cwispydev - Tumblr blog

[cwispydev]

11/01/2022

Long time no post. This time, I have a valid excuse. That is: the holidays. I spent it with insufferable family members and with my very wonderful very special friend.

I've not really done a lot of stuff with the game that I needed to update you guys with. Really, I've just been writing and doing the same shit I've already written about.

Right now, though, I wanted to update you guys about making a custom GUI! I've been practicing with a different game, not the one I'm currently working on.

I've only really customized the preferences/settings page. All of the stuff I'm about to say is literally super basic shit and stuff you can find in the cookbook but, if you wanna stick to it and keep reading, power to you!

So, first off, most of the GUI stuff you need to edit is going to be in the GUI folder of your game.

First thing I edited was the window_icon. That's the icon of the game and it's what appears in the bottom bar of the computer. I think it also appears in the corner of the window?

The bar folder holds the bottom, top, left and right bar images. Those (I think? because I ended up not touching it at all) are for when you're doing the VN version of Ren'py? Where it's just a huge block of text?

Next is the button folder. The check and radio buttons are gunna be the things that get ticked off next to the display and skip options. For me, I did the outline of a star and then a filled in star. The check button is the one that appears for the skip buttons and then the radio buttons are the ones that appear next to the display.

The difference is that you can select multiple of the check buttons but you can only select one for the radio buttons.

Next are the choice buttons. Self explanatory. If you don't change the options in the gui.rpy then they might squish it. just make sure to change the choice button width and height. If your text isn't centered, change the border.

The (quick_)hover_background and (quick_)idle_background are for all the other buttons. They'll appear behind text buttons like the start, load, preferences, quit, etc. buttons. I didn't touch those either since I was going to practice making image buttons.

The slot images are for load and save functions. You can customize those by searching slot in the gui.rpy file. All of those are self-explanatory. If you need to squish the text (the one that says like the date and time and stuff), you just need to add a button_text_xmaximum. You can't squish it too much but you can at least squish it enough to be able to put a border if you need to. Here's a comparison that shows what I mean by border.

Overlay folder holds the main menu and game menu backgrounds. It also holds the confirm background. I was going to mess with that later so I'll have a post about that. But it's basically the background that appears behind the confirm text box when you try to quit.

I want to mess with the phone folder also? But that's absolutely hectic and complicated and I don't want to deal with that. But, basically, it's the GUI for the mobile game.

Scrollbar is really only used in the history page for when people need to scroll up and down. For me, the image I wanted to use was square so I had to make it so that the scrollbar tiled. Not tiling it will have the game stretch it out. If you search scroll in the gui.rpy, you'll find the options pretty easily. I tried to make move the scrollbar but didn't have any luck. The rest of the options are pretty much self explanatory.

Slider folder is for the sliders. These are used for the volumes and stuff. The options for these are self explanatory as well.

That's pretty much all I've done! Have fun customizing your menus! I'll update with more stuff later!

[cwispydev]

28/11/2022 NaNoRenMo word count: 10,255

Long time, no write! Hey, at least I accomplished a lot since you last heard from me.

Most of those things was just a lot of the writing. As you can see, I've pretty much doubled the word count since my last post. That's the biggest reason I haven't updated really.

I don't want to talk much about the different stuff I've been writing. I just wanna focus on my code.

The reason I finally decided to update here is becos I figured some coding stuff out that had me asking not one but two people for help for and it took us like two days to figure the bullshit out.

In fairness to the people I asked for help from, though; they didn't know anything about Ren'py or how to code visual novels. But, they code other things so I thought might as well.

So, the first easier thing I figured out was how to do a blink animation for when you want to do a first person point-of-view blink. Basically, I used this topic but, instead, I added more stuff and made it more complicated LOL.

My reply is that last one by nyeowmi so you can just read that. I also included like the images I used and stuff! Nice!

Here's what it looks like.

The second thing that I had the hardest time figuring out was the layered image stuff for character images.

I don't know if it's just becos I'm the worst researcher known to man but there was literally no documentation for the layered image that my two brain cells could understand?

The easiest one was the guide by BáiYù where they make a whole game out of it. Unfortunately, as of Ren'py 8.0.3, the game doesn't play anymore.

