Novelty progress update (VN maker)

[Sin]

One more question - will there be an option of directly editing a file like Ren'Py has it?
If I want to quickly add lines copy/paste blocks or something like that.
The advantage of Ren'Py is that you can edit the file with a notepad - will there be such a file in Novelty as well? Or do you always need to do it with the interface. Because with time it becomes much quicker to directly edit the script - at least for me.

Much like every WYSIWYG (actually, who thought that is a catchy acronym?!) editor of HTML also has a direct-input option, where you can see the "code".

Well, yes and no.
The "code" in Novelty is XML and looks like this:

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<Page name="Demo" uid="12">
    <Scene>
       ...
    </Scene>
    <Thread name="Whatever">
        <Action type="change_state" object="Sumomo" state="4" desc="Concerned" />
        <Action type="say" who="[$name]" phrase="&apos;Whatever!?&apos;&#x0A;&#x0A;What&apos;s that supposed to mean?" />
        <Action type="say" who="[$name]" phrase="I thought you wanted to know, like.. that is why you&apos;re here right?" />
        <Action type="change_state" object="Sumomo" state="11" desc="Very firm" />
        <Action type="say" who="[$name]" phrase="Ooh!" />
        <Action type="say" who="[$name]" phrase="I see!&#x0A;If that&apos;s really the case then it&apos;s simply my job to convince you." />
        <Action type="change_state" object="Sumomo" state="1" desc="Default" />
        <Action type="setvar" op="=" variable="Whatever" value="1" />
    </Thread>
    <Transition type="gradcross-se" time="2" rgb="1,1,1" pause="false" />
    <Action type="playbgm" name="KTG - Calm workshop" volume="0.6" loop="true" />
    <Action type="setvar" op="=" variable="name" value="Sumomo" />
    <Action type="wait" timed="true" infinite="false" time="1" skipable="false" />
    <Action type="showhide" object="Sumomo" time="1" show="true" wait="false" />
    <Action type="wait" timed="true" infinite="false" time="0.5" skipable="false" />
    <Action type="showhide" object="Border02" time="0.5" show="true" wait="true" />
    <Action type="change_state" object="Sumomo" state="9" desc="Surprised" />
    <Action type="playvocal" name="Eh?" volume="1" />
    <Action type="say" who="???" phrase="Ah!" />
    <Action type="say" who="???" phrase="We- Welcome!" />
</Page>

While you could manually edit it in theory (just open the project-file in notepad), I don't really think there's anything to gain from that. It's too clunky and thus I won't give users direct access to through in the editor. The code above would probably take less than 2 minutes to put together in the editor.

I understand what you mean and work in a similar way when I'm programming. There's a certain "flow" to the way you work and I want to replicate that in Novelty. But in Novelty you're not working with code per se, rather with self-contained "blocks" called actions/activities/events (I still haven't settled on what to call these guys :p). Of course these blocks can be copy-pasted freely and you can move them around and change their relative order.

Additionally there's a dedicated button for adding dialog (as well as a keyboard short-cut). Dialog-actions will remember character names from previous entries so you don't have to retype the name all the time. My goal from the very beginning was to be able to go in and say "I should flesh out this dialog some more" or "I don't like the way this scene plays out. I should change it" and I believe I've met that goal.

Another thing that's important to the "flow" is being able to navigate your code quickly. In programming, what I tend to do anyways, is to scan bodies of code for certian landmarks, being specific keywords or abstract "shapes" in the formatted code. I've tried to replicate this by color-coding each block based on it's archetype as well as giving them all individual icons.

I also try to minimize the amount of actions you need to perform a certain task. For instance there's are two actions: "Show object" and "Move object". They're both useful in their own respect but there's also an action called "Show object at" which does both. It's only purpose is to create a smoother experience for the author.

