree that a new tutorial of some sort would be a good thing for the community to do. I've made an honest effort to go through both the quickstart and ingame tutorial, now I'm thrown at the Ren'Py Documentation and I have no idea what I need to use to make what I want to do, or even how to apply it outside the basic VN stuff covered ingame. No way I'm using the default Ren'Py "New Game", "Load Game", etc... Yet I have no idea where to apply the new information :S

Or maybe I am just a failure at programming -.-

[PyTom]

I think the majority of the problem lies in that Tom himself has never actually made a serious game with his own engine, so he has a bunch of functions that work perfectly in theory, but which are arranged in ways that are impractical when actually using it.

I think this is the basic problem with Ren'Py right now. In previous years, I collaborated on a lot of visual novels. I don't do that as much anymore, and so I'm more removed from the actual game-making process than is healthy. The problem is one of balance - the more involved with game-making I am, the less I can do with Ren'Py, given a constant amount of time. And yet, I think the pendulum is too far in one direction.

The biggest problem if that it is way too difficult to customize the UI. Virtually every single visual novel released has a custom UI. As it is now, it takes too much undocumented programming to even add buttons for "quick save," "quick load," "save," "load," "take a screenshot," "read log," "go to preferences screen," "toggle skip," "toggle auto-read" on the message box. Considering just how common they are now, it shouldn't be so hard to add them.

I think some of this is fair, and some of this isn't. Certainly, "save", "load", "take a screenshot", "go to preferences screen", "toggle skip", and "toggle auto-read" are documented right now. The rest aren't, but I'll add them to my list. At least some fraction of the problem is that the terminology of these features hasn't been standardized: What you call auto-read, I call auto-forward. That makes it hard for you to search the documentation.

For example, let's say that you take a screenshot, and you want a message alert with the words "screen shot saved at [file location]" to appear on the screen that the player can then exit out of by pressing an "OK" button. Or putting in a new scrolling bar in the preference menu that sets the transparency level of the message box. Or putting "delete," "duplicate," or ,"rename" buttons beside every save file in the save menu. These things are pretty obvious things that you might want in a visual novel, but we don't really know how to get any of it done without the programming knowhow because it's just not documented. And the worst part is that I can't really help document it because I don't know how to do it either.

With the exception of delete, which is documented, most of these run into limits of what Ren'Py can do at the moment. Some are easy to fix - it will be easy to modify the screenshot function to return where it saved the file. (Although actually presenting the filename to the user is surprisingly difficult, as the user might have directories that use characters that the font doesn't support.) Some of the others are harder - it isn't clear how I would handle setting the transparency of the message box. Certainly, that's not something we support now - and adding it would break a few fundamental assumptions, so I'd need to think about how to do it. And some are just underspecified: what does "duplicating" and "renaming" mean in terms of save slots?

I think pretty much that all the features ren'py has right now are shiny and pretty awesome compared to what we had in the past. Now the real work isn't in giving new fancy tricks that only the most programming skilled of the users can implement, but just letting the regular user use functions to just change basic things that you need in a visual novel...

While there are a few new features people have asked for, I think this is basically right - after focusing this year on improving the customizability of Ren'Py and adding a new renderer and platform, I think I need to spend a few months improving the game-making experience.

[IceD]

Lishy - not every creator has the abilities, or the time, or the talent to learn almost everything. It's impossible, so you shouldn't concern yourself with these. Instead of that, just go with everything you got and try to learn new things in meantime.

While there are a few new features people have asked for, I think this is basically right - after focusing this year on improving the customizability of Ren'Py and adding a new renderer and platform, I think I need to spend a few months improving the game-making experience.

Go for it Making such a new tutorial game together with the community would be great.

The attached Ren'Py Demo isn't bad at explaining most of the interesting things, but does it in a plain kind of way - it tells about the functions and possibilities, but doesn't tell very much about what can be done with them and how each one can be used to achieve certain in-game effects. It's also preety hard to write a documentation that is both exact and comprehensible for all people. That's why It would be nice to create a new, user-friendly kind of demo, along with fully customized engine that would show almost everything that can be found in a standard modern novel, in a fashion that would be good both for begginers and advanced users, that would like to recall or learn new things they never did. Also, if the demo would be done well, it could become a perfect public demonstration.

[DaFool]

Many new users want to customize everything to the detriment of focusing on the actual meat of the game. A custom main menu and textbox suffice in most cases (with the various sub game menus using a different theme with different colors and layouts). More themes (that look vastly different) would be nice!

A total overhaul of every preference setting might be done by those good at graphic design but I don't recommend it... I've tried Photoshopping a beautiful mockup for imagemap/imagebuttons only to discard it because the needs of the game changed as I added the core content to it. I'm now back to using a default style for speed and simplicity.

Mentioned already somewhat, the larger issue is that there are much more novices than relative experts, and those of us who've used Ren'Py for years are busy challenging the engine with our toughest/longest games yet... and they may not even be visual novels. I think it's already a feat when people in general independent gaming forums are mentioning Ren'Py along with other popular game-making tools, even while visual novels and renai remain a niche market. Once you're no longer in the realm of visual novels, you're already in the realm of python, pygame, and general programming. Even after exploring other options for most of 2009, I've come back because Ren'Py is simply the most powerful 2D non-real-time (i.e. turn-based applications) cross-platform tool there is.

I think what's needed is a tutorial game slightly more complex than The Question (with customizing bells and whistles) and doesn't have the massive info-dump the main Tutorial provides. Something like Ripples, maybe. Let the new tutorial game make use of common VN styles such as ADV and NVL, as well as a short DSE section. And provide easy code reference.

[Lishy]

To be honest, if there is a tutorial game or "sample game" RenpyTom were to make, I'd like to see it do minimum everything Yume Miru Kusuri can do. Not necessarily the graphics (or even hentai for that matter -.-), but things like the Sound Test menu, the CG menu, the quicksave features, the customized interface, splash screen+OP, etc...

All those things are a bare minimum in terms of utilizing Ren'Py to its true potential.


@IceD: Problem is, what happens when you can't learn what your goal is?

[pkt]

I've been wanting to do some coding lately and I'm no python guru or anything like that but I' wondering if I can help at all. I'm really good at explaining technical stuff to people and I understand tech stuff myself. I could do video tutorials provided I know what I'm doing first.

[Sumoslap]

ptk, I would watch every video you made, and I think there are a lot of people out there who would be grateful for videos on how to do the things in Ren'Py Lishy has listed. So now you know you'll have at least one loyal fan.

[Ivi942]

I agree that the documentations should be made more understandable to people who aren't programmers. I get a headache everytime I glance at the ui section, even though I really want to learn it...

I've been wanting to do some coding lately and I'm no python guru or anything like that but I' wondering if I can help at all. I'm really good at explaining technical stuff to people and I understand tech stuff myself. I could do video tutorials provided I know what I'm doing first.

Yes! Video tutorials, with examples of what the result actually looks like in-game! That would be perfect.