At least, not for me. It says something along the lines of 'file' not defined? I'm not sure but, in the comments of their itch.io, someone also had the same problem and BáiYù said they'd figure it out as soon as they could.

So, maybe, this journey will be much easier for you, dear reader in the future, than I, a poor unfortunate soul.

Either way, I couldn't figure out the layered image thing through the tutorial. BáiYù suggested just getting familiar with the layered images through browsing the code of the game (which you can access, even if the game doesn't work).

However, I'm illiterate when it comes to reading code so none of it made a lick of sense to me. Honestly, that one's truly on me becos, unfortunately yet again, Ren'py's coding language (or rather, whatever you use to code Ren'py) is like the only coding language I know well enough to recognize some of.

Anyway, I tried it out despite not knowing what the hell I was doing.

I renamed all my images the same exact way you're supposed to when you use layered images. Which is, of course:

[charactername]_[facepart]_[emotion].png

I also stored all of the files in like a lot of folders. The file path looked something like:

images/felix/[emotion]/[imagefile].png

Anyway, I think that was my downfall. I don't know if it truly is? But I did browse through some of the LemmaSoft forums and some people mentioned that nested images (images stored in folder after folder instead of just in the images folder) got fucked up and it didn't work properly.

That being the exact problem or not didn't matter becos my character image just wouldn't work. I don't remember what exactly was the errors I was getting at this point but I know like some of the parts wouldn't come up or the game just wasn't able to find the files, etc, etc.

Another problem that I was trying to figure out at the same time was how to make the character speak while their character sprite was showing.

I saw a forum post by zmook (not linked becos I absolutely can't find it) where they were directed to the Ren'py cookbook where it wrote about the config.speaking_attribute.

Basically, it's an attribute that gets shown when the character is talking and then stops getting shown when the character stops talking.

Then, in another forum post, zmook asks about the speaking attribute being combined with the layered image stuff.

However, at this point, despite knowing all of this stuff, I was still struggling with getting the image to show properly at all, much less having it show up speaking and then not speaking.

Did I stop and try to figure out the basics first before trying to figure out the talking? Absolutely not.

So, I continued seeking out knowledge. Eventually, I figured out that you have to animate the mouth using Ren'py and not a gif. I figured that out through this post by Argent Games.

I tried coding my character image exactly like that but, unlike that, my character had a lot of expressions and my code ended up looking cluttered while still not working completely.

At this point, what was happening was that everything was showing up properly except the mouth.

In the end, my special friend's brother cleaned up the code for me. It was honestly trial and error at that point where we all didn't know what we were doing, we were just moving stuff around.

My code ended up being something along the lines of:

default felixemote = "smile"

image felixmouth: "images/felix/[felixemote]/felix_mouth_[felixemote].png" 0.2 "images/felix/[felixemote]/felix_mouth_[felixemote]_half.png" 0.2 "images/felix/[felixemote]/felix_mouth[felixemote]_open.png" 0.2 "images/felix/[felixemote]/felix_mouth[felixemote]_half.png" 0.2 repeat

group mouth if_any "speaking" auto: attribute smile default: "felixmouth"

group mouth if_not "speaking" auto: attribute smile default: "felix_mouth_smile"

That code has like a lot of code in between but that's pretty much the gist of it all. After we did that for the mouth and then exactly like what we're supposed to for the rest (basically copied from the layered image documentation from the Ren'py cookbook).

It worked! Of course, it didn't follow the words exactly? The character would just keep speaking even if the words were completely loaded.

However, a victory is a victory and, becos I'm not even gunna think about the voice acting yet, I don't care. I was so tired and annoyed by this entire thing that I just figured this is good enough.

Then, of course, when I went and stress tested the code (as in, showing off the characters numerous expressions), nothing happened.

The expressions didn't change. That was when I screamed and then screamed and then rewrote my code.

This time, I removed all of the auto stuff on the layered image codes. Instead of just having the layered images going through all of my images, I would just force feed it my images.

So, I declared each image with a specific file path that had variables in it I could change based on what emotion I wanted them to display.

For example, instead of just letting layered images figure out what eyebrows I wanted, I wrote out:

image felixeyebrows: "images/felix/[felixeyemotebrow]/felix_eyebrows_[felixeyemotebrow].png"

I did that for the base, for blush (except that one was just blush and a blank png named noblush), glasses (same as blush), the closed version of the mouth, etc.