I'm ranting now. Obviously I've put a lot of thought into this and I always try make sure that you can work at a fast enough pace, but once the alpha is out you'll all be able to either confirm my hopes or prove me wrong. :p

[mikey]

This kind of XML is good enough for me.
I usually have a text file with the script - written line by line. So if I put
<Action type="say" who="???" phrase="
in front of each line, and append
" />
to the back of each line, the import of blocks of text should be easy.
I will be able to edit exactly who is saying what in the GUI later on, right? As well as insert graphics and all the other things.

[Sin]

That's right. If that's what you want to do then yes, it's possible.

This has come up a few times in my talks with other people and I realize there are those who prefer to write their scripts in notepad or word and then paste it into the game once the story has been written. I'm not sure whether that's a comfort-thing or some limitation in current VN-engines.

A very plausible scenario is a team of developers where one is doing all the art, another is writing the script and a third that puts it all together. How do you enable the writer to work seperately from the rest of the group?
One idea I had is some sort of plain text scripting. Where someone could write a script in a very simple format that Novelty then could take and translate into actions.
Here's an example of how such a script could look like:

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[Eric enters from the left]
[Sarah appears]

Eric: (Smiling) Hey Sarah! What's up?
Sarah: (Wave) Hi Eric. I just got here.
Have you seen Ken?

Ken: Hey guys!
(Ken runs towards the Erik and Sarah. He's stops in front of them, catching his breath)
[Ken appears]
Ken: Sorry I'm late. I missed the bus and had to ride my bike here.

While it would be fairly easy for Novelty to convert a text like this into actions, but this still doesn't come without a new set of problems.
Poorly written scripts might not give you the result you wanted. A simple typo might confuse the parser to leave out important parts of the narrative. Tracking down and fixing these errors will only add to the frustration.
The language of a script like this would have to be very limited and straight-forward and never cross into the land of actual programming, as that's goes against every principle of Novelty.
There are already scripting languages like this (Inform is one) and while they look simple on the surface, they're usually incredibly complicated under the hood.

That said, I could still see myself implementing something like this if there was a demand for it.

I should probably emphasize once again that Novelty is at it's core completely different from Ren'py. Ren'py is a scripting engine and a lot of you are used to working with text and code. Novelty throws all of that out the window in favour for a more point-and-click WYSIWYG approach. To put it frankly: if you're moving from Ren'py to Novelty, it should go without saying that you'll have to break a lot of habits.

[mikey]

This has come up a few times in my talks with other people and I realize there are those who prefer to write their scripts in notepad or word and then paste it into the game once the story has been written. I'm not sure whether that's a comfort-thing or some limitation in current VN-engines.

I write my scripts on my Palm, in a notepad and so on, it's also a matter of practicality, plus plain text makes me focus more in "writer mode" - and then when fine-tuning, it's better to be in "director mode" and see how that all goes together with the graphics and sound. Directly writing into a WYSIWYG editor is possible I guess, but at the complete peak when your mind just needs to get things down as quickly as possible, even one shortcut for a new text object is too much time lost.

To put it frankly: if you're going from Ren'py to Novelty you're going to have to break a lot of habits.

Not necessarily for me, our first 5 games were done in this multimedia tool, which was also object oriented, and I had to actually make a keystroke macro to insert texts manually into the objects - since there was no file to edit directly, much like you would want to do something like that in powerpoint. So this is really good. But of course such an approach (I call it object-oriented, don't know whether that's the right term) has its advantages and is really easy to get used to, IMO.

[Jake]

I realize there are those who prefer to write their scripts in notepad or word and then paste it into the game once the story has been written. I'm not sure whether that's a comfort-thing or some limitation in current VN-engines.

For me - speaking from the point of view of someone quite comfortable with programming - it's because when I'm writing, I want to be thinking about the writing, not anything else. So I'd rather just type away in notepad or whatever getting dialogue and narration down in whatever format's quickest, because I care about getting the story out more than coding details.

Ren'Py's actually pretty good for this, 'cause its script format - just looking at the dialogue parts - is so lightweight I can just type through it without really having to think; MorningStar and Renaissance had a similar scripting language, where dialogue was written like this:

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amy: Well, fancy meeting you here
betty: I come here all the time!

