(no subject)

So, I downloaded Ren'Py the other day, and I've been playing around with it. I've been adapting my Shadow Dancer story for it, since it's already kind of suited to a visual novel. (Well... actually it's more suited to a kinetic novel; there aren't exactly a whole lot of paths, so most of the choices are nothing more than fluff. But I am doing the two-perspective thing - you can play as either character - and I do plan on implementing good/bad ends. I mean, Merle's bad end is more of a meh end, but Lloyd's is definitely a bad end.) There's a ton of drawing, most of which I haven't done (main/side portraits in four different outfits for both Merle and Lloyd portraits for at least four minor characters - two each, so far - and nine or ten backgrounds; I have three of Merle's portrait sets done and I'm using solid colours as 'moods' for five of the backgrounds) and also a ton of writing, really, but it's still pretty fun.

Well. Except for the part where Ren'Py throws errors at me and I spend ten minutes trying to figure out what went wrong. Mostly it's that something's indented wrong or I forgot a double quote somewhere, and those are easy to fix, but sometimes I can't figure out why it doesn't like my image declarations or why the pause function I got off an official reference page isn't working, and then I have to google around for help. (I didn't actually have to google for the image declarations, although I did - I just had commas in unexpected places. Perfectly understandable, since while those image declarations didn't need commas, ones I was using elsewhere did.)

Programming, everybody! And I haven't even gotten deep into the Python stuff. (Although with any luck, the furthest I get into that will be defining image locations on-screen and setting/using variables.)

Then, because obviously the correct thing to do when procrastinating the visual novel nobody's telling you to work on is to start another one, I threw some clanner stuff up in a new project. That one has fun stuff like a custom title and chapters and stuff, which I'm modelling after... sentai shows? Shounen anime? I'm not sure which one it is, but it's silly stuff like "Spinel Sun's Fearsome Healer! The Meaning of Power" and "Disaster Strikes! The Secret of Volker". I mean, I called the game "Spinel Sun - The Clan of Adventurers!" for crying out loud. (The clan is called Spinel Sun, if that's not painstakingly obvious.)

I guess... Shadow dancer is the one I'm doing seriously, and Spinel Sun is the one I swap to whenever I want a fun break. (Even though cutesy titles are really the only silly part of the whole thing... the plot's actually pretty serious. So it's really not much of a break at all, except maybe from the extreme awkwardness of Merle and Lloyd awkwardly dorking out all over the place. Although all the comments I'm adding about Lloyd's dialogue/behaviour in Merle's path are pretty fun, even if they're mostly there to remind me of the kinds of things he should be thinking about in his versions of those scenes.)

Ah... I'm even starting to want to write in Ren'Py form, even here. I've noticed my syntax and word choice changes a lot when I'm writing for either Sd or SS; it feels more... anime, I guess is the way to put it? Well, I guess it's part bad tumblr grammar and part anime. A lot of the visual novels I've played are written pretty anime, so that's probably why.

...and I'm going to end up sleeping forever at this rate, I just know it. I've been trying not to stay up late, but it hasn't been working. Maybe if I get up when my alarm goes off later...? I guess we'll see.