[The Hive] Weekly Report #1 (Patreon)

Warning ! Don't open and scroll on these posts if you want to keep the surprise for the demo.

Like the Hive? Then you'll like Personalias, the writer of the game! Check out his work here :  https://www.patreon.com/personalias/posts or here : https://www.deviantart.com/personalias

Latest batch of work on the Hive !

I've finally started working in Renpy. It's a game engine fit to program in python. Since I know nothing about programming or python, it's a big learning process.

Unfortunately, the programmer who was helping on the project choose to stop our collaboration. So learning python is now an absolute requirement for the game.

Fortunately, python is simple enough to allow even beginners like me to be relatively at ease. It's not easy but if you take your time, you can achieve what you want.

I started by doing a screen at the beginning of the game with a logo you might remember!

Renpy is very flexible but it also means that everything has to be specified in code. Contrary to Rpg Maker, there's no buttons you can click to insert whatever you need in your game.

So even a simple thing like this splash screen take time, more exactly the time it take to figure out how to do it (thanks god, google and renpy documentation exist).

Also a correction on the load screen, even if it's still not functionnal, it looks normal now. The biggest loss on time was to figure out where the hell it was in the code and what lines needed to be changed. Globally, I wasted lot of time on the rest of the user interface as well.

The game open on a...dream ? A memory ? Hard to tell.

Then our hero wake up in a weird looking room. And meet the first character : A nannybot.

The typo the robot use in the textbox is a bit more « robotic » than for the other characters. I had fun customizing little details like that for the characters.

For example, each character produce a « bleep » sound when the text appears in the textbox. It works exactly like in games like Undertale or Phoenix Wright. I'm pretty happy with how it come out, it's discreet but noticeable and add a bit of polish to the sound design.

You can see how it looks like in code right here. It's not the only thing I had to change, I also customized the fade out of the dialogue box, new positions for characters on screen and a little bounce animation that will come handy to add life into the scenes.

Then, our hero notice her uncomfortable position. Most of what I've drawn so far is just placeholder. I plan to work more on the visuals during my break.

I also did a bit of dialogue between june and the bot. But due to resizing problems with the bustsets, I wasn't able to integrate the expressions yet.

I hope you liked this very first weekly report! Next week, I plan to work on expressions, animation, playtest and integrate more dialogues.