Well hello everyone. Nobody has probably noticed that its been nearly a month since the game has had an update, since nobody really follows the game yet, but it was a burden felt by me especially. I had to deal with some emergency family stuff, which means that I had zero braincells left to keep working on Ren'Py and our game. Thank goodness the OtomeJam is two months long instead of one. Today is the first day that I've had time to sit down and actually put some new code down. Cheddar has been doing her part in the meantime, working on some character art that she'll share soon.

While I was in my brain slump, I did take the time to read up on an excellent blog by developer Arimia, and stumbled upon a game jam blog post they wrote. The game used as a case study was "Dahlia", and when I saw a screenshot of it, I was instantly impressed with how strong the visual direction was, particularly the UI organization. 

Of course I wanted to learn how to do this myself, and after poking around the forums and documentation to no avail, I threw my hands up and just decompiled the game itself so I could look at the code. Thank god someone made an online tool for it, because something I was trying to figure out for days was solved in like half an hour. Apparently there's a feature toggle you can access in Ren'Py called "NVL" mode which converts the game to this format and does most of the heavy lifting for you. About 3 hours of playing around later, this is what our game currently looks like:

I VASTLY prefer this UI organization to having the dialogue on the bottom, because there ends up being a lot of empty space on the screen  not taken up by characters or text. Now the characters can be much larger and closer, there's more space for text, and the backgrounds don't have to be quite as detailed. Obviously I haven't resized and positioned the characters yet, but that's hopefully coming soon! I will also share my notes at some point as to how this format was accomplished, as I've seen other visual novels do it but really couldn't find it written anywhere how to accomplish it exactly (the way I solved it was kind of hacky but hey, it worked)

Anyway yes, I highly recommend Game Resources Viewer to people who have some coding experience and are learning Ren'Py. It's particularly helpful to decompile game jam games, because in general they are much shorter and it's easier to find what you're looking for. I will have a much longer, in-detail rant about the friction involved with learning Ren'Py probably as a post-mortem later on. But for now I'm glad to be back on the programming horse and getting closer to a good basic setup, I continue to mutter my mantra under my breath when I get frustrated with this engine--"you only have to learn it once."