FIRST EDITION John Oliver Digital Immersion REN PY Independent Directed Studies Project - 2014
CHAPTER 1 INTRO My name is Kyle Sim. I am a Grade 9 student in the John Oliver Mini School Program. I like Video Games, Anime and anything related to anime. I wanted to make a Visual Novel because I had recently played a few and felt as if I could make one myself. I discovered Ren Py and found it pretty easy to use and understand.
PROPOSAL CHAPTER 1 I am going to be using a program called Ren Py. Ren Py is a Visual Novel creator that uses Python as its main code. Its easy to learn script language allows users to efficiently make their own simple stories or life simulation games. It has the capability to make high quality games assuming the user has the time and skill to code it. I am making my own Visual Novel with this program. Visual Novels are a Choose your own adventure type of game. There are choices for you to choose and the outcome of the story changes according to the choices you make. I hope I will make you interested in these types of games. The Ren Py Visual Novel Engine logo 2
PROCESS TIMELINE CHAPTER 1 I thought of doing this project after playing a Visual Novel called Katawa Shoujo. As I was reading about the game, I saw that Katawa Shoujo was made by a group of people using Ren Py. I then decided to search up what Ren Py was. I discovered that it was a Visual Novel Engine that was designed to allow ordinary people to make their own Visual Novels. At first I thought: This seems like something I can do. I downloaded it but never ended up using it until I had to come up with an idea for my project. I was searching through programs on my Mac to do the project on. Then I saw Ren Py, just sitting there collecting cyber dust. I opened it up and started messing around. I found it quite easy to use and started writing my first Visual Novel. It was around this time when I noticed that my coding and story writing skills were horrible. I then studied up on the code and learned how to do more complex actions in Ren Py. Unfortunately, this made my Visual Novel very outdated. I decided to just scrap the first one and start a new story altogether. This was a great decision and I was able to make up for lost time with greater quality. About here is where my mind gets a ridiculous idea. The idea that I had come up with was to make EVERYTHING myself excluding the Ren Py program. I knew that I wouldn t have enough time so I devised a plan. I would make a preview version of my Visual Novel for the project. This version would include sprites made by a Character Generator and backgrounds and music from the internet. They would act as placeholders until I had more time to actually make everything myself. I kept on working on my Visual Novel and eventually finished the story s introduction. I was near the due date so I stopped it there, making the end a cliffhanger. This cliffhanger would later lead into the main story once I work on more on the game. 3
ASSESSMENT CHAPTER 1 HOW I GRADE MYSELF I am grading myself on four things: 1. Content - How much stuff is in the Visual Novel. How many characters, locations and effects. 2. Originality - How unique is the storyline and concepts. Comparing it to other Visual Novels (professional and fan-made) and see how different the ideas are. 3. Knowledge of Program - How well I know how to use Ren Py. Do I know how to use the commands correctly? Am I spacing the code properly? RUBRIC 4. Work Habit - How I have been working on my Visual Novel. Do I work on it everyday? For how long? 1. Content 2. Originality 3. Knowledge of Program 4. Work Habit 4
RESOURCES AND PUBLICATIONS Learning Resource and Citations: - Ren Py Wiki: http://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/ Wiki_Home_Page - Lemma Soft Forums: http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/ - The Ren Py Tutorial Game (Comes with the Ren Py program) - Backgrounds: http://mao.sub.jp/ - Music: Various Game/Anime OSTs and Sound Effects v
ARTIFACTS Project Files A picture of the Ren Py launcher layout Here are some basic images of what is preferably required to make your own Visual Novel. The Ren Py Tutorial game 6
FINAL PRODUCT Download link to demo for Mac on Mediafire: https://www.mediafire.com/?tb1caek80z8qgao vii
REFLECTION WHAT I LEARNED CHAPTER 1 Ren Py is an easy to learn program. I figured out how to do the coding quite quickly. Since Ren Py is used in making Visual Novels, the basic code that you need to know is quite little. All you need are basic commands to add images and text. If you want to make your Visual Novel more exciting, Ren Py does have more complex code for you to do so. I think it is a good program for beginners (like me) to use. The amount of time spent on a Visual Novel is more on writing the story. I was very bad at writing stories but I think I got some practice while using Ren Py. However, most of the Visual Novel was just improvisation and I was just lucky that the story ended up making sense. If you want to make a Visual Novel, you have to make sure that you plan your story first or have a friend who can do that. Having a large group of friends to work on it is useful too. 8
ARTIFACT OF LEARNING Evidence of process oriented learning that takes many forms such as textual, visual, audio or multimedia. Also, artifacts of learning should be original creations authored by the learner that may be built from scratch or remixes or mashups based on intrinsic or extrinsic inspiration. Related Glossary Terms Drag related terms here Index Find Term