Newbie Alert - Please help me stop pulling at my hair...

[EwanG]

I keep my hair too short to pull it out, hence the title

OK, I've got the story I want to program, and the basics of the decision tree I want to follow, and I'm trying to get good enough at drawing (with a LOT of help from Manga Studio's templates) to actually do the art. Unfortunately, I spent most of my "free" money on Manga Studio, and so buying a commercial program to build my interactive story is out of range (at least until Tax Refund time next year).

Anyway, I've spent the last week looking around the web to try and find the "right" program to build with, and I've found NScripter, and Ren'Py, and even a semi-decent flash tool ("FlashDevelop"). But I can't seem to figure out which one of these I should really be using. I think part of the problem is that I can tell there will be a good bit of work in learning any one of these, and so I'm having commitment issues...

I understand this forum might be a little biased in it's recommendation, but I'm putting it out there for y'all to help me decide (or at least convince me) what to do next?

TIA,
Ewan

[dizzcity]

How complex is your storyline? Will it be a simple branching story, or are you going to use variables to track and calculate whether certain options are available? Is it linear narrative, hypertext narrative, or some other form?

What kind of visual style are you aiming for? How much customisation of the interface will you want? (Will that actually be important to your story, or is it just a generic story that can go with any sort of style?)

What other resources will you be using (movies, music, etc.), and in what formats are they encoded in?

Both BlueLemma and Yuirei did a comparison betweent the different visual novel engines available. You can find them here

-Dizzy-

[DaFool]

There's also the Blade Engine, not to mention a variety of other niche engines.

Welcome to the forums.

[bias]
By investigating Ren'Py, you've made a good choice. I'll admit its a bit overwhelming as far as learning curve goes, but unlike the other engines, almost all features you expect from a visual novel engine are already there, since it's a mature engine already.
[/bias]

The best way to learn Ren'Py is to download games to see how the engine works, and to check the references (http://www.renpy.org, wiki which is still in its infancy stage though)

[Jake]

I'll admit its a bit overwhelming as far as learning curve goes

It's an odd thing... I looked at ONScripter, and thought to myself "How can anyone sane use this to get anything done at all?". I looked at Blade, and thought "This... this is like ONScripter, with minor differences!". Ren'Py looked to me very newbie-friendly in comparison...

...but then, I'm a programmer by trade. I thought Ren'Py looked by far easiest to get to grips with for non-programmers, but I obviously have trouble getting into the non-programmer mindset, 'cause I've heard people exclaim "Why does Ren'Py expect you to understand programming?" and I didn't think it did.

Anyway, that's my opinion - ONScripter looks to me to be impenetrable, and FlashDevelop isn't really a VN engine, it's just a general programming tool that you could make a VN engine with if you really tried...

[EwanG]

Appreciate the answers so far, as well as the link to the comparison topic. While that didn't cover Flash, I'm not personally convinced that is a viable option anyway

How complex is your storyline? Will it be a simple branching story, or are you going to use variables to track and calculate whether certain options are available? Is it linear narrative, hypertext narrative, or some other form?

Semi-complex storyline. Quick answer is that it's an Americanized bishoujo, where you do have the typical "depending on who you talk to when or how you act when, certain things do or don't happen." Long answer... well, that's probably not worth wasting your time with until I'm further along

What kind of visual style are you aiming for? How much customisation of the interface will you want? (Will that actually be important to your story, or is it just a generic story that can go with any sort of style?)

While the setting will be US, the visual style will be very much in the manga vein. I think one of the things that attracted me to Anime and Japanese Visual novels is that you get beautifully detailed backgrounds, and characters that are visibly human, but stylized enough to avoid the "creep" factor that I think using photographs adds. Of course I'm a much better photographer than an artist, so I suspect I'm unconsciously also trying to make this a bit more challenging.

What other resources will you be using (movies, music, etc.), and in what formats are they encoded in?

