What If.. I Lured You Away From The Group Into Navigations… To Reveal I’m Actually A Man Eating Alien…

fossil record patisserie

Learning adobe after effects and wanted to try and put some of that to work on my recent moon presence. Its still very crappy and needs a lot more work

Setting up Variables in Ren’Py

Hello Folks,

Today I’m going to take you through how to set up Variables in Ren’Py and what they would be used for in Interactive Fiction or Visual Novel games.

What is a variable?

A variable is basically just a way to store information or value as it is called in coding.

Some examples of that are Player Names, Pronouns, Stats, Health, Inventory. Honestly the list is endless and is only limited by your imagination.

You want a counter for every time you player sees a puppy. You can do that haha.

There are 3 main types of Variables I’ve found that come up the most in coding IF games. 

Boolean Values

Number Values

String Values

Things that are super important to remember. Variables have to be unique. This is because if you use the same variable name twice it will overwrite the input data to the new data. This works great if you want to add increases in Stat’s or decreases in health as it updates it but not for things like the Player Name for example. Steps

1. Create the Variable

You can set this up at the top of you main script.rpy Page or a separate variables.rpy 

My IF Template will come with a varaibales.rpy included for you to edit. 

Formula for True/False (Boolean) variable_name = False

Word Variables (String) You can set up Word Variables as None if you prefer it’s up to you. I always do false simply to save time when I writing a bunch of new variables some people prefer None so they can tell the difference between the 2 variables at a glance. variable_name = None or variable_name = False

Formula for Number Variables variable_name = 0

This is because Ren’Py will give you an error when it tries to run if it can’t find a variable. So it must be created first. You don’t have to type in init python: if you are listing the variables in the main script file as it already has it at the top. But if you create a new file for variables (like I have in the template) you need to type this at the top so Ren’Py can recognise it. 

2. Make the menu for the variable

If you want to see how to make a menu in Ren’Py please take a look at my Coding Choice Examples Post. I will be looking at doing a more in-depth post on Ren’Py in the future as well as having a few example menus in the template.

3. Set the variable in the menu. This is done by writing $ variable_name = “value”

And that’s it Voila! Your Variable is created and set, when the player chooses this menu choice it will set the string_name variable to words.

Want to display your variable? Simply type

[variable_name] 

So if we wrote

“Tell me the [string_name].”

The player would see the 

Tell me the words. I will show you different ways to display your variable soon.

Wait whats the difference between the Variables?

I will be going into more detail in a future post about variables but at the moment you can take a quick look at the top picture for a brief explanation. 

Variables are super important to Interactive Fiction so it’s great that Ren’Py makes it so easy to code. 

Hopefully this post made sense and gave you a basic idea about Setting Up Variables in Ren’Py. If you are an IF Dev and have been inspired to use Ren’Py for you IF Game let me know. I’m trying to put together some examples of games so people can see how versatile Ren’Py is. Thanks for reading till the end. :) 

That smile

Fetus Manson

B L A S P H E M O U S — 2019, the game kitchen

“Now fall. Return to your brothers and sisters. Sleep, and share your dream with those who failed in penance. They who continue to hide their faces and prolong their lies, long after their clothes have turned to dust. If the Miracle has really pointed out to you, you will rise again upon the dead, before the pain of the statue of the twisted Father who will watch over you. If that is your fate then we will meet again.”

Soooo..I came across @abz-j-harding‘s spooky rooky bird man and I absolutely love him! To think ‘ol Rufus couldn’t get any better, this needs to happen!

Also, you are such an inspiration and I love your art

Mossy Creek in the Kawhaka Forest by Steve Reekie

halloween playlists

halloween: this year, we haunt our own houses. we haunt our own hearts.

vampire: eternity bites when you have lived for too long, when everything withers and you remain: when inside the sordid beauty of your wasted flesh the years flow together like poured wine or spilled blood. you have known the hunger longer than you have known anything else.

werewolf: even in the darkness the red eye is scorned: to escape the claws of the beast you must become it. under the moon you feel yourself crack open, your bones scrape against each other. every living thing must survive the curse of transformation.

ghost: everything becomes a ghost eventually. everything fades into the monochrome translucence of time. ah, but the ghosts remember: they shift silently through the dark. they hold the shape of all your memories. they carry the world like sisyphus. 

witch: you cannot burn what is already aflame. you cannot curse what holds all the curses in their mouth. you cannot condemn what has already kissed the dark. you cannot chain what has already mastered iron. you cannot tame a witch.

demon: everything comes with a price. your salt circles will not protect you when the deal has been struck. a red candle in the window attracts the things which creepy from the abyss. if you stare into the void, it may stare back.

A suspicious biographical journalist interviews a young man who claims to be a vampire in San Francisco in the 1990s. Louis de Pointe du Lac, a man who lost everything, recounts his experiences of the past 200 years and recounts his encounter with Lestat de Lioncourt , a creature of the night that made him a vampire and taught him to live in a new way.

Interview with the Vampire (1994) dir. Neil Jordan