do you got any tips to start comic pages? Or any tutorial you would recommend in mind

Look I know how to use a read more tag now

I've no tutorials in mind really. I did look through plenty of them way in the beginning, but later found what worked for me the most! And it's just having your script and deciding how much of it you want to jam in that one page, and most importantly, what panel you want the page to end with so the cut-off doesn't feel clunky. Check how much space your dialogue takes before sketching, make sure it has room to breathe.

I like it when there's at least one establishing shot in the page that shows the characters in relation to each other and the environment. Sometimes you can get away with not including it but a pageful of headshots gets boring easily.

Some people just sketch freely and add build the panels after that, it's pretty good for more action-packed scenes since not being bound by an existing layout tends to make things livelier. I sometimes use this for silent pages, since they're the ones that give me the most grief to plan.

If you're on the boat of being afraid to actually START making a comic, there's plenty of you! It's self-preservation talking, and it's so super normal, especially if you've never made a comic before. Comicing is hard work and offers a tons of things to keep track on. In the very start your story's spine is so flexible it's hard to see how you can make it hold weight, but with every page you'll be cementing it. Half of my comic feels wobbly right now because I'm not there yet, but 200+ finished pages have told me it'll be okay. It'll hold weight when we get there, because all that work we've done till then is now foundation.

I won't lie, sometimes paging is pain in the ass. Sometimes it's so hard to figure out what kind of shot to use, how to avoid repetition in conversations, deciding on panel size, how to fit all in, where to cut the page. Sometimes I've feared that this is where it ends, I can't figure this out, but then I remember I have so much done already, and I've met these troubles before. It doesn't need to be perfect, just get it over with! The next page will be better.

With these in mind, it'll get so much easier after you've started. White canvas is scary, were it a new page or a whole new comic.

Posting some glitchy shenanigans from the pre-sequel

IT WORKS! BY HECK, IT WORKS!!!!!

Is it slightly mad to get this excited about text animation?

Yes. Yes it is. But this took me the better part of 3 DAYS to get working. So I reserve the right to get unreasonably excited.

Text from Pléhtin's route, with Leiz and Leíla talking about aggravating their elder brother. Early stuff, so there are probably spelling and grammar mistakes, apologies.

There is a mouse click in between the two animated lines. The plain black presentation is NOT how it will be in the final game, I'm just using a clean file to run experiments in.

It might not be that clear what's going on here, but effectively what I'm doing is scripting each line to print in a mimicry of the timing experienced if the characters were speaking, small pauses for commas, different pacing for if a section is spoken quickly or slowly, etc. The timings here are not as I want them, and I'd like to overlay a fade to make everything read as less robotic.

There's a ludicrous amount going on under the hood to make this all behave nicely.

Hello! I was a big fan of the series a while a go and it is lovely to see that you are back. I'm terribly sorry that other anons put you through a lot with the voting aspect of the game. Absolutely no one deserves death threats for a story that they are bringing to us for free. However, I am not going to lie, I always feel a bit worried when a fandom majority vote is what has long lasting effects on character life/death. It was ok when it was everyone voting with an equal effect. Now there will be a wealth gap to vote. Only people that pay can contribute. And at least where I'm from wealth looks a certain kind of way.

Since you have characters that are in a minority it feels... Bad. Maybe I'm projecting how racist and transphobic my home country is on the vote for this game. I also don't want you to feel like this is an attack on you because that is not my intent at all! I love the diversity in the love interests and it was what brought me to the game initially. I am worried that if you do a majority vote on Patreon that characters that aren't white/cis will face a harsher vote. Trans lives are in danger and I was not surprised when a nonbinary character died first. I was part of the fandom and people treated them very grossly (it actually made me step away for a bit as well). There were many options but the vocally out and proud person got the boot first. What I'm saying is I trust you more than your Patreon supporters. If the people can't all vote as one, due to the actions of some terrible people, then maybe we shouldn't vote at all

anon, i totally understand your concerns because i absolutely shared them. to be completely honest with you, i had totally misjudged which characters i thought were popular or not and watching the three non binary cast members struggle through that first vote felt Bad. my personal disappointment about ellis being the character to receive the least votes in the vote contributed in no small part to the twist in chapter 3 and their revised arc (which was Not planned when i set out writing body count hahaha). howeverrrrrr, i did learn a lot from the process.

my main motivator behind making the vote patreon exclusive was that the voters would be genuinely invested in the game and that the polling would be much harder to game or manipulate. selfishly, i also think it will reduce a certain amount of the absolute barrage of wild anons from the first time around haha!

in addition to that, though, i think its important that i reaffirm what i have said from the start: i am acutely aware that in interactive fiction in general and particularly on tumblr there is a strong preference for white male characters, and i am not here to write some kind of gross POC/women/nb slasher. as much as i want the audience to have a say in the direction the story takes, i ultimately have final say on what happens in the story that i am writing.

the main way that i intend to have oversight of the voting process is by who appears on the polls in the first place; the first poll was the last time the whole cast will be available for a vote at the same time. since ellis, one of three NB cast members, was the first character to die, i've said that neither of the other NB cast members will appear on future polls. if it's women and POC suffering in the next vote, then i'll be applying similar logic. if that means we get towards the end and we need a white boy only poll then so be it!

that said, if people cannot behave then i will simply take away their toys. although i consider the voting mechanic to be one of the things that makes body count unique and fun, i'm absolutely not above doing away with it if there are Shenanigans that spoil it, ya know?

anyway, i hope that assuages some of your concerns! sorry for another giant wall of text wow i simply cannot answer a question concisely atm

So I've recently started learning Ren'Py. I'm glad to say it is pretty easy and I've made a few test VNs that are functional, which makes me very happy.

