The Waiting Game - Devlog 2 - The first playable prototype of the game

    Hi, Tommy here, It's been a short while and I made some progress on the Visual Novel game. It's still far from done but I do have a finalized script AND imported said script into the RenPy project's script file. I used the website JustSketchMe to get basic placeholders for the two characters Ryan and Michael. I didn't bother with a background placeholder has the game will have one unchanging background anyways. in fact I was looking into methods of creating this background asset when I remembered I had a blog to update.

But yeah let's get straight to the point. The writing of the game is pretty much finished, minor changes could be made but the overall story is setup nicely. not perfect as some parts are a bit strange but it will suffice for the first game project.

The biggest step in this game project is the fact we technically have a fully playable game from start to finish. I added all the dialogue and writing into a RenPy project and put the bare minimal effort in getting a complete game out of it. Here is a screenshot below to demonstrate.  

 

    Believe it or not this short demo still took a good hour or so to make, most of it being copy and paste as well as adjusting the positions of the two character sprites. Thankfully RenPy makes saving these positions easy.

But this is still a very rough prototype as it has none of the polish and assets to make it good. Like I said earlier I was looking into a good method of creating background for the game as drawing backgrounds is a problem for me, I can do it if forced but I also want to find a good workflow that can be carried over in a bigger project in the future.

I've found that some visual novel games used edited photographs for backgrounds or in some cases people would make 3d renders of a room and draw over said renders. I know people have royalty free photos that can be used for such a purpose but am still weighing my options. In truth I just feel lazy and don't want to draw the background for an hour just for a one shot game, characters are more fun for me so I don't mind as much. Still I got lots of assets to make for this one game.

The next step after getting the assets made or found is to polish the actual textboxes, RenPy has tons of features to make text display a bit more dynamic and visually appealing.

Anyways this project is still alive and am hoping to get some work done on it today. wish me luck and I hope you have a good day!