Sleepy Time Jack Report 01/14/23 (Patreon)

Happy Saturday, Sunspots! It's BáiYù again, and I absolutely did not accidentally post the previous Sleepy Time Jack Report as being from 2022. What are you talking about ahahaha... Anyways, the first Patreon beta is here! 🎉

Version 0.1 Changelog

• Increased "Regular" text size of both Kinto and Bubblegum font options
• Fixed Quit action prompts when manually closing the window on desktop OSes
• Replaced Confirm frame with Textbox image (couldn't figure out how to make the frame not look weird, so YOLO)
• Replaced background music
• Set up system for split text and audio language
• Sorted voice lines into a spreadsheet for future recording purposes
• Identified issue with audio for randomized dialogue not playing once built, fixed that
• Uploaded Beta Version 0.1 for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and Android to itch.io and Github

Are you a Patron at the $12 Pick Your Poison tier or higher? Click here to access your copy of Sleepy Time Jack! You will need to create or sign into your itch.io account to claim your key.

Not a $12+ patron? No problem! You can still enjoy the web beta, though it's limited to only Jack's fully clothed mode and the page itself is locked behind a password (we're quite serious about anti-piracy, and we hope you all understand).

Access the page for the Sleepy Time Jack beta here. 

The password is a single word, all lowercase letters and no numbers. To figure it out, fill in the blank:

The SunnyTime Crew Show is filmed by xxxxxxxxx Productions

Need a hint? Check this poster.

We trust that you all will not share the above page and password with those who are not Patreon subscribers. Thank you for your understanding.

At this time, Sleepy Time Jack Beta Version 0.1 does not include any new lines of dialogue, and his Good Night dialogue is unvoiced.

New Dictionary Format

Split text and audio languages are rather popular feature requests, so I did spend some time reformatting the dictionary and testing it. At this time, our current dict for playing randomized lines looks like this:

## -1 :[0, 1, 2, 3, 4]

## "dial_key_X" :  ["IMAGE", "AUDIO_FILENAME", "DIALOGUE", WAIT_TIME],

Dicts can be expanded to hold a larger number of entries associated with the "key" for the information, so it's a matter of adding things and keeping track of their positions.

# -1 :[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

# "dial_key_X" :  ["IMAGE", "EN_VOICE", "ES_VOICE", "JP_VOICE", "EN_DIALOGUE", "ES_DIALOGUE", "JP_DIALOGUE", WAIT_TIME],

Because the randomized lines don't play according to standard Ren'Py format, having separate dedicated entries per language is necessary.

Spreadsheets Galore!

A well formatted spreadsheet makes recording easier, though I'll gladly throw hands with other developers working with voice actors who don't also give them the option of reading the full script for context. In the case of Sleepy Time Jack however, since it's composed of mostly single lines that are played at random, a spreadsheet with a column for notes is perfectly serviceable.

The way I've set up the sheet per category is by Purpose, Line, Filename, Recorded, and Notes.

• Purpose - Where is this line being played? Provides quick context (for the randomized dialogue sheets, these are the dictionary keys).
• Line - The dialogue being said.
• Filename - When the voice files are sent over to be programmed in, this is the naming scheme that the voice actors should follow.
• Recorded - A simple checkmark box; if it's recorded, click on it, otherwise it's blank
• Notes - Is there a certain way this line should be delivered?

On the bottom of the page are the category tabs, where we've been taking notes for  the dialogue you've all suggested in last week's post. You'll also notice the "Holiday Greetings" tab among those; we're working through which holidays we want to include. One of the things I'd like to figure out is how to configure Ren'Py to recognize holidays that are based on the Lunar Calendar or certain weekdays in a month (ie. third Wednesday of a month). It's possible, but it's going to take a bit of research and messing around.

Fixing the Audio Problem

Soooooooo... fun fact! I was actually going to do a soft release of Sleepy Time Jack for our $12+ supporters last night but somehow once I had turned the project into a proper executable file for players, the associated audio for the randomized dialogue suddenly wasn't working! I promise it worked fine before all the files were compiled and archived, but once I had a small group test the majority of the new Version 0.1 builds, Jack no longer talked except for the Greetings and Clothing Change dialogue. To add more to the confusion, only the Web version of the game had his randomized lines play the audio...

• Was it an issue of the new naming scheme I had set for the files? No, because I double checked the names to make sure they all matched when testing the uncompiled version.
• Was it an issue of file format? No, because his set dialogue continued to play just fine.
• Did those particular files somehow get excluded from the build? No, because I managed to locate them in the compiled builds using my private tools and once I extracted them, they suddenly began to play in the game.

After sobbing and laughing hysterically for at least a good 40 minutes, I conferred with Mole who was equally confused but less distraught to see if she could diagnose the issue. And lo and behold, within 6 minutes:

File Access functions are rather obscure and rarely used in the majority of Ren'Py games to the point of not really being mentioned anywhere else in the documentation, and while renpy.exists(filename) worked for building open source code, it can't actually access individual files stored in the .rpa archive files, hence why the voice files began to play in the game once extracted.

After replacing all instances of renpy.exists with renpy.loadable, the compiled executable versions began to work as intended!

What's Next?

This next week we'll be reviewing and editing some of those line suggestions, picking holidays for Jack to comment on, then handing them off to NaughtyMaus to record! We can't say how long the next update may take as I'll also be handling some stuff for both the SDJ Kickstarter and The Groom of Gallagher Mansion production (which I hope we'll have an update for next week), but we'll do our best to let you know when we can add in new voiced lines.

That's all I got for now! If you happen to be in the UK around February, don't forget about Reece's first convention appearance too! Let's show up and give him your support~