How do you name your labels and handle branching paths?

[phoenix-onyx]

This is more of a Ren'Py design question than a technical one. Do you have a certain schema, strategy, or philosophy for naming your labels?

I was wondering if there is a best practice I can follow to implement branching in an organized fashion.

What I am trying to do, in a nutshell, is include optional events that the player can choose at certain points in the story. If he or she doesn't choose anything, a default option/path is followed. These scenes should add points/unlock flags for relationships and skills the player can develop throughout the story...which will ultimately affect what options are available later.

What are your thoughts on this? Also, thank you for reading this - I greatly appreciate your time.

[isobellesophia]

This is more of a Ren'Py design question than a technical one. Do you have a certain schema, strategy, or philosophy for naming your labels?

I was wondering if there is a best practice I can follow to implement branching in an organized fashion.

What I am trying to do, in a nutshell, is include optional events that the player can choose at certain points in the story. If he or she doesn't choose anything, a default option/path is followed. These scenes should add points/unlock flags for relationships and skills the player can develop throughout the story...which will ultimately affect what options are available later.

What are your thoughts on this? Also, thank you for reading this - I greatly appreciate your time.

That is rare in some games in Ren'py, you should probably take a look at this sites.

https://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/doc/tu ... er_Choices
viewtopic.php?t=22817
https://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/doc/tu ... _the_Story

Hope it helps to you.

[xavimat]

- Naming labels. Maybe everyone has a different way of organizing things. This question is like "how do you organize your wardrobe", you have total freedom here, only avoid two labels with the same name. A simple advice: better if label names are meaningful enough for you, and not short names with acrostics impossible to remember. Think about it at the beginning of your work.
You can also use local labels (https://renpy.org/doc/html/label.html#label-statement). But I find it more confusing than useful. I prefer to write every time the full name of the label (Sublimetext or Atom complete it for me, anyway), than using local names and not remembering what the global was.

- Branching and giving points. A complex VN (even a not so complex one) can be very tricky with this. Think very well what points your game gives and when. It's easy to end a route and miss a point in a sub-sub-sub-branch so some endings could be unreachable.
I usually make a diagram with points possibilities (with an actual pencil and a sheet of paper, I'm so Paleolithic, I know), imagining different options in the menus and different routes and endings to ensure that every ending is reachable.