Horror Game Questions!

[Saica]

Hello there!

I'm pretty new to Ren'py so I'd like to ask some questions! I've searched around quite much, but I'd still like to know a few things.
Excuse my english, I'm from Sweden, so I may have some trouble...
Anyways!

1. I have the story for a Horror Game and I want a lot of it to be in Visual Novel style.
The problem is though that I would love it if I could create maps where you would be able to walk around yourself. In any way possible!
The reason, is because I think it becomes wider and more scary that way... If you can walk around the school and find things for yourself.
It doesn't have to be anything high-tech, walking around with sprites and such are fine. But yeah, if it's possible in any way please tell me!

2. The second thing, is that I would like the player to be able to take quests. In order to get payed, you have to help people with favours and such.
Since I would like this to take a pretty big part of the game, so mini-games would be awesome. Is there any way to include these in your game?
Like, mini-games made in other programs (tips on these programs too, please!), or other creative ways to create fun games.

Basically, I need some ideas for fun and creative ways to expand the game with this like these!

Hope it's not too much of a complicated question!
And if this question is in the wrong part of the forum, I apologize! ^^'

Ask me if there's something you don't understans, thank you!

Visual Novels that I've played that use these kinds of ideas: IB, Fatal Hearts

/Saica

[Yakkety]

Hi there...

For your first question, I don't believe it's possible to make such a thing with Ren'Py, instead, you will have to create the map and sprites as a stand alone version (try GameMaker for free) and then import the game file into Ren'py, also a tip, play the game Corpse Party for the PSP, it's a horror VN in the exact style as you just described, with sprites walking in a horror school...

As for your second question:



So basically, what I think because Ren'Py is a VN engine and not a game making engine, you will have to create anything such as mini-games and such, in a different game making engine, this includes quests n such...

[papillon]

Walking around is possible - look at Science Girls and several other renpy games.

But *possible* and *easy* are separate questions.

If you want lots of different kinds of minigames it is probably easier to work in something like GameMaker. That's why Fatal Hearts was a GameMaker game. It was the easiest way I could think of to splice together lots of VERY different kinds of puzzles.

You *can* do quite a lot in RenPy if you know your code (and pygame for some bits), but most people here won't even be able to give you help with it.

However, it is not possible, as far as I know, to make the minigames separately in some other engine and 'import' them into a renpy game.

[Saica]

Thanks for the answers!

Do you know how they did it in Science girls? I haven't heard of that game before! :O
And... So I can't create a map and such in game maker and import it into ren'py?

/Saica

[Showsni]

I think Gamemaker is totally incompatible with Ren'Py... I believe you could make minigmaes in Pygame and import them in; but that's about it. If you search for Pygame you can find some pretty diverse stuff, but you'd have to ask for help on a Pygame forum for help with coding there.

Actually, the creator of Science Girls has a programme that can apparently convert Gamemaker games to Pygame to run in Ren'Py (I think that's what it does, anyway...). Never tried using it, but you can check here:
http://spikycaterpillar.com/python-gm-runtime/

[papillon]

Kinda-sorta, but it's really not designed to mix bits of GM with bits of RenPy. It was designed to take a complete GM game and load it into pygame/renpy so that it would run on mac/linux. And it only works with a particular old version of Game Maker, because that's what I was using at the time I got Spiky to do my porting. For that matter, it only implements the parts of Game Maker necessary to port the particular game he was working on. And I don't think anyone other than him has ever figured out how to use it.