vrengames

Lab Rats 2 Prototyping - Damn it Jim, I'm a Programmer, not a Writer

Added 2017-06-25 07:35:06 +0000 UTC

v0.8.0 of Lab Rats is out, and so far everything seems to be nice and solid. That's given me a week between it's patron and public release to do some work on the prototype for the sequel. Lab Rats 1 has plenty of work left to finish on it, but it's nice to take a break and look towards the future. Over the next few weeks I plan on doing a series of posts about my design thoughts and decisions going into the sequel. To start off I'm going to be talking about why I picked Ren'py for Lab Rats 1 and 2.

For anyone who doesn't know, Lab Rats is build on a platform called Ren'py. Ren'py is free and open source, and purpose built for creating visual novels. If you've played a visual novel of any type recently, there's a good chance it was made using Ren'py. Deep down, Ren'py is built on Python, a programming language that focuses on creating simple, clear code.

When I first started developing Lab Rats 1 I had about 6 years of programming experience, but I hadn't had a chance to write more than a "Hello World" script in python. Ren'py offered me the chance to learn a new language, and provided a framework that let me start producing content right away. Writing a scene in Ren'py is as simple as:

sis "Hey there!"

me "Hey Lily, how's it going?"

sis "Oh, it's fine."

All of the menus, formatting, and other things that make a visual novel work are handled behind the scenes. That was a great asset when starting development, because I could produce real, tangible results in a few hours. That ability to just sit down and write has produced results, to the tune of 220 000 words of dialogue in Lab Rats.

Unfortunately, that simplicity has a cost. Every scene I want to add to Lab Rats requires me to sit down and type it out. Each branching path in the game is hand written, and variations are hard coded so they cannot be reused. Each major scene added to the game takes about 4 hours to write, and with 5 characters in the game a relatively small update that adds one major scene for each takes 20 hours of dev time without even worrying about new game mechanics or adding images.

Producing content in this way has other problems as well. When a scene is written I have to assume a certain outfit for each character, or I would be forced to write a slightly different version for every single different outfit in the game. Imaging those different outfits would be a colossal task as well, growing with the number of outfits introduced into the game. If you were able to have different mixtures of outfits, the problem only gets worse. That's stopped me from adding often requested features like having girls wear different outfits when you talk to them, because any scene that triggered from there would have the wrong descriptions and wrong images. Solving this would require a fundamental change to the way content is designed for Lab Rats.

With Lab Rats 2, I'm going to be putting in the time and effort to build a solid base that solves these problems and focus on my strengths as a developer. At heart I'm a programmer and game designer; writing and artistry are secondary skill I exercise when I have to. As much as possible, I will be seeking to make dynamic and flexible systems, rather than creating individual scenes. By doing this from the start, I'll be able to add more varied content, more quickly as we move forward with development. I'll be putting out posts with the details of these systems as they're developed, starting with the new outfit system and the new sex system.