NaNoRenO - Week 1

Week 1 of NaNoRenO is over, so time for a re-cap of what I could get through this week. This will definitely contain spoilers, I guess?? But also the game is completely in flux so who knows what a real spoiler is.

Ren’py

My biggest game “mechanic” that I wanted to be able to incorporate was randomising the order of scenes a player could get. It ended up being easy enough to find other people asking for example how to do this. So I took some code samples shared in a forum and started to experiment with how to use it. So far so good, now I just need to not get lost in it while filling in the content.

Something I don’t love about Ren’py is that it seems like the bulk of the game is in a single file. It will probably make it easier to hunt for errors in the future but I’m very worried about how messy the file will get.

Backgrounds

My main focus for the week was backgrounds. With the second day being troubleshooting why my image isn't filling the screen properly. Spent a fair bit of time researching why this could happen only to finally find that it was my own Clip Studio Paint save setting that was re-sizing the output. Oops. Which is why at the end of day one this was all the progress I had to show.

With that solved I spent each day trying to complete one background. As of today I have 6, having taken 2 days easy after longer work days. So I’m pretty happy about that. It’s nearly 50% of the backgrounds I had planned for.

Planning

I had done my original game flow layout before the month started (which you are allowed to do!). I had originally planned to make the first prototype of this game in Twine so I had that downloaded and ready to go. I’m more familiar with Twine so I used it to lay down the main beats/scenes as well as the progression path. Which resulted in this:

This is what helped me count how many backgrounds I would need and how many scenes I would have to write.

I’ve only written a few lines so far, I should really start getting other ideas down. But I have confidence in my writing speed and less confidence in my drawing speed so the creation of the assets is my biggest priority while I still have new project excitement.

Conclusion

I do feel my desire for drawing backgrounds already waning. But buying new brushes and finding ways to “cheat” a look I want to do still feels nice. In some places, like the fence in the garden scene, I tried to find a fence brush that would help me spit that out in a second. But after trying 3 or 4 I gave up and drew one segment then repeated it. For the ropes in the outdoor lighthouse scene that was an easy brush to find so I could just do 2 lines then done. So there is a bit of a treasure hunt quality to some of the tasks which I enjoy. Found a water reflection brush that I feel like works really well so I’m no longer afraid to fill the space on large bodies of water.

The indoor scenes though, yikes.

I did a fair bit of research into lighthouses before I started (and still am really). But there are very few images of the inside of lighthouses. And these days when you try to research them, what you’re going to find is remodelled lighthouses turned into Air B&Bs. Which is very much not what I’m looking for.

So with indoor scenes being a weakness and having basically zero reference images to work from, I’m afraid these rooms are going to look rather wild as I continue to draw more of them. I’m proud of the desk scene at least. That’s the first image in the game so I wanted to at least not hate it. While a few of the backgrounds I’ve done I do hate already. But we only have a month so can’t dwell on trying to fix them, it’s on to the next image.