And that's more or less my requirement when it comes to editing scripts - having finished typing a line of dialogue, I shouldn't ideally have to hit more than the return key to start typing the next. Hitting tab to move between fields, even, would already be a significant annoyance. And to be honest, trying to solve this problem in a decent way was one of the things that drove my own Ren'Py-IDE project into the ground.

[Sin]

Ren'Py's actually pretty good for this, 'cause its script format - just looking at the dialogue parts - is so lightweight I can just type through it without really having to think; MorningStar and Renaissance had a similar scripting language, where dialogue was written like this:

Code: Select all

amy: Well, fancy meeting you here
betty: I come here all the time!

Yes. One of the main benefits of using a scripted approach is that writing a story involves a lot of typing anyways. Ren'py has done a good job at minimizing what you need to type, especially when it comes to dialog.

The reason why I didn't make yet another script-based VN engine is because there are a ton of baggage that comes from having to write code. That becomes more than clear to me when I read the threads on this forum where people are constantly asking for help. There's almost always a solution to their problem but the solutions are rarely obvious, at least not to someone who's not already well-versed in python.

Of course I realize that writing dialog has got to be the easiest and fastest action to perform in Novelty. Currently it requires two clicks to add another page of dialog. One to add a dialog-action and another to move focus back to the dialog text box. I'm working to remove that last click. You can also press Alt+Enter if you prefer to keep your hands on the keyboard.

[Jake]

The reason why I didn't make yet another script-based VN engine is that I believe that there are a ton of baggage that comes from having to write code. That becomes clear when I read the threads on this forum where people are constantly asking for help. There's almost always a solution to their problem but the solutions are rarely obvious, at least not to someone who's not already well-versed in python.

To be honest, I think a lot of the benefit in a GUI-based development environment isn't so much that people can't write code, it's that people don't think they can write code. A lot of people seem to refuse to even try and learn, on the grounds that it's programming therefore it must be too difficult. (And sure, some people will find it difficult, but I've seen too many people who are perfectly capable of the same kinds of tasks when they don't think of them as 'programming'.)

So yes, I think there's a lot of value in a non-script-based editing environment. I just think that the entry of dialogue into the game needs to be as streamlined and as natural to edit as possible, because that's the thing - writing, editing, etc. - that takes 99.9% of the game-maker's time.

Since I think one big reason that people edit dialogue outside of a script editor is because they want to get on with the writing and nothing else, it seems to me that it's important to let as little as possible get in the way of that writing. So, for example, if a GUI required mouse use to enter a line of dialogue I wouldn't use that GUI, because it involves moving my hands from keyboard to mouse and context-switching and not-writing when I should be writing. Keyboard shortcuts are OK, but one wonders - why require Alt-Enter, what's wrong with Enter on its own?

(As it goes: the best-guess interface I came up with when I was working on Berlinetta was to place the script actions in a grid, with the first column being the type of action (dialogue, stage-management, scene, etc.), the next being the action performer and the rest being whatever data was relevant to that action. So by default, there'd be an empty 'dialogue' action waiting at the end of the script; typing the beginning of a name into the performer column would find the name from a list of pre-defined characters, then hitting enter would select that character and move the cursor to the data column, where the user types the dialogue itself. Hitting enter in that field saves that action, creates a new empty 'dialogue' action immediately after it, and puts the cursor in the 'performer' field for that action. So typing a few lines of dialogue goes:
<type first letter or two of character name>
<enter>
<type line of dialogue>
<enter>
<type first letter or two of other character name>
<enter>
<type next line of dialogue>
<enter>
...and so on. I guess the GUI would also have to discard completely-empty dialogue lines, and have an easy option for "narration" lines, and so on, as well...)