Certainly am hoping to have some BGM. Would like to also have voices, but suspect that I'm going to blow the non-existent budget if I start trying to get voice actors. I thought about recording my own voice, and then altering it with Audacity, but am not sure that wouldn't kill a lot more time than just sticking with text and graphics. Would certainly be interested in opinions on that as well

For the mini-movies in the title, I have no problem with MPEG as I do a lot of FFMpeg work to get my home movies and such onto my Tivo.

Thanks again,
Ewan

[monele]

So far, sounds like any of the current VN engines can do what you want, really. And it's the case for almost all VN projects. What's left is the comfort provided by each.
Like Jake, I see ONScripter and Blade as very code-heavy engines. What you write is *not* human friendly. Ren'Py, on the other hand, allows you to write scripts that you could almost print and send to a friend... and they could perfectly read it and understand.
The only daunting thing is starting and knowing where to start. And that's when the community butts in and helps you out anyway ^.^.

Actually, if you think you have the time for it, try to think up a *very* simple scene containing a BGM (play and stop), a background, one displayed character, a few lines of dialogue (maybe with an expression change) and one or two simple choices leading to two branches of dialogue. Then, pick each of the possible engines you at least consider picking right now... and try to make the same thing on each of them. Compare the time it took, how easy it was, how hard it will be to do the same for a whole game... and choose the engine you're most at ease with.

[PyTom]

One question that I'd like to ask is if the story will be totally ordered in time. That is, for any two scenes, call them A and B, will A always appear before B whenever both appear in the game? Or would it be possible to have one game in which A appears before B, and a second game in which B appears before A?

Ren'Py can do both versions of the story, but if the latter is true (often), then you'll have to use something like the DSE.

One thing you might want to do is to post a short excerpt of your script... and we could show you how to turn it into Ren'Py.

[dizzcity]

Ah, sorry... I wasn't being sufficiently clear when I asked the questions, I think. The main reason why I asked those questions was to determine what sort of features you would need in a visual novel creation engine for your story. Then, we could suggest the engine that would best suit your needs. (Of course, it's very likely to be Ren'Py, but hey... )

Based on your replies, I'm guessing the short and quick answer would be just to go with Ren'Py. However, if you want a longer, more detailed explanation of the reasoning for the questions, read below:

What I was thinking about in terms of storyline structure was really more of a programming issue. In what way will the user's choices affect the story? Is it a simple "choosing of one option from a list leads to a separate path in the story" (branching story), or is it "the cumulative sum of several choices you make along the way will determine which path you take." (variable-based story - think of Good-Evil alignments in RPGs to get an idea of what this means) Is it a straightforward "this is a block of text you don't interact with, and then comes a choice" (linear narrative with menu at the end), or is it structured like Wikipedia, where there are hyperlinks scattered throughout the text that leads you to a different spot?

Different engines have different strengths in those fields. For example, Ren'Py doesn't really support hypertext fiction structures, but Flash might. Likewise, Blade has problems with variable-based stories (if I'm not wrong... they may have upgraded it by now).


Likewise, for visual style, I wasn't really asking about artistic style, but more of directorial style. (Well, actually, a little of both...) What sort of visual or movement effects do you want? Zoom, pan, flash, snowflakes, multiple ways of transitioning from one image to another, etc.? Ren'Py is best suited for that. Do you have any particular need for being able to change your colour schemes, fonts, layouts and menu styles for the interface? Basically, how customisable do you want your presentation of the story to be? (In general, Ren'Py has the most customisable features, but it's also the most complex because of that. A simple story that doesn't depend much on visual style may be created on other VN engines just fine.)


BGM is all fine and good, but be careful which format it's encoded in (eg. MIDI, OGG, MP3, etc.). Certain engines will support some formats and not others. Likewise for movies. As for voice-acting, you can quite often get volunteers from the Voice Acting Alliance community to audition for free. (Need to check with BCS for that, but I think it was free...). And yeah, generally time and effort may not be worth having the extra polish of sound effects or movies (not to mention they eat up a lot of HDD space). That all depends on the story.