For the eyes, I wanted to have a blinking animation so I declared the image like this instead:

image felixeyes: "images/felix/[felixeyemote]/felix_eyes_[felixeyemote].png" choice: #choice is so that ren'py can randomly choose between the three cus blinking tends to be random and not in the same intervals 4.5 choice: 4.5 choice: 4.5 "images/felix/felix_eyes_closed.png"

I specifically made all of the variables different so that I could control each variable to be different. Like, for example, if I wanted the angry eyebrows but the sad mouth.

My variables ended up being the following:

default felixemote = "smile" #this is to control the mouth default felixeyemote = "smile" #this is to control the eyes default felixeyemotebrow = "smile" #this is to control the eyebrows default felixbased = "regular01" #this is to control the body/base default felixblushed = "noblush" #this is to control the blush default felix_glasses = True #this is to control the glasses

The glasses variable is different becos the code for that one ended up being:

if felix_glasses: "images/felix/felix_glasses_glasses.png" else: "images/felix/felix_glasses_noglasses.png"

The full layered image code ended up looking exactly like this:

layeredimage felix: zoom 0.85 #i needed to do this becos my character images weren't the right size group base: attribute regular01 default: "felixbase" group blush: attribute noblush default: "felixblush" group eyes: attribute smile default: "felixeyes" group eyebrows: attribute smile default: "felixeyebrows" group mouth if_any "speaking" auto: attribute smile default: "felixmouth" group mouth if_not "speaking" auto: attribute smile default: "felixmouthstop" #remember that this should be a declared image with the file path but the variables should be the same as the variables you use with the file path in the speaking animation if felix_glasses: "images/felix/felix_glasses_glasses.png" else: "images/felix/felix_glasses_noglasses.png"

Convoluted? Pretty much.

Each of the images underneath each attribute is it's own declared image with the variable-riddled image paths.

I've already tested it and it works, both fortunately and unfortunately.

I'll put some example gifs down below so that you can see it in action. I'll also put a screenshot of the script where I call all of that stuff so you can see what that looks like too.

I tried to show off the fact that the dialogue would stop loading but they'd continue talking and the fact that you can interrupt mid open mouth and they'd still transition to the closed mouth.

Thank god this long ass post is finally fucking done. Thanks for sticking with me til the end and hopefully this helps making your game a little bit easier.

If you have any questions about this at all, send me a message on discord at nyeowmi#6969 or send an anon/ask here on tumblr! I'll do my best to help

[cwispydev]

if you have any questions about any of the stuff i post, send me a message on discord at nyeowmi#6969 or send an anon/ask here on tumblr!

disclaimer:

none of my code is like indented properly cus i literally write it in the tumblr editor so proceed with caution! if you wanted me to do a pastebin of one of my codes, let me know!

currently working on:

@never-ending-love-vn

★ my linktr.ee

[cwispydev]

15/11/2022 NaNoRenMo word count: 5,408

GOD, I was writing this stupid update and Tumblr deleted the whole damn thing when I pressed Ctrl + Z and honestly? This website is the bane of my existence.

Tumblr is so fucking lucky that it's the easiest way to keep up a stupid fucking blog.

Anyway, I was just writing about updates. I was unable to update for a few days just becos I've been focusing a lot on the writing of the game and becos I got a little bit sick.

Focusing a lot on the writing meant that there's not really a lot of cool coding comments I can share with ya'll since I want to avoid giving spoilers for the game. And then, being sick of course meant that updates have been slow and I wanted to avoid being stressed so I avoided any coding stuff that would give me even the slightest bit of trouble.

I ended up being pretty impressed by my solution for a random hint generator though so I'll tell ya'll how I ended up coding that for the game.

First things first, what I wanted to achieve was a random hint generator that would give you hints on how to achieve certain endings in the game (though it might not be applicable to the demo). I wanted it to show every hint at least once before repeating. I also wanted it to avoid giving you any hints if you've achieved all of the endings already.

I based a lot of the code I used on xavimat's answer on this LemmaSoft forum post about a random conversation generator. I ended up doing the if/elif/else statement solution that he suggested.

However, like I said before, I wanted the generator to show each hint at least once before repeating any of them. That was a bit harder to figure out.

