How did you do coding for unknown characters?

[kara24601]

In Beautiful Music , the main character already knows the other character's names because they are famous rock stars.

In my other project , the PC isn't supposed to know the other character's name until after an introduction / mention ( much like you would not always know a person but learn of somebody's name in real life ) ....I've tried to go the route others have taken and have ??? show up as the "name" but whenever I would try that...no matter how I worded it ( either 'Unknown Person' or '???' ) ...it wouldn't work.

So , I'm now at a loss as to how others pulled that off with their games.
I did a search but it didn't come up with the type of topic / subject I was looking for so apoligies if anybody has brought this up before

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$ u = Character( '???'color="#330000", what_color="#fff")

[Jake]

Personally, '???' always seemed a little fake to me, but equally so did giving characters names before they introduce themselves.

My favourite option is to have a little portrait of the speaker next to the dialogue box (or some other visual cue to link dialogue to speaker), and no names displayed at all unless they're actually in dialogue, which is hopefully the way we're going for NaNo... but I can't remember how easy that is to do in Ren'Py...

[kara24601]

Yeah , both ways are bad ,
but I'd rather have ??? show up where / when the main character
isn't supposed to know the name then it gets changed Yuki
or whatever the other character's name is , after introductions.

I currently don't have any graphics done for the game I'm thinking about where I want to use ??? so , at the moment , the "show a portrait instead of ???" is not an option plus that would be kinda weird



( but that may be a route I would take anyway once I get graphics done or somebody else helps me with the graphics...hmmm... )

[papillon]

'???' sticks out too much to me, I'm just being descriptive. If you don't know the names yet, they're Man, Tall Boy, Red Haired Boy.

[kara24601]

That's a good way to do it too. Ok , so that's two votes against ???

But...still...how to do the coding for something like that...

thanks for your posts

[sigmaxion]

Well, maybe I'm wrong, but I think you don't have to define a Character, you can use simple code like this:

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'???' "Hi, I'm an unknown guy..."

[monele]

sigmaxion is right, but if you really want to use a Character object :

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$ u = Character('???', color="#330000", what_color="#fff")

You forgot the comma after the name string.