Post by lysander in Support: Text-based

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Hi Andy! To be perfectly honest, while I personally find Twine to be more intuitive, using many images may require a lot of CSS and HTML knowledge. If you're comfortable with that, then it may also be intuitive for you. However, if aligning/positioning images is something you don't want to do, you may want to consider Visual Novelty or Renpy.

Between Renpy and Visual Novelty, I'd say VN may be more beginner-friendly, as it has a visual interface rather than Renpy's pure-code editor.

About images and Twine though: it really just depends on the complexity of what you want to do. If you're trying to make a VN-like game in Twine, it's completely possible, but you'll have to code the framework yourself, which may be more work. Does this help?

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A G Moody8 years ago

It really does! It's kinda tricky to figure out what 'base' the engines (knowledge and visual-wise) have at a glance.

I don't think what I plan to do is super complex - just an image above my text with the text starting in the same area (where some Html/css would probably come in handy I imagine). I don't want to do the VN 'name + dialoge box'. I like the minimalist look of Twine's hyperlink system.

I'm torn between beefing up my html/css knowledge(in browser playing is SUPER attractive) or jumping into ren'py blind (I have some C++ knowledge)

But that's what the pre-planning for right? Thanks again, I have a much better idea of what I'm getting into

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lysander8 years ago

I'm glad I was able to help!!

I'd probably go ahead and brush up on your HTML/CSS as what you're describing doesn't sound too hard! You'll probably find it easier to customize the look for Twine, too! Although Renpy is a great engine as well, and it isn't terribly hard to learn— it's just more of a pain to customize (and I speak from experience.)

If you're interested, I've been considering writing a guide for Twine— maybe I'll do it when I'm not sleep-deprived, but if that sounds helpful, I can do a rough draft some time and forward it to you.

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A G Moody8 years ago(+1)

I plowed through the basics of twine in about 5 minutes XD

I didn't give myself enough credit for the html/css knowledge I do have- that and what I want to do is WELL within the scope of basic twine-fu.

I'd be happy to take a look at any guide you have! You've done some really neat stuff in your previous games!

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lysander8 years ago

Oh gosh, thank you!! Sadly I haven't went and updated some of them... probably going to do that tonight since stuff needs fixing.

But I'm glad to hear that!! Yup— Twine is really easy to get a hold of if you have previous experience with programming or markup languages, so it's fantastic to see people use it!! I can't wait to see what you do!

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itch.io

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