So I had to do a "final project" for college with a "real client". I have a solicitor friend and we came up with the idea of a visual novel "learning tool" to show young people what its like to be a solicitor.
The art took freakin forever to do, (probably 2-4 hours per piece of 18 pieces). Sketched copies, scanned and coloured in Photoshop in various ways until I figured out the proper way.
To begin with I was actually "re-drawing" after scanning by going over all grey space with white (...dont....ever...do....this.....). Then I tried just tracing over all lines with a black line tool. Eventually I found the "dodge" tool which lets you gradually remove greys starting with the lightest shade, so you end up with just your lines. Then you need to darken the lines, so you adjust image levels, make the darks super dark and whites super white. Then colour using paint brush and then the lasso tool when I realised it was much faster lol.
I started making it in Flash scene by scene but eventually when I came to the point of "storing" user input realised I couldn't utilise global variables in actionscript3 and needed to rewrite it to use Movieclips and be object orientated, rather than just separate Scenes with code for dialogue and no way to share variables across them.
Luckily I'd forseen this (forseen completely failing with only 2 days to go) and could use what I'd done in Flash up to this point for my Multimedia assignment. Instead I switched to the visual novel builder Ren'Py http://www.renpy.org . It's bloody brilliant and a few hours later and some more fucking image editing later I'd finished.
Unfortunately, as with the nature of college, the product is only worth like 30 marks and I have today to do the planning/testing/evaluation writeup bullshit that is worth 170 marks. And then tomorrow to do a whole database assignment that I wish would just disappear and die.
But after Friday I finish 2 years of college and, if I do manage to submit the work, should be going to University in September. (my 3rd attempt at university lol)
Anyway the whole point of this post is to brag about my sick visual novel that turned out fucking genius after i wrote it with no sleep for 2 days delirious as fuck. Enjoy
ps: renpy saves game files as an executable so i just made a youtube recording of the game instead
nicely spotted, never noticed. and just confirmed that i had spelt "definitely" wrong (twice) but thats an ez change. that fucking word i have never spelt right so i dont feel bad about it lol.
theres a metric ton of stuff i would have done differently (buy a fucking graphics tablet for one)
im not sure either. i managed to squeeze out some stuff from my friend between dota games. i got
"has to deal with peoples cases, maybe people management skills" -> talk to angry client "might talk to someone about their application for housing benefits" -> homeless guy "might assist a barrister in court, has to get the details of a case ready and present them to him" -> correcting the barrister
its hard to relate with fresh perspective to something you've made, all the dialogue and scenes make sense to me coz i know what they're supposed to represent from the getgo.
On May 22 2014 20:19 FFGenerations wrote: that fucking word i have never spelt right so i dont feel bad about it lol.
I definitely know that feeling .
Spelled it definately for years, and only in the past few months have I begun to correct my ways (I also do a lot of changing i's to a's when they're pronounced like that i in definitely, though).
Think about it without the de-. Finite is way more clearly an -ite. Finate just looks and sounds wrong. Once you have finite dress it up (finite -> finitely -> definitely)
On May 22 2014 21:58 Deleuze wrote: This looks really, interesting - was there a theoretical grounding in your choice to create a learning resource in this way?
I pretty much figured I wanted to do a vn (maybe I should have done art instead of coding lol) and then thought of ways to get away with it. My friend is an accountant and I said how about you be my client and I do a vn about someone going to work as an accountant. He said that's retarded and to do solicitor instead.
By theoretical grounding i'm not sure what else you mean. Its probably pretty cool to be able to follow a visual novel that follows a particular career, like fireman or policeman, and be able to see exactly what they get up to (firemen just sit around all day until the bell rings, right?)
My other idea was to do a Dota hero common counters application where you can click a hero image and it'll show you common counters (like, idk, click any hero and it'll tell you pheonix counters him)
I started doing the vn in Flash but fucked up by not leaving any time, not doing any research, and realising I needed to go object orientated structure and had done everything wrong, so I switched to Ren'Py. I'll upload both the flash and renpy files at some point
On May 23 2014 04:31 radscorpion9 wrote: I really really liked the music..was a fun, cute game!
here's a download link for the game and flash files
you will need to unzip the files into a folder
the flash file (not the full game) is PROJECTFLASH.swf and can just be dragged into your web browser the game exe is PROJECT.exe and runs on windows assets (pix and music) are in the game folder and you can also see the script.rpy and options.rpy i used here zip file size is 15mb
EPT
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