Interested in developing a game that is heavily "Point & Click"/"Visual Novel". One centered around discovering map locations and depending on which route determines which characters, outfits, animals, etc... you have with you by the end.
LOOKING FOR ABILITY TO:
1. Select and progress through map locations that can be explored in more detail that will be revealed as the player progresses.
2. Engine that remembers locations that have been selected and choices that have been chosen as player progresses to new location.
3. Rooms or specific locations that items can be selected to provide a description (NOT NECESSARILY PICKED UP like inventory but as a result of menu choice)
4. Plenty of hover/rollover animations for buttons.
5. Visual Novel style of speech between characters and player.
RENPY CAN:
1. RenPy has Imagemaps but are limited to only 6 locations.
It seems one could us alpha transparent screen buttons to create a customized map, room, or location scenes.
2. To remember locations and dialogue requires lots of Python code rather than drag and drop system?
3. RenPy seems good for 4 and 5 from above
THOUGHTS:
It appears that Renpy would be a bit cumbersome to program multiple scenes with multiple locations with multiple items that can or cannot be selected dependent on players prior choice and how they are revealed and what the player will accumulate by the end with a ton of "true" "false" python statements. Of course phenomenal with normal VN's!
Is this what is just required to develop a game like this or are there engines more developed for more of, what I suppose is a called "Point & Click" interaction"? Something with more of a drag and drop system like modern web-development like WIX?
I would personally recommend RenPy over any drag-and-drop engine in the long run. I've tried some drag-and-drop engines in the past, and they can definitely help out with starting to wrap your head around some of the basic logic of programming. But I inevitably ended up wanting to do things outside of the basic simple functions those engines provided, and it's a much more useful and transferable skill to learn programming than to try to work around the limitations of engines that are just made for beginners to do one particular thing. Also, you're going to end up with a whole bunch of variables no matter what - it's just that a drag-and-drop engine might be creating and calculating them behind the scenes, rather than you actually dealing with a big list of them in the code yourself.
If you search through the RenPy Cookbook section of the forums, you can find a lot of helpful tutorials. This one is what I used to learn how to do imagemaps, and this other one looks good as well. Here's one for story inventory data, and here's another one that has a template of an inventory screen. If you take a look around and experiment a bit, you'll probably be able to figure it out. I'm still pretty new at programming and I struggle to understand a lot of the more complex stuff, but I got some decent point-and-click gameplay working in my own project without too much trouble.
Also, what do you mean when you say that RenPy's imagemaps are "limited to only 6 locations"? I have way more than six imagemap screens in my project.
uh, as for 6 locations I was referring to the link I posted that goes to the online documentation of imagemaps and it starts of like this:
"Imagemap Statements link
A convenient way of creating a screen, especially for those who think visually, is to create an imagemap. When creating an imagemap, the imagemap statement is used to specify up to six images. The hotspot and hotbar images are used to carve rectangular areas out of the image, and apply actions and values to those areas."
"specify up to six images" So I might have not understood that correctly but also from the demo it only showed 6 images that you could click on for choosing a location on an imagemap...
Oh, I think that might be referring to how you can have up to six different variations of your map images: ground, insensitive, idle, hover, selected_idle, and selected_hover. Basically they can change how a hotspot looks based on the situation, like the "hover" image is what your hotspots look like when the player is hovering over them but hasn't clicked. I've never heard of a limit on how many imagemaps you can make or how many hotspots they can have, which is what I thought you were saying there was. But sorry if I misunderstood!
If you're looking for a *lot* of point-and-click you might want to find an adventure gaming forum to ask in instead. Most posters here are less familiar with the engines designed for those games and the features that they have. I know that tools for them EXIST, but even I don't know the details beyond having the name "adventure game studio" pop into my head.
As I recall, RenPy struggles when you want to have clickable objects with irregular borders rather than simple rectangular buttons.
RenPy imagemaps are in most cases a terrible idea. They're easy to understand for people who are more art-oriented than code-oriented and design a whole screen at a time. However, they are extremely inflexible. If you're trying to do anything complicated, or if you change your mind about any details of your design, then they suddenly make everything much slower and harder rather than easier.
However, from your vague description it's hard to tell if you actually want point and click or if you just want a branching story with a lot of variables, like an old choose-your-own-adventure gamebook.
If you have some vague concept sketches of what you want the gameplay to look like, that might make it easier to tell what approaches could work well for you.
Imagemaps aren't the only way to make point and click stuff, there is always imagebuttons.
Unless you're on an Android device or a Raspberry Pi, just set focus_mask to True and you can use whatever irregular shape you can create.
You can also move or animate imagebuttons, which imagemaps cannot do either. And yes, you can click on them while they're moving.
Warning: May contain trace amounts of gratuitous plot.
pro·gram·mer (noun) An organism capable of converting caffeine into code.