However, I'm aiming to make HSS-based projects, so I do want it to resemble the Choices app's style like ILW and BB:TS do. But unfortunately, I'm having a bit of trouble achieving that.

I tried changing the text box, but it was difficult to fit the text into it right. And the buttons were even worse because they always came out looking wonky. And that isn't even accounting for the screen orientation– the version I have gives me only four resolution options that are all in landscape format.

Do you guys have any tips on how to effectively make my projects look more like the Choices style? Thanks!

The default settings for renpy are all geared towards landscape orientation. You’ll need to find in your game settings where it establishes the screen size. I think it’s in options.rpy but I don’t remember… we used 768 x 1360 iirc.

Whats happening with the buttons is that most likely, the set size for the choice button isn’t the same as your actual choice button. So if your choice button image is 768 x 150 or something but in the gui file, it’s set as like, 500 x 200, it’ll stretch and resize your image, distorting it into a weird looking shape.

As for text boxes and such, we basically had three different text styles: narration, player character, and NPC. The narrator had no speaker so if we never specified who the character was for dialogue, the game automatically routed it to use the narrator “style.” Then whoever was set to the playable character would have their text on the left side, and every other person would be on the right side. We did this in the screens file by customizing the say screen.

My main advice honestly is to just get in there, read documentation, test things out, and then get involved in renpy community forums. There are a lot full of really helpful people. I used the lemmasoft forums a lot, as well as the Renpy discord server. You can ask for help on specific issues and share what your code looks like so people can give you suggestions on how to tweak it the way you want.

Good luck with your HSS fan projects!

I have a suspicion that where tumblr used to randomly unfollow accounts for you, it now randomly blocks them. The usual symptom is a note when you try to comment a post, that "some comments may have been hidden or removed". I've heard this from three different people now, and experienced it myself and it's sounding like more than coincidence to me. Of course that's hard to prove because you can't go and ask people, if or why they blocked you.

So yesterday I had the idea to go to my own blocked-list – and I found three Simblrs there. They all had something with Sims in the title and posted Sims content. Now it's entirely possible that they started life as empty accounts with fishy-sounding names and I mistook them for bots when they followed me. At least one went rather far back though, so I wonder when that may have been.

Idk, I'm just putting this out there, because I think it may be something to be aware of. And be it only that you should sometimes check your blocked-list.

Are you able to talk about how you're going to approach Lea's character arc on the rival reassignment route?

Will it be a case of variances versus outher routes, flavour text, Lea going off with other companions at certain points in place of the Hunter?

I ask because admittedly I thought this is content we would not see on their route. Much like how certain choices can lock us out of a romance, I figured the same would apply for non-romance content.

Although typing that, in that scenario I guess if the player played their cards right, they could end up in a situation where the companions are just dropping one-liners like it's a post-story Bioware game.

That would make the Hunter a very lonely, lonely person. Eh, moreso than they currently are given everything.

yeah for the most part the scenes are just going to be different, but the same information will be relayed to the player.

you can potentially miss out on some scenes if you piss Lea off too much, or any of the companions for that matter; there are scenes in the second half of ch2 with Noel, for instance, that can make him very angry with you and will change the way that scene goes, and if you've been romancing him you'll miss out on a potential romantic scene since he'll cut the conversation short. same with Merry. Clementine is the only one exempt from this in ch2 because i don't give you the option to be mean to them 😇 but their scenes will differ whether or not they got hurt or if you traded them or not, etc.

with Lea, the structure of the scene and the dialogue choices will change, depending on your relationship, as well as how they respond to the dialogue depending on whether or not you agreed to talk to them later, or if you reaffirmed your partnership, if you yelled at them or let them down gently...

choices in one scene if you're "rivals":

choice 1: "I wanted a clean break." choice 2: "…I don't know." choice 3: "I think I just wanted to hurt you." choice 4: "I had to do something!"

versus the same scene and choices as "partners":

choice 1: "I don't know." choice 2: "I thought I could just ignore it..." choice 3: "I was scared." choice 4: "I don't trust you, Lea."

and, again, the exchange leading up to these choices is also different, mainly the tone and attitude of Lea, though the same information is exchanged. and there's a whole other set of scenes for if Lea is injured by Duncan that vary in the same way.

if you want to see it in action i would point you over to my other work, blood choke, which is farther along relationship-wise than tnp and has a significant amount of branching depending on how you treat the characters.

