while A Black Filter was absolutely a meaningful story that we wanted to express, it was also an experiment to see how Ren'Py works behind the scenes, and how VN stories operate at a small scale. we wanted to explore basic functionality, integrating choices (albeit ones without meaningful differences, just branching dialogue paths), and having sound effects, music, etc. learned a hell of a lot!
-
Ren'Py does NOT do well with music tracks. music has to be produced to be a seamless loop as a track, because Ren'Py does NOT have loop points for audio. it often skips at the end of the track anyway, and there's literally no fix for this. alas!
-
the actual coding is unbelievably easy. as people who have done so little coding in our life, with our main experience being HTML and Java (LOL) in high school (2006 or whatever), this Python shit is easy as hell.
-
documentation is expansive, though the more technical stuff is hard to parse, but that follows for literally any coding work we've ever done. it's literally learning another language, so seeing stuff without any context and having no idea what it means is still jarring. Python is STILL easier than anything else we've seen, though.
-
our previous games were text-only - adding graphics in beyond just css styling, and doing ALL the code ourselves, expanded the difficulty and time consumption exponentially for each part we had to handle. it's not a linear increase in time and difficulty, every part added their own expanding convolutions that, thanks to the relative simplicity of this project, didn't hang it up too hard.
all in all, a fantastic learning experience that we're glad hit home with players! we're definitely going to make another, more expansive and """marketable""" one in the future! in future ones we want to have choices that matter, if we can manage that, a wholly new UI, and professional art instead of amateur (a lot of people said it was good, but, we're authors, not visual artists!) photoshopping.
game development is fun.