I see, that's insightful. The idea of giving the player options in regards to romance is a nice one, though I don't know whether it's worth your while, given how you planned the timeframes for the project. Either way, I'm now looking forward to John's and Charles' routes to see what kind of development they will receive compared to Mike.
On a side note, would you mind sharing what tools you use for coding with ren'py? Asking simply out of curiocity.
I'm fairly inefficient since I used to just do my LUA stuff in notepad++ before I started ren'py & python.
Right now I use Atom Text Editor with a few plugins:
- language-renpy
- custom-folds
- renpy-dialogue-plus
And the whopping 81 base packages Ren'py adds on if you let it. The reason I prefer atom is simply the layout (Multiple panes is a godsent when editing script), since indentation matters in python and ren'py, and the ability to tree any type of file etc, which makes it very organized.
Realistically, Visual Code Studio is what most people use, afaik and it's probably superior, but I'm used to Atom by now.
Other than that, ren'py itself is fairly powerful in the developer mode, since you can type script or code directly into the console and run it live, as well as giving you pretty accurate debug errors in real time, with most issues. It has LINT integration, TODO integration and a ton of useful tools to be found, even if the documentation on them is generally lackluster.
For art edits I use Clip Studio Paint, which I believe most of the team also uses (There's that one guy who uses Photoshop...)
If you're interested in VN Development there's a discord server with a lot of resources set up for it that I'd be happy to link you to, and I'd be happy to give you any input or help on discord.
Thanks for sharing, I like reading devlogs and technical details. The reason I was interested is because I saw the ren'py extension for VS Code the other day (I've been using VS Code for all my programming for about a year now), and immediately thought that it would be interesting to know what the workflow with ren'py looks like. With grammar checker and great python support (snippets, debugger, etc.) it feels like a potentially nice tool to compliment whatever ren'py development suite offers. I guess Atom is similar in that regard, I remember it having tons of extensions too, though I'm never touching that piece of software again in the near future, not after having to manually clean appdata folders and even registry for it to completely uninstall ))
I've heard about the discord server, but I'm not looking into actual development right now (it's an interesting idea, but the lack of time and writing/drawing skills make me lose interest), I just wanted to hear your take, since I think you implemented some cool visuals compared to some more barebones VNs out there. Either way, thanks for taking your time to satisfy my curiosity )
