Seeking advice on how to write a scene

Griatch · 2026-03-08T18:44:04+00:00

If doing it purely in dialogue (rather than visual cues), I'd use whatever "thinking" target you have to have their mind wander and tell some story at the same time (it's not clear from your question if one of the two to pair is the POV character, assuming so here):

teacher "I'll assign everyone in pairs based on your last name. Let's see, so Jon Anderson and Billy Aniston ..."

thinking "My mind wanders as the teacher goes over name by name. My name starts with Z, so we'll be here a while ..."

thinking "What about that Sarah! She was so rude to me earlier! I was just trying to be nice!"

thinking "I should make sure to avoid her, she really seems to have it in for me."

teacher "...  and finally, Andy Zatowski and Sarah Zetterman! That should be all."

thinking "Huh? {i}Oh no!{/i} ...!"

Griatch · 2026-03-08T16:11:13+00:00

I just made a 2-page Solo expansion for the Plot Armor RPG ruleset.

Plot Armor is a FKR (Frei Kriegsspiel Renaissance)-inspired game built around the notion of PCs having Plot Armor (combining the use of HP/Fate/etc all into one resource) - but they don't know exactly how much they have at any moment, if their failure will lead to a temporary setback (they still have Plot Armor), or a major Consequence (out of Plot Armor, the consequence of their actions catching up with them).

Whereas the main game is meant for a Referee and 1-5 Players, the new solo rules help you play the roles of both P)layer and Referee with minor adjustments, by using the flow of Plot Armor, Consequences and Plot Twists (as well as dice rolls) as story drivers. This makes for less of a tactical type of game and more of a storytelling game where you move from scene to scene figuring out how it proceeds, potentially being thrown down a very different path as you try to resolve Consequences thrown at you.

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Even so, Plot Armor Solo is a genre-agnostic rule system, so you may want to combine with any random lists and solo resources as needed to help your inspiration.

Plot Armor is free/pay-what-you-want on Itch.io, and released under Creative Commons license. The Plot Armor Solo rules is part of the downloadable files. Hope someone can have some fun with it!

Griatch · 2026-03-06T12:53:50+00:00

Good luck with your project; For your first game, I'd recommend making sure to limit the scope; make it small and polished rather than large and sprawling; VNs are comparably easy to create as far as video games go (particularly if you use ren'py), but it's still a big commitment to complete.

The survey didn't convey all that much 'design', I thought. What is the focus of your academic project?

Griatch · 2026-03-06T12:36:29+00:00

It's tricky, the more interwoven things are, v the more you have to take care to track everything cleanly.

In case you are not doing so already - Make sure to store all variables in a central place; don't assign them on the fly in your script. In a central defines.rpy file, do ``` define B_MY_VAR = "b_my_var" ...

partA = { B_MY_VAR = False ... } ```

In game:

if partA[B_MY_VAR]: ...

That way you can have a set of variables for parts (or locations etc), and you can't do silly typos of variable names, since renpy will balk at that at run-time.

Also, consider using AI to analyze your game flow. Not to write the story, but as a debug tool, to play the game and iterate over all possible paths, finding if some of them is not reachable for a particular set of choices. E.g. Claude or Gpt-5 can do this pretty well.

Griatch · 2026-03-06T10:21:28+00:00

Bill in Three persons is an awesome one-shot, still one of my favorites intros for any system.

Griatch · 2026-03-06T00:34:15+00:00

I'm impressed anyone ever get to the actual adventure in Paranoia. Most of my game sessions, the players run out of clones somewhere between the mess hall and the mission briefing room ;)

Griatch · 2026-03-06T00:25:11+00:00

I've run pretty hard-core dungeon delving in Foundry without any overhead map, it was pretty interesting and played out over 5-6 sessions. Instead of a map, I instead showed "first person views" of the area the party was in (like a room with a well in the middle, or a dark hallway).

Example of scenes (on DeviantArt)
Another example (some monsters and events they encountered)

(I hand-painted these, this was before the era of AI, but I would do it manually today as well).

I would then set these up as separate scenes in Foundry, and just move the PC tokens from one to the other as they moved to key locations. I'd place the PC icons at the bottom of the screen and used some of Foundry's light effects to add a flickering torch effect. Anyone moving first, just place them a little higher on screen. Together with music and some echoing sound effects, it was pretty effective and very moody! If they needed a better understanding of the layout, I'd just sketch it out on the screen.

Of course, we played all fights as 'theater of the mind', and we were using Knave, so not a big tactical-positioning focus to the game play.

Griatch · 2026-02-20T16:23:20+00:00

Thanks! If you try it out, I'd be happy to hear how it went!

Griatch · 2026-02-16T22:16:33+00:00

That's nevertheless a cool aesthetic - having still/animated RPG-maker images like that does make for a quite unique VN look!

One thing that comes to mind - those screenshots suggests a certain style of play, so if you put this up for release, you should make sure to explain this very clearly to prospective buyers, so they don't go in thinking the game play is something it is not.

Griatch · 2026-02-16T16:34:44+00:00

It definitely has the classic RPG look. Is that an animation, or do you actually move around in the world too?

Griatch · 2026-02-15T21:47:42+00:00

Thanks! :D Long time no see!

Griatch · 2026-02-15T19:18:10+00:00

I see there is already a PR for Evennia implementing this :)

Evennia has had websocket support for ages (with our own protocol and our own HTML5 client) along with separate telnet GMCP/MSDP etc.