I did a whole thing where I put a variable (something like viewedhintone = True) every single time you viewed hint one, two, three and so on. So, if the variable was true, it would jump back to the random integer generator and get another integer that, hopefully, would lead to a hint you hadn't viewed yet.

Unfortunately, this gave me a problem. Once all of the hint variables were true, it gave you an infinite loop becos there was no way for the variables to turn false. I thought I had solved this by setting the else for the statement as just viewedhintone = False, viewedhinttwo = False, etc.

That wasn't the case. It ended up not helping at all becos the random integer generator would always spit out an integer so there was no way for it to get to the else statement.

Instead, my special friend had to help me solve it. Basically, for the if statement, you have to set it as if viewedhintone == True and viewedhinttwo == True and etc. so that it checks for that first. You have to set the if statement to check if all your viewed hint variables are true, basically.

Then, if all of them are true, just make them all false and then jump back to the random integer generator so you can view all of the hints all over again.

Also, make sure to have the viewed hint variables set to persistent so that they stay the same even if the player starts a new game.

Another update that I'm pretty happy about is that I started a Trello board and I really like it. I can be really scatterbrained sometimes so having something to put all of my thoughts onto really helps a lot.

I added a list or post or something on there for later on, when people start testing the demo. It's a place they can put comments and stuff about the demo or any bugs they encounter.

I'm not sure if rando people can comment on it or if I have to add them or whatever so we'll see. Hopefully, rando people can comment on it and, if not, I'll figure it out when I get to that problem.

The next challenge I'll need to start looking for? Or, rather, researching about? I don't know, but I need to figure out a calendar system for the game.

It needs to achieve these certain things:

allow player to decide what to do for the next month

show whether or not there's any special events happening

have a random generator to decide what the other characters are up to and then show that

I've been avoiding it becos it's a little bit intimidating. However, now that I'm thinking about it, I think it'll be just as simple as when I figured out how to create a gallery for Ren'py.

I'll just basically have to make a custom menu/screen that I can call up and stuff whenever I want.

Still not looking forward to it, though.

In any case, I'm excited to just finally finish everything, show off the demo and work on the calendar. I'm trying to think of what I'll keep in the demo but, hopefully, it won't be too much so that I can publish the demo by the end of November.

Speaking of November! I'm like so utterly embarrassed! I found out that NaNoRenO is actually during March and I confused it for NaNoWriMo which is in November.

Either way, I needed something to challenge myself so here I am. Doesn't matter if it's an official challenge or not, I just wanted an excuse to churn something out.

I'll update you if anything else happens! Thanks for reading, I guess?

[cwispydev]

08/11/2022 18:39pm NaNoRenMo word count: 3,158

So, another update has come! Unfortunately, the amount of words in the dialogue of the game hasn't increased since I've only been messing with the game's code. However, there's still some updates!

Right now, I've kind of just been fiddling with the name input so that the player can put in their name. I've also spoken a lot to the artist doing the sprites so we're making progress with that too! I've also done a little tentative main menu for the game.

The naming input stuff hasn't been difficult at all.

I didn't want the player to type into the dialogue box though. I wanted a separate window to come up. Some of the LemmaSoft forums stated that I can basically steal the exit confirmation window for that but I didn't know how and I had to look a bit harder to find any instruction for that.

I ended up finding an old tutorial from EmcL_ on reddit where they posted the code for the screen as well as how to call up the screen in your script code! That was pretty helpful!

I also wanted to do like a weird creepy thing where the game would recognize you if you input the same name twice and I didn't know how to do that either so I needed to research a bit more.

I got the idea from 14 Days With You where, in the demo, the game mentions something like 'Oh, it's nice to see you again, angel.' and it sent a chill down my spine so I wanted to do something similar.

I peeked a little into the code but didn't find my answer there. In 14 Days With You, the script is written so that, if you finish the game, there's a persistent variable that marks that you finished the game. Then, in the script, they do an if/else statement to be able to say the phrase or a different phrase if you haven't finished the demo.

That's like an absolute perfect and reasonable way to deal with this. Unfortunately, I'm too much of an idiot and I want to make it more complicated for myself.

My first thought, of course, was to do like a persistent variable thing like 14 Days With You did (except a string containing the name instead of a true/false depending on if you finished the demo). The player would just input the name and it would be placed as a persistent variable so the game would remember the name.

