Fresh dev, artist first

[Ahooo]

Hello! I'm making a small intro post of sorts just to test the waters of how things go around here. I'm Ahoo, working on two games at the moment, and it's a lot tougher than I remember.

Numbers and math always escaped me growing up, so watching tutorials has helped me a lot (until I got sick which is why I'm currently up at 6am from sleeping too much) and HOPEFULLY I'll get to working again soon!! I've always wanted to make a visual novel, I'm lucky I have a couple friends who have volunteered their time to help me, but MANN after talking to one friend I'm gonna have to get me a coder <__>""

Typically I draw every other day if not every day, make up stories or fan works etc etc, so my learning curve for code has been super wonked. Any other artists around that have had a hard time getting the hang of it at first?

[rook17]

Welcome!

A few very general pointers:

• Save lots! Save different versions. You'll make mistakes and sometimes rolling back takes far less time than fixing things.
• When something isn't working, find the last thing that worked and change one thing at a time, carefully and slowly until it breaks again. The hardest part of debugging is finding what actually isn't working and it will sometimes not be what you think.
• Don't try to do everything at once. When you think of ideas as you go, add them to your to-do list, don't get distracted. Just focus on adding text. Or adding scene transitions. Or adding effects. But just one of those things. Then stop, take a deep breath, and then start something else.

When coding you are your own worst enemy. That doesn't change as you get more experienced -- you just learn how to outwit yourself

[Mutive]

[*] Don't try to do everything at once. When you think of ideas as you go, add them to your to-do list, don't get distracted. Just focus on adding text. Or adding scene transitions. Or adding effects. But just one of those things. Then stop, take a deep breath, and then start something else.[/list]

When coding you are your own worst enemy. That doesn't change as you get more experienced -- you just learn how to outwit yourself

I want to echo this. Do something simple. Test it to see if it works. If it does, go back and add more.

I don't think anyone is capable of creating a huge block of perfect code. But doing something like, say, a single animation is rarely difficult.

I also tend to have completely separate files for testing out new code. (e.g. if I want to fiddle with a character builder, I'll create a new file and tinker with how to make it work there before I copy and paste the code into the game I want to use it in.) Sometimes I'll even create games to try out something I haven't 100% figured out how to do well yet. (Because it's a lot less frustrating to figure out just how to create a point and click adventure than it is to create a point and click adventure with an inventory system, battle engine, tile set map, etc.)

[VimislikArt]

I'm in the same boat

Honestly, if you're using Ren'py as intended, it's pretty manageable; everyone here has the right idea with breaking your code into chunks, and constantly testing your code. I'd add it's a good idea to arrange your code and ## comment on it a lot so it's easy for you to read and understand it later, when you may have to do some extra work on it.

The tough part is that once you want to be "creative", and do stuff that's outside of the standard toolset, you are gonna mess up a LOT, and it is SUCH a different mindset you have to get yourself into to fix buggy code and patch problems that crop up.

The WORST part is when you start to enjoy programming. It's a thrill ride of emotions without a safety harness. I hate it and I can't stop doing it.

[akhayashiii]

I'm an artist trying to do VNs too and I agree with everyone here, but I also want to say: have a test project where you can test all the tutorials and crazy ideas you have before implementing them in your real game. You'll feel less anxious about breaking a test project that can be dumped than breaking your beloved project.

Besides that, I recommend start with coding simple stuff like dialogues and choice menus (you can study the code that comes in RenPy's example project for that), before you jump into more complex things. Reading RenPy's documentation also helped me a lot when I was just starting, and it still saves my life more often than not.

Coding seems daunting at first but once you understand how RenPy works, it becomes very fun and intuitive!

[Aviala]

I started out with an art background (drawing as a hobby since I was a kind, then went to an art-focused high school, etc) but it's surprisingly fast to get to a point where you can make a visual novel with Renpy. I think the difficulty level of your project depends on what you want out of it A LOT. If you just want to make a visual novel, you can learn the basic skills (how to code the character sprites, choice menus, etc) in a couple of weeks. But if you want to make something more complicated, like minigames, learning the skills needed may take years. So I'd suggest starting with just a simple visual novel, and along the way you can learn some extra skills other than just the very basics, for example using the Animation and Transformation language to make simple animations, etc. You can also get surprisingly far just by learning how to use variables and lists in Python!