Hey there.
You may have noticed that I did not post anything last Sunday. Nor did I post a make-up entry on Wednesday. And true enough, neither of those things happened.
I just want you to know, I’m fine and nothing is wrong. Except that I don’t have the slightest inkling of inspiration to write anything. So yeah, I guess that’s kinda something wrong. But not really, you know?
I mean, I supposedly write for fun — I’m certainly not aiming to get paid for this nonsense. But I don’t know, maybe if I had something like expectations and a real deadline, I’d be able to force myself to come up with something. But yeah, sorry, I’ve got nothing.
…
By the way, does anyone know what a video game script looks like? Is it something like a play, with gameplay references instead of stage directions? The reason I ask, I keep getting ideas for stories that (I think) would be better served by linking it to gameplay. (Or I’ve been playing so many games, I’ve started seeing everything in reference to them, but never mind.)
Case in point, I’ve been playing a game on Switch that just came out called Alchemist Simulator — by the by, I’d suggest giving the game a miss. It has some interesting ideas, but the implementation is pretty weak. Well, maybe it was better on PC, but the Switch port is pretty rough going.
Anyway, the game started me thinking about being an alchemist, professionally, and then began to snowball a bit as I imagined an old alchemist who had created some ultimate item, only to blow up his own lab to keep his creation away from the people in charge of the country or whatever. Then the story would move forward a couple decades or so, and focus on a gloomy young man in a school for alchemy…
…Ok, the story has a lot of influence from Mana Khemia, fine. (Incidentally, Mana Khemia is a great game from the PS2 era, and while I’d love to suggest you play it, good luck finding it these days. There was a PSP port as well, which was awful. Apropos of nothing, I guess.) The point is, alchemy is great fun to play around with, but not nearly as fun to simply read about.
…That might be an exaggeration. Still, it’s a lot of fun to drop a lot of fantasy ingredients into a magic pot and make things, rather than reading about someone else dropping ingredients in pot, etc. You can’t experiment, yourself, with a text. Does that make sense? Unless it’s a Choose Your Own Adventure book…which is basically a paper based visual novel, right? Without the visuals? Anyway, that’s why I like alchemy games, especially the Atelier series by Gust. And why I think a story about alchemists should be told in the medium of video games.
…Where was I going with this? I don’t even know. Thanks for reading my random pseudo-apology, and here’s to hoping for more focused content in the future. Cheers! 😛
The Dark Jackel's Howl 
I apologize for dropping out of contact on my end.
Had some projects get quite interesting. But at least some of them are actually /done/, now, and I may be back below the number of ongoing projects that I can keep on top of.
I’m glad you’ve been doing well.
Scripting games is an interesting question, and the answer is ‘it depends’. Caveat, I’m mostly speaking as a layman. My understanding is that for a game, you have a choice between doing all of the code yourself/in house, or use a technology from someone else who has partly implemented the game you want. Programming can be very specialized, and many games have common requirements, so there are apparently a lot of technologies available to choose from. So, quite a lot of game developers are using a technology from someone.
Flash is famous, but they are kinda hard to play these days unless you have that one collection people did trying to preserve all of the browser games that were done in Flash. Unity is a big name right now. I have unity on this machine, which uses integrated graphics, and actually isn’t really good enough for some of the Unity development tutorials to display properly.
RPG Maker is another that is fairly famous.
Anyway, a lot of words to get around to Ren’Py, which I may not be remembering correctly. IIRC, it is a contraction of Ren’aii and Python. It is a technology for visual novels, implemented in Python. So you can develop in it by installing the right Python version, and then the right Python dependencies.
I think from the writing end, it may be pretty similar to creative writing scripts.
I recall reading about a program called twine, which was apparently intended to help writing stories with multiple paths.
Anyway, I have an interest in programming, but am not good, and have often been short on being organized enough to spend time on getting good. I’ve actually gotten better recently, but am definitely not learning game programming.
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