(hopefully this also sheds some light on why this shit is taking me so long to write 💀 lmfao)

there are going to be points of no return with the companions, you can potentially be locked out of Clem's and Lea's romance routes already, and if you're rivalry crosses the line into actively hostile, the companions will respond likewise. i wouldn't say it locks you out of their story arc, but it will change it, if that makes sense.

In this age of remasters, something I appreciate with The Master Chief Collection is how you can switch between old and new graphics instantaneously. Can you explain how this mechanic works? Big thanks!

Once upon a time, back in the ancient years of 2009 and 2010, Bungie was developing its final Halo game - Halo: Reach - with intentions to then go their own way. Microsoft created a new studio named 343 Industries to take over after the split from Bungie. 343 co-developed the Halo Legends animated series and worked with Bungie on Halo: Reach to learn the Halo development ropes, and then worked with Saber Interactive and Certain Affinity to develop Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. Halo Anniversary (2011) was the first appearance of the classic graphics toggle feature.

From what I've been told, the way it works is that modern hardware is capable of doing much more than simply running the old game engine with upscaled visuals, so Saber Interactive built a "secondary engine" to work in tandem with the original. This technology basically uses the extra memory and cycles to load and handle the computations needed for both old and new graphics simultaneously so you can hot swap between them with load time since both sets of graphics are loaded at all times. Saber also worked on Halo 2 Anniversary and brought their hot swapping tech to H2A as well.

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IVE BEEN MEANING TO POST THIS AND CONTINUOUSLY FORGETTING! BUT HEIGHT REFERENCE SHEET!

stuff on the reference sheets in the pinned post is just slowly becoming less relevant-

I recently added my two cents to a thread about organising CC at PBK. After I answered, an idea resurfaced, that I pondered before: Whether I should add pictures to my CC folders, so I know, what I'm looking at right away. I'll probably won't do that, because of increased loading times. But I pondered, whether it would be a good idea to have a folder on my external drive with a lot of pictures and renaming them, so they have the same name as the folder. Or create a shortcut, that links the picture? Although 80% of the time, I know what I'm looking at or have a descriptive file name, so I can just google it 🤔

tl;dr: Do any of you guys add pictures to your downloads folder?

Just as a general reminder, if you want to submit quotes, you have to go through the submissions tab, not asks. You also have to source your quote, though I will accept ‘Source: Unknown’ if you don’t know where the quote is originally from.

How do you achieve GS' ...simple? line style? Like you don't focus on too much detail with the lines and it's still able to be really solid! I'm not sure if you would be open to art tutorials/advice etc though so I apologise if you aren't aa,,

It might be some unconscious disney/animation mindset. If you look at stills of Lion King, Spirit, Bambi and so on, there's not that many lines inside the outer lineart. It's always looked very pretty to me so I used it for GS, and to this day I struggle to add much detail when it comes to linearted pieces. I try to find the most prominent parts inside the lineart, like cheek, spine or shoulders. It's much like drawing cats! They're just outlines. If you line their body parts too much they often stop being cats in my eyes. That's not the case for many animals, but it works with this kind of art style.

I just use a small sharp brush, crank stabilization to max and go at it. If I get wild with it, I might add a fur tuft. Or a wrinkle.

So uhh, I messed around in the Tales files, tried to swap Vasquez with Rhys in EP 4 but due to differences in how their models are handled, the only viable solution was to have a version where Rhys' mouth and eyes don't move. So, enjoy some rhack-centric scenes and "Dead Stare Rhys".

Bonus stills under cut!

In dev news:

I've mostly got this behaving itself now. ¬¬ mostly...

But I wondered if folks would be interested to see what this line looks like code side:

The mode and timings are divided from the text with a _, while text is sectioned off to allow for multiple timings and behaviours using a |.

I've also just patched in a few extra lines which allows me to write like this:

Note the 'a' instead of the previous instance of a mode_timing bit. This is auto behaviour, it takes the mode and the individual character or word timing from the previous section, allowing me to print the text at the same rate, but add pauses for extra effect.

Cross all available appendages that this keeps behaving itself going forward...

I just wanted to say I love how the game looks on Twine!

eeeeeeeeee thank you glad you enjoy! cannot stress enough that all the work of making it look all saucy was @nyehilismwriting who is a coding god (unlike me, who is the opposite of coding god. coding satan?).

hi!

after hearing the news about the delay, i am just curious to know what happened so suddenly that ch22 needs heavy rewriting?

as a writer and it lives within enjoyer, i cant help but wonder why the direction/ideas for that chapter werent working for you all that it needed to be greatly altered? in vague details, without spoilers, and only if you all feel like sharing a bit about your process with brainstorming plot ideas/story direction, of course.

It's not so much that we're changing what happens, but more how it happens. a big part of it was that necessary lore and answers weren't properly communicated, so we need to find better ways to communicate all the information crucial to fully understand and appreciate the endings you receive. there was a disconnect between what we were trying to convey and what the testers actually understood, so we're working to fix that! these edits won't necessarily take a very long time to do, but between these edits, and needing time to test them, and editing, programming, and testing chapter 23 (which is over 70k words alone), there was a lot that needed to get done, and I knew that three weeks wouldn't be enough to do it all.