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. 

Semester 2 Week 11 10/10/16 Monday

I apologise for not updating anything for the past three weeks. There was some trouble with my developer and they said they would not have enough time to build an APP for my project. They, will, however, create a website for me. As the due date is closing in, I really hope they will be able to complete it on time. I have already handed all the necessary files to them to make the website. In my exegesis, I will discuss the benefits of having a website than an APP: the developer is able to build the site so that it can resize accordingly to different screen sizes, enabling the comic to be read across multiple devices. A website can be read on computers as well as smartphones and tablets, unlike APPs, which can only be read on portable devices. The interactivity is retained, readers can still advance at their own pace and make decisions of their own in the narrative; the animation can also run on the website, but these can only be in GIF files to reduce the loading time. The only disadvantage I can see here is that there must internet connection for a website to function, while once downloaded, an APP can run anywhere at anytime. This is a minor issue as most smartphones have 3G or 4G data, and if not, WI-FI is usually quite accessible, especially considering the digital society we live in today.

I am not doing nothing while waiting for the website to be built. I a have edited my comic together as a single video file which can be viewed as an animation; although it may not seem that interesting. I also added sound to create some atmosphere.

I also experimented with a visual novel engine called "Ren'Py". I tried my best to understand the coding, and apparently it is supposed to be incredibly simple compared to other code languages, but I cannot seem to fathom it nor able to make it function for me. The tutorials I looked at so far were different to how my scripts operated, I am not sure if it's because I did something wrong or the engine versions are not the same. But I was introduced to this engine by a gaming tutor, and it seems appropriate for me to utilise. I wish to learn how to use this program properly and build something out of it, however, considering the time frame, it may prove difficult.

Attempting to use Ren'py.