However, I quickly realized two things:

You can't just put persistent.(insert variable name here) everywhere

The game wouldn't be able to store multiple names so I was worried that, if you played the game and then replayed it again, the game would replace the variable with the new name

There also isn't a lot of documentation about persistent variables as like strings? All of the documentation I found had like true/false persistent variables that you could use to flag if someone's finished an ending or if someone's seen a gallery.

I don't know, maybe I'm just that shitty of a researcher but I ended up just posting a thing on the LemmaSoft forums where I asked about how to use persistent variables when it comes to player character names.

I specifically asked if I was able to code the game so that, if a player enters the same name, the game is able to remember what endings they've achieved and so on. Kind of like a profile.

A really awesome person answered and basically posted a lot of code that I have yet to parse through or really implement into my game (just becos I've been busy with things). But, I'll be doing that now! So, I'll let ya'll know what horrible shit happens when I do LOL

That'll be the goal that I'm hoping to finish tomorrow. That and, of course, I'm wanting to finish this intro part already and, hopefully, get to the moment selection part.

I'm planning for that to play out a lot like how it plays out in Our Life where there will be a handful of moments in the Villainess' childhood that the player can play through in whatever order they want to. I definitely want to play a lot with like persistent variables (or maybe I don't have to?) so that I can reference certain moments that the player has already played through without knowing what order they played through them.

BUT, then again, I feel like maybe that shouldn't be the case? I only really want to do that moment menu becos it seems really cool but I don't know how I'd really do that story wise.

Obviously, the plot will play out where the player has to gain the affection of everyone so that they won't get killed. However, I also wanted to add moments like when so-and-so event happens in the future, the Villainess can choose to do something about it or not.

I think maybe I might have to settle for something in between where there might be like a calendar? The player can choose what they focus on for the week so there's still that freedom for the player to do whatever they want but then, there's some weeks where the game lets them know that something is going to happen?

I feel like that might be a nice alternative. We'll see. First things first, fix this naming convention thing and finish the intro!

[cwispydev]

07/11/2022 11:34 NaNoRenMo word count: 3,153

My inconsistent annoying ass is back and I've restarted yet again.

I don't know why but I just keep? Doing this whole bullshit of not being an expert on coding languages immediately and then being frustrated by that.

I'm like a weird mix of perfectionist who has to do everything perfectly the first time but also lazy asshole who doesn't want to expend too much effort.

So, I've restarted and decided to do some stuff with Ren'py.

My biggest concern with Ren'py was definitely the fact that I'm 100% not an artist. I'm not good at drawing or graphic design but Ren'py is very visual heavy.

So, for now, I'm making a visual novel for NaNoRenMo and then seeing where I go from there. I'm working a lot on dialogue and the coding side of it and kind of just worrying about the visuals later on?

I have someone working on the character sprites right now so I'm not too worried about that. It's the GUI stuff that I'm worried about. I'm planning on doing that myself so I needed to get a lot of practice done. Which I did do in September/October so I could be prepared for NaNoRenMo.

I've been doing like test GUI things? So, thank god. It wasn't too bad, just needed a bit of work on the art department. The way to code it was a pain in the ass but easy to learn.

I mostly used Zeil Learnings' video on Image Buttons and their video on Main Menu Customization as well as qubodupDev's video on Image Buttons on YouTube.

It was a bit frustrating to learn but, because it's repetitive work, I got the hang of it eventually. Here's some gifs of how it went.

This gif kind of shows off how my buttons look when you hover over them and stuff.

Then, of course, I practiced a little on how to customize dialogue boxes. I also used another Zeil Learning's video to learn about that. Specifically, I watched a lot of their video on Dialogue Customization over and over.

Customizing the dialogue boxes and stuff was so much easier than customizing the main menu since I got a lot of practice with image buttons on the main menu and the dialogue is way more simple than the main menu.

Here's the image of the dialogue box that I customized.

Ignore the ugly Main Character Holder and the weird dialogue. I was testing out how long the names could be for the name box and ended up keeping the name that way.

I was also testing out how to unlock CG for the gallery I made so that's why there's the huge guy I made with picrew in the background. I'd post the picrew but it got taken down.

