Why your VN Characters feel Wooden (and How to Fix it!) 

Thank you! I'm glad I'm helping, and best of luck on your first visual novel!

I'll add it to my list!

Oof, yes please!

I'm glad this will be some help! Best of luck for Winter VN Jam!

Congrats! Best of luck on the jam!

I'm getting a video idea 🤔

@@vimi Haha, looking forward to it :D

That's why it's helpful for myself to make these videos - it forces me to think critically about my design sensibilities and choices, and codify them so I tactfully use them in the future!

This formula really only works in terms of how the player character interacts with characters around them, and it's not something that needs to necessarily be applied to games; just a writing tool that may have some overlap with the narrative processes of preexisting games! If you were to take this tool and apply it to that sort of interaction, I'd have Athlete-Chan offer a challenge to the player: run X number of times within Y days, and depending on that, she'd offer them "a reward". This would be an extended Expose period, with the change depending on whether or not the player hit expectations.

Thank you very much!

I am having more fun with Ultra Despair Girls than I thought I'd have!

@@vimi omg AND ur a dr fan? 😭 best renpy channel ever

Hell yeah!

Thank you!

Thanks! I'm glad you've been enjoying them!

Thanks! It's a lot of effort, but hopefully my content helps!

Thank you! I'm glad you liked it!

Thank you!

Glad I could help!

Thanks!

Thank you!

Thank you! I'm doing my best!

Thanks! I'me glad they've been a help!

Slightly different, but close enough! Probably should have said "before" instead of "until", but it's the same basic message - the player needs to have the character established and enforced before hitting the Expose + Change stages!

Glad you like it!

I'll get back to that with some genre-specific writing videos!

Thanks! I should have a new video out in less than a month, but I'm in the middle of a long term project that has taken a lot of my attention, that I might want to make some videos about someday

@@vimi _"I'm in the middle of a long term project that has taken a lot of my attention"_ That sounds exciting! Love to hear that. And, whether you release another video or not anytime soon, long as you're doing well and enjoying (at least overall since sometimes I'm sure it can be a bit frustrating lol) what you're doing. Just wanted to thank you and check in on you is all cause you're more than your entertaining and informative videos.

Hi :) I'm currently running through a few Danganronpa games (including Ultra Despair Girls!), and I also enjoy them a lot!

@@vimi HA! I actually finished Part 1 roughly before christmas and cant wait to start part 2 soon! And of course i am also looking forward to Ultra Despair Girls! Generally ,the characters and story telling are just SO SO good! And i feel they really followed the principles of your vidceo (regarding character changes and interactions) to the tee. And theres not a single character that i dont AT LEAST appreciate!

Anything is possible, but not everything is advisable. Do not try to make a fighting game in Ren'py.

There's a difference between "Immersion breaking" and "incongruous", and as long as you stay within standard design conventions, players will accept it in stride. You can put a contextual "!" exclamation mark icon over something they haven't pressed before, give it a little animated wiggle, and that should be enough to get players to press on an object of interest. As long as you have the design match the rest of your UI, it doesn't read as "out of place"; the player will see it as an extension of the games existing interface. If that's not enough (and it might not be!) use a pop up that says "Click the "!" icon for more lore about the world", that appears if they haven't pressed a "!" within a the last few interactions.

Put in whatever mechanics and systems you feel would be fun in your game, but ultimately, clear communication to the players is critically important! When your game is content complete, get some friends, family, and strangers to be playtesters, and pay attention to what the players understand, what they miss, or any other unintended behavior you're producing through your systems. Usually, the most problematic elements will be the ones you least expected! In my first solo-developed game, I removed manual saving, and had the game autosave regularly instead. Unfortunately though, I didn't explicitly communicate the autosave feature to the players, so there were a few people who thought they had to play the ALL the game endings through in one sitting, instead of the intended "casual half-hour playthrough with repeat gameplay" behavior I was looking for! The solution? An "Autosaved!" popup at the end of each of the 5-minute chapters. Nothing patronizing about it, just simple communication. Best of luck on your project!

