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Name: Bounce
Playtime: About 6 minutes

So, this is my inaugural game using Ren'Py. It started out as a VN project in RPG Maker 2000, since I couldn't really understand how to get Ren'Py to actually work. But, after going to the panel at Otakon (it actually worked, Pytom!), I pretty much got a good handle on what to do.

The game is actually a kinetic novel. Still, I've worked my hardest on it, and after taking months to figure out the idea (really, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing in RM2k, and then I decided I'd revive it last Saturday at Otakon), in about two days, I've made a complete kinetic novel.

Oh, and it has a moral too!

I guess this is more a way for me to get used to coding in Ren'Py and to get a game out there more than anything else. Plus the fact that it feels good to actually finish something for once. The speed at which I did complete it gives me a little more courage, I guess, for finishing not only my long project (AKTMNN), but also my long RPG project as well. ... not to mention I still have to think up more of the ideas for Snow Project (which is a RM2k3 top-down adventure game).

Still, I hope you enjoy!

EDIT (14/08/2008): Version 1.1 has been uploaded.

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Feminine pronouns, plz.
healberry.net

Wow... I like it... It's so sweet, it really says something, it's written very nicely, great pacing, music goes well with it...
it was awesome. And this is your first project too, right? I'm betting this was difficult to make, then.

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Haha, no, I didn't write it for PyTom specifically. xD

I haven't had a teacher exactly like the one in the story, but I've had teachers that are different parts of him. Like, I've had the always energetic, ready-to-help-anyone kind of teacher, but she wasn't an art teacher, and she certainly wasn't old. The speech the teacher gives is kind of based off of the speech that our main art teacher gave us at graduation. Only he wasn't retiring. He was part of the mob, we suspect, though (the little "grab by the scruff of the neck" thing). xD

I'm very glad you liked it. I kept on adding to it because I wasn't sure if I had elaborated enough on certain things. Seems that it got the pacing exactly right!

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Feminine pronouns, plz.
healberry.net

I liked a lot your story. You successfully created such an atmosphere, somehow cozy, introspective but also a very well portrayed character.

Also, your choices about music are really good. They blend marvellously well : they add their own drama and emphase the descriptions.

It seems you have quite a talent for drama scenes
I hope you'll make another game soon

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Yume no Sora blog

Let's see:

• Right-click doesn't work.
• The escape key doesn't work.
• Alt-F4 doesn't work. (Which is not really your fault, but a SDL/Ren'Py bug).
• Ctrl-alt-delete does work.

The relationship between game developer and player is one of trust. By not letting me quit the game without resorting to ctrl-alt-delete, you've violated that trust. I didn't make it far enough through the story to be able to comment on it.

(Incidentally, the reason why I right-clicked was to change the preferences. It was only after finding that this doesn't work that I decided to quit.)

(Oh, and I really hate the way the backgrounds are dimmed when the text is displayed. If you're going to make the backgrounds too dark too see, why bother having them at all? But this is more of a Ren'Py issue than a problem with this game in particular.)

@yummy: Glad you liked it!

@Wintermoon: The escape key and right-click not working are Ren'Py issues as well, because I can't disable saving without those being nixed as well. If you can tell me a way to disable saving without killing those during gameplay, I'd be happy to do a v1.1 and fix it.

As for the backgrounds, they're there to serve as their name calls them: background. I show them for about five seconds before the text goes so that the player can take in the location of the text. The text is the main focus of the game, not the backgrounds. So having them dimmed shouldn't be all that much of a problem -- at least, that's my opinion.

Also, can't you quit the game by just hitting the "X" button? There's a reason I kept it as default in windowed mode. However, as said, if you can give me a way to disable saving without disabling the in-game preferences screen, I'd be more than willing to fix it.

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Feminine pronouns, plz.
healberry.net

Of all the people coming here to check out your game / novel (that's still a unique phrase in my vocabulary), what's the odds that I'm the last person you'd expect? I hope they're long enough.

Time for some enjoyment, I guess! I'll report back here with my findings

OK, but why disable saving at all in the first place? Sure, if it's a short piece then people probably won't want to save, but that doesn't mean that taking the option away is necessarily justified, surely?

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Maybe I forgot to mention that the style is like a few visual novels I've played before that are of this length. I know I mentioned somewhere on the forums that the style is based loosely off of a short KN called Adagio that I found on insani.org. It was a simple, straight-forward game, with no saving, or anything like that. No bells or whistles -- just watercolor backgrounds and text. I felt pretty inspired by it myself, its simplicity.

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Feminine pronouns, plz.
healberry.net

You should be able to remove the save and load options from the game menu by setting 'config.game_menu' (see http://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/doc/reference/Main_and_Game_Menus#Game_Menu), although I'm not sure why you'd want to.

I always play in full-screen mode.

Great game. Oh, and really nice music.


Although there were a few really glaring grammar errors that made me want to cry because I'm such an English freak like that. But it's okay because I don't expect your 17 year old narrator to be a perfect grammar paragon.

I really liked how you established Mr. Art Teacher as a character.

It's pretty good... But the pauses become somewhat problematic because I keep pressing the space bar whenever I see the text stop and I end up skipping stuff. If this was longer, then this would have been a much bigger problem.

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@Wintermoon: I'll keep that in mind. Still, I'm kind of lost as to why such a short game would need saves. Unless, of course, you like the graduation scene and you want to start from just that, I guess.

@Dusty: ... Now you're going to make me go back and find them, because I happen to be a grammar freak too. Must've missed them on my third pass-through. Unless they're "semicolon" errors because, to be honest, semicolons are at the behest of the writer as opposed to using a period. Well, I did include a link to the site in the credits, so be my guest. <.< Also, thanks!

@Samu-kun: I actually faced that problem a little bit myself, too, ironically enough... I guess making some of the pauses shorter might make things better (like doing .8 instead of 1.2)?

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Feminine pronouns, plz.
healberry.net

It was on the first page, at the bottom, I think.

... *twitches* W-wow... That is a pretty blatant one. How could I have missed that subject number agreement? D:

*fixes and looks through to fix some more things for a v1.1*

EDIT: All right, I've fixed some of the more glaring grammatical errors, dropped the waits on the 1.2s to .8s and the 1.5s to 1s, and re-enabled saving/loading. I'm actually thinking of placing three saves in the final package: the opening, graduation, and the epilogue. Opinions?

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Feminine pronouns, plz.
healberry.net