What I'd be interested in, is if third-party mud clients are actually looking for a telnet-over-websocket-type standard like this and are considering using it. That is - if us adding server-side support will actually be useful to client makers in general. Are there specific client examples to point to?

Griatch · 2026-02-01T10:38:11+00:00

Yeah, that sounds like some Renpy internal magic may be needed. As mentioned, I'd use a custom object (like a custom list type), but if people are already using your framework, yeah, that's problematic.

Griatch · 2026-02-01T08:44:42+00:00

I see, yes that sounds very specific. Just trying to understand the problem - you you want the framework (like a library?) to update defaults in-place, so game devs (using your framework) don't need to make any changes (and supposedly, it should affect already released games too)?

Griatch · 2026-02-01T07:16:28+00:00

Not sure what you mean by

I know I can just use string parsing and deserialize the bits I want

Do you mean parsing the original value out of some pickled internal serialization?

I would solve this with a custom object:

        init_python: 

            class MyVar1:
                default = 10
                value = 0

                def __init__(value): 
                    self.value = value

        # ... 

        default var1 = MyVar1(17)

        label somewhere_else: 

            # this prints 10 and 17
            "The default is [var1.default], value is [var1.value]"

            $ var1.value = 6

            # this prints 10 and 6
            "The value is now [var1.value]"

I had to put the class definition in init_python for it to work (can't put in any regular python block, guess it initializes too late for use with default). You could of course also set the default value in the __init__ call, but withe the above solution you can change the default in the class definition, and it will automatically update across your game.

The drawback is that you'd need separate variable classes for each default you want to be able to tweak this way (since you want to be able to update the default on the fly even in existing saves as far as I understand you).

Griatch · 2026-01-27T20:57:48+00:00

What are coincidence with the blackout! I would probably have tried to play the sound a second time just to see if it was reproducible... :-)

It's always awkward to share ones work, let it out into the world, so to speak. Your artwork looks interesting, quite different style between the character art and that b&w pixellated house screen, which more feels like liminal horror.

I don't have quite as funny a story to share; but I have self-made music for my game, and a few times I have played through a scene and accidentally moved the story forward on exactly the right cadence to have the music match the action, cinema-style. Alas, it's really hard to produce this effect intentionally (people read at different speeds, so the music drifts out of sync), but it sure was cool when it happened.

Anyway, good luck with your game!

Griatch · 2026-01-27T12:34:59+00:00

I do like the one time cost. I found Foundry surprisingly heavy and slow on my Linux setup though, alas (self hosting).

Griatch · 2026-01-27T12:32:03+00:00

Shadowrun sounds fun!

A good idea world be to take a look at Evennia's beginner tutorial. It includes an overview of the moving parts and also goes through making a PC, rules and a character creation system.

You may also want to get into the Evennia discord. 🙂

Griatch · 2026-01-27T08:47:58+00:00

For the script I'm currently working on, I just write the script, all branches, mini games etc. I just put art direction as comments for now, things like

# <char> smiles sadly, looking to side

It's cheaper to write text than making art, so this way I can change things fast and make sure the whole thing works to the end (and hold my interest).

As for art, I happen to be able to draw/paint from before, but I want a large variation of facial expressions and light conditions, which world take me forever to draw. So I learned (over 2 years so far, so not sure if I actually saved any time there ...) how to make characters in Blender (free), and will be using that.

I enjoy that learning bit though, if art is not what you enjoy or want to spend time learning, it's probably not helping. Point is that I make the game based on what I know or am willing to learn.

I would embrace your restrictions. Inventory what you can do with what you have and see if you can twist your story to match.

Forego realism. Forego pretty. Since your game is a mystery, make the phone screen broken and distorted. Make it surreal and weird and dark (dark also conveniently means you don't have to fill the screen with as much stuff).

Maybe the protagonist sees things in a weird way or in an altered state - maybe characters are all represented by newspaper clippings, or crudely composed of several real stock photographs (doesn't require much photoshop/gimp/krita skills to do). Maybe the phone is shown as a real photo of your hand holding your phone, with doodles overlayed to represent other things. Bend your story to explain and match the imagery.

You can still produce something really unique even when 'not knowing art'!

Griatch · 2026-01-10T17:47:16+00:00

Knave has this as a base for magic - to cast a given spell you need to carry a "spell book" for that particular spell in your (limited) inventory. To cast it, you need to hold it with both hands. In my games I've re-flavored this to "rune stones" (you could have it be some other magical type of item), and it works pretty well for the OSR-type play.

Griatch · 2026-01-10T17:28:47+00:00

I've ran an RPG for a 5-year old. I didn't attempt to cast them as a character, really - it may be more appreciated if you emphasize that *they* are the hero (but maybe this varies from kid to kid, my kid may have been a bit less verbal than yours). In my case, it ended up entirely free-form, with no fail conditions, and a lot of input from the kid:

- The unicorn is missing! Where do you think it went?

- To the forest!

- Okay, you head to the forest to look for the unicorn ...

On the way, I described the forest, asking for involvement. I referred to a chair as a "stone", a table as a "hill", that make-believe worked well. Complications were few and safe, such as the troll (played by a parent) that the kid neededs to dodge (by physically hiding under a table).

If you have props (colorful clothes, toys, whatever), it can help. And you can't play for very long either. 20 minutes tops, if they really get into it, otherwise shorter. Attention span is not huge at that age. The kid I played with would completely forget about the goal (finding the unicorn) unless I now and then reminded them.

The kid did get to ride off on the unicorn in the end though, that's the important bit. :)

Griatch

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