Then, the next step was doing a whole custom menu? Which sucked but, like I said before, not as much as the main menu since I got a lot of practice already. I also used another Zeil Learning's video (their video on Making Your Own Image Gallery) and they posted some of their code and assets on itch.io.

Here's the gif of my attempt at that.

The entire time I was doing this, I was kind of trying to figure out what I wanted to write about for NaNoRenMo. I was thinking of doing what I was planning on doing for Twine but do it for Ren'py instead.

Except my perfectionist stupid brain kinda dumped that idea.

So, I was wracking my brain and figured that I should just write about something I'm passionate about. Right now, it's Villainess Isekai manga.

I've been obsessed with the genre for like a couple years now. I've read a lot of light novels and mangas and I basically celebrated to death when the anime for some of them started getting churned out last year and this year.

I figured that there would be a dedicated fan base for it (since I'm a part of that fan base LOL) and decided to go that route.

So, now, I'm writing a Villainess Reincarnation visual novel/otome game where you play as a Villainess!

Another one of my obsessions has been Our Life: Beginnings and Always. It's a really great visual novel/otome game that really puts to use my absolute favorite romance trope: childhood friends to lovers.

It's a really in-depth game that gives the player a lot of choices and lets the player customize their character a lot. I've always been a huge slut for character customization in video games so I've always wanted to make a game like that.

So, of course, I'm loosely basing the visual novel/otome game I'm making on Our Life.

Think Our Life x Villainess Reincarnation.

The premise for the game is that you're a Villainess that was killed at the guillotine (like usual) and you've woken up in bed with a lot of your memories missing.

You start out as a child and then kind of grow up, trying your hardest to learn from the mistakes you've made.

I'm still trying to figure out if I should implement a moments selection like in Our Life or I should just make it very linear. I'm leaning more towards the moments selection, though.

I just don't like the fact that it would be too much work.

But yeah, my friend (not my special friend LOL) has been working on sprites for the game since pretty much November started. I've just been using placeholders so far becos they haven't finished any of the sprites yet.

(Obviously, holy shit, sprites are super fucking hard to draw.)

I've written a lot of stuff (I'd like to think) since NaNoRenMo started. I was being really lazy in the beginning but my special friend has lit a fire under my ass and now I'm like updating my blog and writing a lot for the visual novel/otome game.

I'm determined to churn something out LOL

But yeah, that's my update. Hopefully, I'll be able to update tomorrow or something with a new word count and some updates on how the game is going.

I want to keep the game as vague as possible? Just becos I don't want to give anyone spoilers. So, I'll mostly be talking about like the technical aspects of the game rather than any plot points.

Also, I forgot to mention but the tentitive title for the game is Never Ending Love.

[cwispydev]

28/04/2022 3:08

First of all, I need to stop doing these at like the crack of dawn because it's honestly very bad for my health to be an absolute nocturnal idiot like this.

Secondly, sorry it's been literally forever since I've updated. I got COVID and I also got very lazy. But that's okay because I'm here now and I've come to tell you that literally nothing has happened before the last update!

I haven't even written any more things for the game. There's so little text for a text-based choose-your-own-adventure.

We've implemented the player stats and have made it so that your beginning player stats are affected by the background you chose. Honestly, I wanted to keep it balanced but my very special friend wanted to pull the numbers out of his ass so that's what happened.

I wanted to add like little bars and stuff to show how much of the stat you have out of 20 but apparently, that's going to be very complicated. My special friend is going to show me how but it'll take some time so that hasn't been actually added.

I think that's pretty much all I've done. I changed some of the values for the variables and stuff to numbers instead of strings cus it'll be easier to call them back up that way. I should've taken a note from the Corruption of Champions/Trials in Tainted Space book and started it like that but I wasn't thinking so now I'm stuck trying to tediously change everything.

We also added a little function that makes it so that you need to finish the whole quiz before you can go to the next part of the story and that's also tedious as hell but not as hard as I expected.

I'm slowly learning how to code and, honestly, for now it doesn't feel as complicated and impossible as I thought it would be before. In fact, I'm so happy to be learning all of these stuff and being able to do what I've always wanted and dreamed of doing.

I feel bad because my special friend is not only doing all of the really complicated code but also he's taking a lot out of is time to teach me. I'm thankful though and, hopefully, by my next update, I'll have more to tell you guys!

