Hi! I'm thinking of making an original choices-style game through Ren'Py (or whatever other engine I can figure out how to use), but I don't really have much experience with graphic design and coding. Do you have any advice for getting started? How did you set up the profiles and dialogue boxes to match that of the original app?
Thank you for all you do! The It Lives series is by far my favorite story from Choices and it's amazing to see you all give the series the justice it deserves! :)
Hey, good for you for wanting to create a VN game and having the determination to learn how to do it!
My biggest advice for getting started is to watch tutorials, read the documentation, google questions you have, and then go to forums with specific questions. Renpy has a super active and helpful forum, lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/ In addition to asking questions, you can often find already-answered questions that help you out too!
It also helped me a lot personally to just get into the nitty gritty of it all. I learn best by doing because I don’t have a very good attention span to actually internalize things beforehand 😅 so I learned a lot in the beginning just by taking a scene and programming it. As I came across issues, I’d search/google/ask questions until I found out how to do it the way I wanted.
Before you start, you’ll want to decide on your game’s orientation. Renpy is optimized for landscape view, not portrait, so if you want to have the same orientation as Choices, you’ll need to do a lot of customization. It’s possible, but it’s tougher, especially if you’re a beginner. We use 768 x 1360 for our screen size. For all your text boxes and character sprites, get clean transparents for them, and for characters I recommend having them all the same image size so that they’re easier to manipulate. How we set them up to match the app is pretty complicated to explain, but we basically created custom screens in the screen document that call different textboxes to the screen depending on if it’s the playable character, the narrator, or an NPC, and depending on the length of the dialogue/text. But yeah, I would recommend just downloading the engine and start playing with it! Read the documentation and get active on the forum, and you’ll figure it out 🥰