Art & Code: How it's made - and what goes wrong :) (Patreon)

(!There's a spoiler at the very bottom!)

Hey everyone!

I know I usually share my art in these posts, but a big part of what I do actually happens in code. So today I’d like to give you a little peek behind the scenes & show you how that looks.

Adding dialog

So, below you see  one of many scripts that the  game has. I organize my scripts in stories per character.   And here you see the latest  dialog  I wrote for the junkers. Now if you take a closer look, you might notice that this bit of code, basically consists out of two parts;  spoken scentences &  references to pose-pictures.

(Maybe you need to open the image above, to read it?)

Now every scentence that you see in the game “is written like this” in code. And the letter in front of each sentence here,  determines who says the text, so ‘k’ is Keen.

And sometimes I use special bits of code like this, {b} which make the text bold {/b}. I usually do that to highlight items or characters.  But beware! Type one letter wrong and then this is what you get…

Does that happen a lot? Well,  now I know this screen probably better than my mom :)

Adding characters

Now to every scentence belongs a certain expression. And I add these manually between the lines of dialog. This process is pretty easy... but it does take a bit of time to do it right.

Here you see for example the images I I can choose from,  for when keen stands in the dark.

Now picking the right expressions is one thing, but you also need to position the characters on screen. Now in my first pass, I usually ignore this, so I can focus on the expressions first. But then when you start the game, things often look like this :)

Here I made a typo as well, and then the game-engine thinks there is an image missing -so then this anime girl pops up. ...Somehow she always makes me laugh :)  

The End

Well, and that’s in short how I put together the dialog-scenes for Space Rescue. The other part of the job is of course creating interactive rooms, animated scenes and placing dozens of triggers to knit everything nicely together.  But I won't bore you with that :)   

However if you're interested;  the Ren’py game-engine is pretty easy to use, and once you get the hang of it, it's quite enjoyable as well. So if you ever wanted to make a visual novel, this might be the tool for you!

Well, I'll get back to coding soon &  then I hope to release another update in the next two weeks or so :)

Have a great weekend & all the best!

-Robin






PS. here's the spoiler!
...
I liked how this scene came together... but it's unrelated to the rest of this post :)