Your description so far kind of suggests the dialogue isn't edited in-situ, but rather in a text box somewhere else or in a pop-up modal window or something - is this the case? 'Cause that sounds like another thing which would become increasingly irritating as the project grew past a couple of hundred words... :/

[Sin]

Absolutely. The dialogue is the most important part and everything else comes second.
Since my last post I've removed the need for any clicking. Alt+Enter will now add another dialogue-block, regardless of what you're currently doing elsewhere in the editor, and move the caret to the corresponding text box.
So this is how it works now:
<Alt+Enter> (Adds a dialogue-action to the page)
<Type the name of the character>
<Tab> (Shifts focus to the "phrase" text box)
<Type line of dialog>
<Alt+Enter>
(Novelty remembers the name)
<Type another line>
<Alt+Enter>
...

Keyboard shortcuts are OK, but one wonders - why require Alt-Enter, what's wrong with Enter on its own?

Because Enter on it's own is reserved for linebreaks.

Your description so far kind of suggests the dialogue isn't edited in-situ, but rather in a text box somewhere else or in a pop-up modal window or something - is this the case? 'Cause that sounds like another thing which would become increasingly irritating as the project grew past a couple of hundred words... :/

It's not a popup. There's a window labeled "Properties". It's like a hub for manually editing internal properties of pages, objects and actions. Basically, whatever you currently have selected you can edit in that window. Dialogue-actions are no exception. This window is not fixed. You can move it to any part of the workspace, have it docked or floating. Whatever is most comfortable for you.

I understand your fear that it could be annoying having to always track "that darned textbox" between entering every line of dialogue but this is simply not the case.
As of now you don't have to find and click on it to start typing your lines, as I mentioned above.
Aside from that, you're forgetting about the WYSIWYG-part. As you're typing your lines, the main view is updating and showing you the text as it will appear in the actual game with the actual font. The activities-window (seen in the screenshot a couple of posts ago) is automatically updated as well.

Novelty gives you instant visual feedback for everything you do.
When I write dialogue, I'm not looking at the little text-box in the properties window. I'm looking at the game.
This is what I mean about breaking old habits.

[Jake]

Keyboard shortcuts are OK, but one wonders - why require Alt-Enter, what's wrong with Enter on its own?

Because Enter on it's own is reserved for linebreaks.

Would it be possible to make it a configurable option? I'm just thinking that with all the VNs I've worked on, new lines of dialogue have been more common than line breaks by a couple of orders of magnitude, so it would make a lot more sense in those cases for it to be linebreaks which required the extra keypress.

(An example of this is IRC clients, which also deal more frequently in lines-of-dialogue than multi-lines-of-dialogue. Every IRC client I've seen has some special out-of-the-way feature to add linebreaks, but hitting enter will finish the current dialogue-action (send it to the IRC server) and start a new one.)

I wonder whether the people who like NVL mode (I've never understood the appeal at all, myself, but some people seem to love it...) might prefer to insert line breaks more often, but I think they'd probably be the only ones.

There's a window labeled "Properties". ... Dialogue-actions are no exception.

I understand your fear that it could be annoying having to always track "that darned textbox" between entering every line of dialogue but this is simply not the case.

Being a Visual Studio user, I can recognise that kind of editing paradigm.

Anyway - my fear isn't only that it could be annoying to have to track between adding the line of dialogue in one place and a text box in another place. I mean, I do think that would be annoying, wherever you allow the properties window to be placed, but consider this other case: I've typed three lines of dialogue with the keyboard, and I notice that I've made an error on the first one. In notepad, SciTE, or any other text-oriented editor, I can hit the 'up' arrow twice to move to that line, or just click on the error with the mouse and backspace it out, in a minimal number of interactions, and without moving my hands from the keyboard if I don't want to.

From what you're saying, it sounds like in Novelty this would involve many more control-interactions and more eye-focus movements to perform the same relatively simple and common editing operation.

Aside from that, you're forgetting about the WYSIWYG-part. As you're typing your lines, the main view is updating and showing you the text as it will appear in the actual game with the actual font. The activities-window (seen in the screenshot a couple of posts ago) is automatically updated as well.
...
When I write dialogue, I'm not looking at the little text-box in the properties window. I'm looking at the game.
This is what I mean about breaking old habits.