[cwispydev]

[link]

[cwispydev]

17/04/2022 4:01 (edited 18/04/2022 20:33)

After lazing about and procrastinating on this (because, despite how passionate I am about anything, my lizard brain will always procrastinate), I've managed to both disappoint and impress myself.

As I had written in my dev log yesterday, I wanted to accomplish the following things:

finishing the character creator part

finding a way to assign the starting stats of the player based on the background that they choose their character to have

a little quiz to see what type of person the player likes and see if any of the characters in the game suits their taste best

write a little bit more of the story so that there's actual content other than just dumb questions

The good news is that I managed to accomplish most of that. The bad news is that I managed to accomplish most of that.

I finished the character creator (for the most part). I still want to implement a little paragraph where there's a brief description of the player so you get a little summary of what you look like. I haven't started on it but, other than that, the character creator is finished.

I've started making the quiz for the player to see what type of person they'd be into. I haven't finished it yet but my friend and I have decided to make a variable for each possible character the player can end up with and then each choice the player makes will add a point to the related character variable. Then, in the end, the one with the most is the one that the player character will end up with.

But, like I said, that hasn't been added yet because I haven't even finished the quiz. Sucks to be me.

I wrote a little bit of a scene at the beginning so that there's a bit of text in the game but that's pretty much all I've done on that.

Now that I've written it all out, actually, it doesn't feel like I've done a lot. Which, of course, bums me out but I guess I'll just try to get more stuff done tomorrow.

The stuff I learned to do that wasn't on the list was the fact that I learned to make text appear and disappear based on things the player clicks. When the player selects their background from a drop-down, the description of the background appears below that. Things like that.

I also learned how to upload things on GitHub so that's fun! My friend and I needed a way to basically exchange the files back and forth because he's helping look over my code, streamline it and even add a little stuff cus he's a very experienced genius coder and I'm his teeny tiny apprentice dumb student.

That's pretty much it.

Goals I want to accomplish by the time I update tomorrow:

finish everything I want to do with the character creator

implement the starting stats stuff based on the background the player chooses (I already know what stats will go into each background, just need to code it)

finish the quiz the player has to take and code the shit out of it

write more stuff!

Looks like a small list but I bet it won't feel small while I'm trying to get it done!

[cwispydev]

16/04/2022 4:17 (edited 18/04/2022 17:38)

Merry Christmas, happy New Year, hope you enjoyed your Valentine's Day! All in all, a lot has happened but you know what hasn't happened? Any progress with my little Godot game.

Instead of really making progress with anything, I ended up fucking around with my very good friend and playing a lot of video games. A lot of the games that really caught my eye (especially recently) were text-based games.

Examples would be Corruption of Champions, Trials in Tainted Space and Degrees of Lewdity. They'd be my top three favourite. In fact, I loved them so much that I wanted to turn my dream of making a dating sim/otome game into something like that.

Problem is (because, of course, there's always a big fat problem) all of those kind of games are very code heavy and story heavy.

Story heavy is fine seeing as, like I've stated before, I'm a writer. No, the problem is that I'm not at all a coder.

I've coded in high school a little bit for my terny robotics club team but, as most nerds do, I graduated high school and erased all of my memories of that time.

I remember some things like variables, how if statements work, things like that. However, if you sat me in front of a computer, put a gun to my head, and asked me to code, I'd stick that gun into my mouth and laugh.

When I told my very good friend this predicament, he came up with a solution. He said it was probably a good idea to work towards big project with little projects. It would help me learn the skills I'd need to complete my ultimate dream game and it'd help me practice coding a little bit. So, that's what I decided to do.

I settled on using Twine/Sugarcube/JavaScript entirely on my own, no input from my friend at all. Maybe the fact that Degrees of Lewdity was coded using Twine/Sugarcube/JavaScript also helped a little.

Then, I decided to join a game jam with a little text-based choose-your-own-adventure game to kind of jump into the deep and see if I survive. This one is entirely my very good friend's idea and, honestly, I don't know if it's a great one. I don't even know anything about the game jam, just that it's over in 11 days (9 I think as I edit this post) and that it's only requirement is to make the game with JavaScript.

Together, we decided on a cute little dating sim/otome game concept where the character has just moved into a new town and, because they're so extremely busy and have had bad luck with romance and finding love, they join a little speed dating event in hopes of finding a connection with someone in this unfamiliar city.