In any case, good luck with it, and hope you'll have something to show us soon.

-Dizzy-

[EwanG]

OK, so obviously the first step was to get a little bit more into what story I want to tell, and how I want to tell it.

Basic setup is that you have a fellow who is in his last year of college, and starting to think about more than just graduating. He's dated casually through college, but never anything serious. Now that he's getting serious, he's starting to notice some of the women around him. This lets me have some level of variety without venturing into age groups that are US in-appropriate...

Because of the setting, I have one possible lady friend who is a classmate (Linda). But the other ladies are a waitress (Julie), a grocery store checkout girl (Becky), a drive-through lady (Carla), and in one certain path (protagonist finds that the restaurant is closed, walks by a gallery, and decides on the spur of the moment to go in), a rather interesting performance artist (Annette).

That means I need to create a background for his dorm room, a background for Linda's dorm room, a background for the apartment for each of the other ladies, a class room and a college setting background, a restaurant setting (one indoors and another outdoors in the parking lot), similar for the grocery store (at the checkout and in the parking lot), and the art gallery. For the performance artist track I also am planning an "on the roof looking over the city" background since she's a bit more experimental

Not going for the full hypertext experience - at least not for this story. I do have a more "graphic novel" idea where letting the user "explore" will be useful, but that's a bigger storyline and more work than I'm ready for yet.

Am thinking the ability to Pan, Zoom, etc will let me get more out of a few well put together graphics, and so I think that the features Ren'Py offers will definitely help there.

Anyway, hope that helps clarify - at least a bit - where I'm going.

[DaFool]

Not going for the full hypertext experience - at least not for this story. I do have a more "graphic novel" idea where letting the user "explore" will be useful, but that's a bigger storyline and more work than I'm ready for yet.

Actually the concept of user 'exploration' is very dating-sim-ish. The toolsets are there, its just going to be lighter on actual narration text and instead heavier on dialogue text, and more importantly, variables management.

So yeah, it really pays to plan out the whole structure of the story first, like drawing a diagram on paper for various paths. Then you can determine if its doable with just branches or if you'll really need to use variables.

[monele]

Unrelated to engine choice anymore but.... I like what you've described of the women ^.^. Sounds like this should be quite original despite the usual school & dating setting.

[EwanG]

Unrelated to engine choice anymore but.... I like what you've described of the women ^.^. Sounds like this should be quite original despite the usual school & dating setting.

Thank you. I figure original is half the battle (the other half is learning to draw the women so that you can tell they are women...)

[musical74]

It sounds like you've got a good idea as far as cast of characters and settings.

One thing I am curious of is if you were influenced by the *school dating sims* that are out there, or if this is something you wanted to do on your own, and just chose the traditional school setting for it.

I am NOT an artist (see my response on more usergroups) but I'm willing to help out with ideas, and if you want, I can help beta test it. About 2/3 (maybe more?) here are game developers in some fashion...I'm a game player, and can offer advice from the flip of the coin. =)

Good luck, and welcome to the forums! =)

[EwanG]

It sounds like you've got a good idea as far as cast of characters and settings.

Thanks!

One thing I am curious of is if you were influenced by the *school dating sims* that are out there, or if this is something you wanted to do on your own, and just chose the traditional school setting for it.

Obviously I've been influenced by the anime and the games I've played, so to claim originality of the setting would be rather bogus of me

On the other hand, it seemed to me that SO many of them were just variations of the "harem" concept, and didn't consider the fact that you meet people in a lot of other situations as well. So I was drawn to the idea of trying to write something that was somewhat more realistic.

I'm going to take what I've learned from the board already, take advantage of the ALICE dolls and BCS' backgrounds that were posted, and try to do the classmate path (so two endings - you get her or you don't) as an initial demo. We'll see how long that takes me