I'm not forgetting about the WYSIWIG part, I'm thinking that it's irrelevant to the task at hand. It's nice that the main view is updating and showing you what it'll look like in-game. It's technically impressive, and I'm sure it'll be really useful when editing graphical elements, but fundamentally text is text, and the most important part of editing text can be done on a bit of paper with a pencil or in notepad or in SciTE or in a textbox on a WinForms app in 10-point Arial equally well. It comes back to the same statement - when I'm writing prose, I care about writing prose, I don't care at all about coding or graphics or anything like that.

Not to mention that even if I do get used to writing prose the Novelty way, it's a separate mode of working that can't be transferred over to other apps or other purposes, so it's a very specialised skill. On the other hand, editing with a script-based editor is transferrable to more or less any other prose-writing activity; I don't have to learn a new typing skill or habit to effectively write prose into Ren'Py or Blade or MorningStar any more than I have to learn a new typing skill or habit to write poetry into Word. So it's not really reasonable to say that Ren'Py users will be breaking old habits - the way you describe it, anyone who has typed script/prose in any text editor for any length of time will be having to break old habits.



Don't get me wrong - I think it's a wonderful project and I'm eager to see it released, I hope it'll result in a new set of people making VNs who were previously too scared of the coding aspect. But I'm worried that you're not thinking enough about the text-editing aspect and that it'll start to get very tedious to enter text in this particular manner after the first couple of thousand words.

[Sin]

No worries. I get you. I'm nerd enough to really appreciate these kind of exchanges.

As, what I gather, a serious writer your opinions are valuable to me. I'm not a writer, but I try to make educated decisions in every aspect of my design. Experienced input helps me make better decisions. It's a bit too late to make any major design changes now but once the alpha is out and you can all try it for yourselves we can work together to iron out the wrinkles.

As for making Alt+Enter an option, sure.

[Nuke_Bloodaxe]

Hi there,
I'll just quickly chime in a moment. The discussion on the scripting is true, but one of the things that I do believe that should be noted is that not everyone is a scripter. The approach Novelty takes allows those people to put together their work with the minimum of fuss, as well as being quite usable by children.

Jake: The biggest problem I see out there right now is that all of the engines are simply inaccessible, to a large proportion of the population, due to the usage of scripting languages. Do not lose perspective that once a coder, always a coder, your experience colours your outlook on many matters [ this is not a put down, just a psychological factor, I've spent 3 years training myself out of it ]. Novelty appears to be the only fresh approach to the problem I have ever seen, and with its usability not requiring a huge amount of training, I see a great future for it.

As for breaking habits, that is good, it requires people to think about what they are writing. Plus with all the dialogue being modular chunks, this is really no different from paragraph writing. But if it is a problem, copy and paste from whatever editor you like.

Just for the record, I've compiled and tried out the in development versions of Novelty, and I find it far, far better to use than script based systems. From a usability point of view, it blows everything out of the water along with the rest of the ocean.

[Sin]

I have come up with what I think is a good solution for Jake's worries. It involves a seperate tool for writing the script in a word processor-like manner. You will be able to move back and forth between the main editor and the seperate tool since none of the non-dialogue XML will be affected.

It's not a replacement for the Novelty editor, but a supplement for those who prefer to "just type". It's not a tool for programming (not that kind of script). It's strictly for writing large bodies of story and dialogue.

PS. Thanks Nuke. :p

[Jake]

Do not lose perspective that once a coder, always a coder, your experience colours your outlook on many matters

Except... I'm not talking about the perspective of a coder, I'm talking about the perspective of a writer. I've been writing prose longer than I've been writing code.

(And please, one of the things I think is best about this whole project is the accessibility for non-coders. I'm well aware that there's a large proportion of the population who are put off of things like Ren'Py because it looks too much like programming; if you look back over my posting history, I've been waving that banner pretty much since I joined this forum. ;P)

As for breaking habits, that is good, it requires people to think about what they are writing.