@@vimi Thank you for replying. Yes, my game isn't done yet, but I plan to post the demo for a jam in a month and that's why I asked. A friend of mine did play it and he actually complained that I didn't give that much info about the MC right off the bat which I found a bit surprising and wasn't expecting. I guess I put too much of the MC's info outside of the intro and that might make the player not feel engaged in the story.

It's definitely an adjustment! Lots of "implied" responses, actions replacing words, no internal monologue to fall back on, and you'll be relying on a lot more monologues! Having a narrator helps, though, if you can get away with it!

@@vimi Totally. One of the hardest parts is having scenes end in a natural way or to properly get characters to talk and ask things. A narrator definitely helps during scene transitions. One question I have is if you'll ever do a video on code for updating ypur visual novel after you've released it? Hard to find proper guides on it.

@@angelos3049 I just reupload the game to itch.io or steam - your save files are generally saved to a different part of the user's computer, so players can do a complete reinstall, and it shouldn't affect their saves! If you want episodic DLC, there are some workarounds, but I'd have to test them before I can do a video on them!

Working on it!

Try saving your audio as different audio file types. Renpy won't recognize certain types of waveforms, so I use the program Audacity to change up the soundfile exports.

I actually do not know how to do that yet! I have some ideas on how it can be implemented, though 🧠

​@@vimi I looked around and someone suggested something to do with math and dot product and steering behaviour... This to say all I want it for is to make a feline character follow the cursor when it is a red dot, lol.

​​ @Fabio Kun Honestly, that sounds about right, but if you're willing to compromise your vision, you can make it much simpler! If you wanted to do exactly that, have the character's eyes follow the cursor, you would have to create a custom class definition to track the cursor, and then interpolating that data in real time would require a separate function that would be pretty elaborate too. Probably a lot of time to code it properly, or at least modify code you found from someone else. If you're willing to go dumb basic with it though, you could create a screen with a series of invisible buttons, and then depending on which button you're hovering over, change the pupils to a new position aimed at that general area. Way less time to do that! If you wanted to go EVEN SIMPLER, you can change that section of your game so you need to aim the laser pointer at a particular spot to get the character reaction, and until then, the feline character will pretend they don't even care about the laser pointer. Literally a one button screen, and the restraints lend themselves to some structured interaction. Personally, I like simplifying the interactions as much as I can, since it tends to forces me to be more creative with the implementation, and once I have the interaction made, I start to think of all the other different ways I can reuse, reskin, and recontextualize that mechanic throughout my game!

Action Editor is going to look a lot different another year from now too! Most of the basics are still the same, though! From what I recall, the big difference is now the sliding bars are the animation timeline instead of a slider for the value, so now you can just want to adjust those numbers by tapping, holding, and sliding your mouse up or down to change the number.

When you define a character, you don't have to give it a name. Edit: I'm pretty sure the minimum amount of code you'd need to define a character without a name is "define n=Character()"

@@vimi ok thank you but how do i use a different png for a a specific characters textbox

@@scrotumlamp6306 "define n = Character (window_background="your_image_here.png")" www.renpy.org/doc/html/dialogue.html#Character

How are you handling your "cycle"? I also want to compare!

@@vimi Oh thanks. You see I was working on kind of a general Flowchart for narratives within routes. You meet the character (1st Impression) => 2nd Encounter(You get involved)=> Empathy(You see the pieces of a character's conflict) =>Special (Every Problem and Person Is different , Spice It Up)=>Conflict (The root of the problem) =>Doubt=>Choice => Resolution.

Btw love your channel. It's such a Helpful Dynamic Edutaiment and I'm all in, I've already seen all of your videos .

That's "Dream Daddy"!

@@vimi thank you for letting me know :)

Stock footage sites are hilarious like that

🙂 hi!

nice

Hi!