I came up with the title Love on the Run because you're too busy to stop and find love so you need to have Love on the Run? Get it? Ha, I hope so because I'd be really embarassed if you didn't.

So, entirely on my own, I learnt how to make bubbles, buttons, drop downs. Also learnt how to fade text in and out and how to change text color by searching up Reddit posts and copying code. My friend jumped in later on to check on my code and streamline it as well as kind of pull it apart and explain it to me.

He doesn't want me to put any code I don't entirely understand in the game and I think that's pretty understandable.

Then, he continudd on to teach me how to assign variables and how to use functions, all the bread and butter of how to code with JavaScript.

So far, we've accomplished:

making half of a character creator with bubbles and drop downs

What I want to accomplish by tomorrow:

finishing the character creator part

finding a way to assign the starting stats of the player based on the background that they choose their character to have

a little quiz to see what type of person the player likes and see if any of the characters in the game suits their taste best

write a little bit more of the story so that there's actual content other than just dumb questions

Thanks for reading and, hopefully, by the time I write my next post, Ill have good news for you guys (me editing this post in the future: well, there's good news and bad news...)

[cwispydev]

[cwispydev]

11/12/2021 7:38

Back already with another blog entry??

Yeah, I wanted to make like an initial blog entry kind of stating what I want, my goals, where I'm coming from, etc. So that's my first blog entry. This second one is about what I've done which is basically nothing :')

I was really indecisive about what kind of program I'd use to make this game on.

I was considering Ren'py (since it's the leading engine for dating games) but it was too code heavy for me who likes visualising things and I'm not very good at staring at huge chunks of text while imagining what they translate to in the game.

Then, I considered Unity but, after watching a few how to videos on Youtube, I decided I'm way too stupid to learn that engine too.

A very good friend of mine suggested Godot so I've been fiddling with that and it's gone really well so far. I love the way it's a very visual engine! The problem (because, of course, there always has to be one) is that I'm not much of an artist and you have to pretty much attach code to art in Godot.

My friend has taught me how to make buttons so far and we've done practice buttons and a practice menu. It's easier than I thought and the way he explained it was really simple. We managed to make this absolute piece of art so that's fun!

I want my menu to be much more complicated than that, though.

My new short-term goals are now:

to figure out how to do a hover animation over the buttons

how to make a loading page so you can select save slots and load them which sounds like a pain in the ass

figure out the options page too which is also going to be a bigger pain in the ass

For now, I think I'll work on the graphics a bit more, design the menu out, make the components that I'll attach the code to and then go from there.

I will march on, encouraged by the power of Benis. Hopefully I'll have a better update for the blog tomorrow

[cwispydev]

11/12/2021 7:33

Hello! My name is crispy and I've decided to start a nice little game development blog. You're reading the first post!

I've always wanted to make my own game but it's always seemed really difficult and overwhelming. Where do you even start, how do you even motivate yourself to keep going, when are you going to have the time?

Well, I'm going to start now--I have the time since I'm in between college semesters--and I'm going to just fucking do it. No more pussyfooting around or procrastinating. I'm going to motivate myself to keep going and I'm going to hack at this (coding pun intended) until I churn out a solid turd in the form of a game.

Since the brain-worm about making a game entered my mind, I've always known what kind of game I'd make. A dating/otome game. I've obsessed with them my entire life and, though I'm not as into them as I was a couple of years ago, I can at least say that I can tell what a good and what a shitty dating game is like.

The dating game I want to make starts with the player moving into the big city in the hopes of starting a new life and, along the way, maybe finding new love.

Some of the features I want it to include are:

interactable laptop and phone where you can receive emails, go on online chats, text and call other people, etc

very extensive character designer

choices that really personalize the main character so that players can really feel that they're the main character

a flexible schedule so that the player can design their own and do whatever they want with their day

There's only one problem with all of those features and a very good friend of mine was able to word it perfectly. 'People who want to make games are usually divided into three groups: coders who can't do art, artists who can't code and writers who can't do either.'

I'm a writer with big fat dreams and I can't do shit.

So, join me while I fucking struggle to learn how to do this! It's going to be annoying as all hell and you're going to hate it but at least you can laugh at me while I fumble my way through this