I am making a dating sim and need to know how:
*To display images
*Add and play Music or effects
*Type in for correct answer(And change to next passage)
*Custom Naming of Character and able to post name
*make variables for love and hate
*Gauge for love/hate
*locking passages to where they can't be clicked unless love is enough
Just got into Twine and need help. Thanks for the help!
Comments
For example, how to display images images can be found here, and how to play audio can be found here. For custom character names, love and hate, you're going to need variables, which is covered in the 3rd episode of the video series I linked.
Once you've made a start and have reached the point where you're asking more specific questions, then we'll be able to give you more specific advice.
Note: Twine 2 currently cannot display images with relative paths in Play or Test. You'd have to publish your project to test any such images.
Use <<cacheaudio>> in the StoryInit special passage to setup your tracks. Also, possibly, <<createplaylist>> to setup any playlists you wish to make.
Once they're all setup, you use <<audio>> to manipulate individual tracks and <<playlist>> to manipulate playlists.
Is that two questions?
Text entry may be done via <<textbox>> or <<textarea>>. The former will likely be what you want as the latter is only really useful if you want the player to be able to enter large amounts of text.
As far as testing the answer for correctness, you should define what you're looking for more clearly first.
You'll probably want to use <<textbox>>.
What does "post name" mean? If you meant print the name, then assuming you do something like the following: Then to print the value of the $name story variable later, you'd simply do something like the following:
First. Check out the docs for variables and <<set>>.
Do you want them to be discrete values or opposite ends of a single value's spectrum? I'm going to assume the latter for now.
For example, here we setup a story variable named $affection in the StoryInit special passage: Later on as the sim progresses, you may modify $affection like so:
What kind? I assume you mean like some kind of bar?
You don't lock passages per se, you gate any links leading to said passages via <<if>>. For example, assume you're using the $affection story variable from above: Here's an extended example:
>gauges for love and hate
might just be show $affection
Not that I'm implying one is better than the other for indie games, rather I'm wondering if Renpy offers some advantage in this particular visual-heavy genre.
As I've got some experience with Ren'py myself - It's because mainly you need art assets, and a text editor. It's a very user-friendly system - once you get the hang of it. But TWINE can also output images as well. Ren'py is MORE on the visual output and text. Backgrounds, Character Sprites, effects, etc. But TWINE is more of a literature program - although you can do both in TWINE - Images and Text to tell a story.
I hope that makes some sense lol.
If you have a story, and you need some art for effect, use Ren'py.
That said, for the sake of this tangent, let's assume a VN is what Alexisdesu hopes to make.
The entire point of Ren'Py is to be a visual novel engine, so writing a VN in it is most definitely playing to its strengths. It's also been around for a while, so it's fairly mature.
That said, there's nothing particularly complicated about a pure visual novel, so most story formats could also handle the job, if not quite as well out of the box.
The hardest part of making a visual novel, by far, is the artwork.
Twine is ultimately more powerful for a visual novel, just like Unity is ulimately more powerful than both. Eg Twine can give you responsive resolution scaling (I hate playing RenPy visual novels that require me to set the resolution before every game... ugh), as well as fancy CSS and canvas transition animations. I have never seen any visuals from RenPy that rival Canvas or WebGL used by experienced hands.
However, making Twine into a visual novel requires CSS/javascript/maybe canvas coding skills, and using Unity obviously requires some experience there.
I'm not sure I'd recommend Twine for visuals if you have no CSS experience.
I made a mobile game in Unity once after doing a course. It was a rather agonizing experience, but at the same time, there was a lot of flexibility and power to branch from 2d to 3d with no real restrictions other than your ability to code it. (So for me, a fairly large roadblock. :P )
One of the reasons I was wondering about it was the longevity factor. Since Twine uses HTML as a base, I wonder how long a game made in it will functionally last. E.g. Will people in 10 years be able to play it when browsers continue to change?
I'm aware that all games basically have a somewhat finite lifespan in the end as drivers and OS's change or stop being supported.
When looking at Renpy and Unity, they seem to be a self enclosed bubble that you download. But that may be quite deceiving, since I've got very little idea of what's going on in the back-end.
(Of course, using SugarCube, I've got all these pre-built macros and I don't have to touch Javascript unless I'm wanting to do something fancy.).
But I didn't realize RenPy didn't have responsive resolution scaling, which was interesting to hear.
You can think of them as a Virtual Machine that sits on top of your OS, and the VM uses the OS's features to run the game (image). At some point in the life-cycle of the OS an older VM will stop working, you rely on the developer of the VM to add support for later releases of the OS as well as the ability (backward-compatibility) to run older game-images on the new VM.