Semester 2 Week 12 18/10/16 Tuesday

I continued to work with Ren' Py and began understanding the engine a bit more. It was, in fact, rather easy to use and the coding was straightforward. It is, however, an engine made for dialogue based visual novels, and not comics. As I was figuring out how to place images in my Ren' Py, I discovered that the program would not dwell on an image unless there was dialogue with it. To remedy this, I added "fake" dialogue in the script, which is blank spaces tricking the engine that there is dialogue present. This in turn caused a white transparent dialogue box at the bottom of each page, and I have yet to find a solution to this problem.

Another issue I had with Ren' Py was that it did not support GIFs (graphic interchangeable files). It did support some forms of videos, but these had to take up the entire screen, and would slow down the program significantly. With the amount of animation clips I have for my project, adding all of them in my game would be impractical.

The blank spaces in the quotation marks of the script indicate what is shown in the dialogue box. In my case they are all null. I could not find anything on the Ren' Py website that could assist me with the issue.

The animation could not be played in Ren' Py.

The one benefit I got from Ren' Py was that it was able to create custom "menus"; options for the user to choose and alternative endings in the story. This could be created rather easily with a few lines of code in the script. I did not have control over how the options appeared, however, as they were always positioned in the top part of the screen. There may be ways to customise this, but I did not have enough time to find out.

Points where the user could choose their own paths.

I was also able to add some sound in the game. It was somewhat the same process as adding an image, and simple command statements would initiate the sound when the user clicks to a certain page. 

As the user reaches the end of the comic, the engine would take them back to title page. 

In conclusion of experimenting with Ren' Py, I find the learning process quick and the coding language easy to understand. However, it is better for creating visual novel projects rather than animations, as it does not handle video files very well, nor does it support GIFs. It has much potential in creating a branching narrative as the menu command is able to present the various options to the user during the play-through. As aforementioned, Ren' Py is more suitable for dialogue-based visual novels that involve little to no animation, and functions better in a landscape format with full screen images rather than multiple panels spread across the screen. It was fun experimenting with Ren' Py, and I might consider using it for potential future projects, but it may not be the best option for the current project I am working on.