Huh. I'm not sure you're getting the point.

If you were talking about writing habits, I'd kind of agree. It's good to not fall into a rut and only write one particular kind of prose from one particular perspective; mixing it up and trying something new every now and again makes you think more about which bits of structure are there for necessity and which bits are there out of habit, which is fine.

But we're not talking about writing habits, really, we're talking about typing habits. Consider this analogy: programming languages X and Y and Z require that you put a semicolon on the end of each statement and enclose blocks in curly braces and type variables before you use them. Language A comes along and requires you enclose blocks in curly braces and type variables before you use them but requires not a semicolon on the end of each statement, but a special unicode end-of-statement symbol which requires holding alt and typing a four-digit code to enter. Maybe A has some really nice libraries available, or some great language sugars or something which make it an attractive option. It's hard for X, Y and Z programmers to use A, because they keep habitually typing semicolons. (For bonus points, maybe the IDE implements its own clipboard which doesn't support unicode...)

It's not the greatest analogy, of course, but hopefully a programmer should realise how thoroughly annoying it would be to have to use some other complicated-to-type symbol instead of a simple and habitual semicolon. Typing free text isn't a trait of scripting languages, it's a trait of prose, it's just convenient that scripting languages allow people to type in a very similar manner to prose typing.

Plus with all the dialogue being modular chunks, this is really no different from paragraph writing. But if it is a problem, copy and paste from whatever editor you like.

This kind of comment makes me wonder if you've ever done any serious writing. I mean, writing things longer than one or two thousand words. Pasting in a short bit of script in front of each line of dialogue would be a lot less hassle than pasting the entire ten-thousand-word script in a line at a time, switching between two applications for each line.

And this is the thing that I was most worried about when I first read how dialogue was being entered in Novelty - that the people who were designing/testing this interface didn't seem to have actually tried to write anything of any length in it. Usability of interface concerns change quite drastically depending on how frequently the user is expected to be performing particular tasks.


Still, I'll look forward to giving it a go - maybe it's less hassle than I'm imagining, or maybe Sin's separate-script-editing-tool idea (which sounds promising!) will ease it enough. Like I said before, this particular problem is the one which more or less made me give up on writing a graphical IDE to create Ren'Py scripts, so it's something I've both thought a lot about but also can't really think of any entirely-sufficient solutions to.

[Sin]

I just want to say that I take interface design very seriously. Programmers generally don't think about usability. Especially not hobbyists like myself, most of whom write programs only for themselves or people identical to themselves. The rest are politely asked to figure it out on their own.

When I said people will have to break habits, I didn't mean that in an arrogant way. What I meant was that Novelty is completely different from Ren'py in every respect. Just the fact that there's primarily no programming in Novelty will come as a HUGE change for anyone who's already accustomed with Ren'py.

Each engine employ completely different paradigms. The best analogy I can come up with are cruisers and airplanes. They both get you from A to B, but the experience is different.

Btw, you will most likely don't see the writer tool until after the alpha release, as that's my priority now.

[BigFish]

From what I've heard, Novelty's system for writing will not hinder the speed or experience of making a visual novel. Pressing Alt-Enter to advance to the next text box is not very hard to do, except that some people might freak out since Alt-Enter is usually used for fullscreen toggle. Again, this should probably be a configurable setting.

The only thing I'm worried about is changing the character name on the textbox. To change the character, do I have to press tab, enter their name, and then press tab again to get to editing the text again? While this is not much of a hassle, for visual novels where the characters have long names this could be a problem. Maybe a keyboard shortcut system for character names? Like, shift+b for "Bob" or something like that.

And lastly, something else I'm wondering is, at some point will Novelty have built-in support for moving character mouths during text typing (like Phoenix Wright)? Obviously, advanced stuff like this probably won't be in the alpha, but one of the main thing that has driven me nuts with visual novel engines is lack of this feature. (.....also, I couldn't help but notice you used a Phoenix Wright sprite in some the screenshots )