It's tough being a human! You have homework, your mom yells at you... good thing you've run away from home! But wait, who's this talking to you at this pond in the middle of nowhere? ...A frog?
One Frog, Two Frogs is a little visual novel about a human and a frog! Be a little human, hang out at a pond, and abandon humanity(?)!
Made for GDG Gamejam (hosted by @GalaxyDevZone)!
Play here: https://littlerat.itch.io/one-frog-two-frogs
This game marks my first time making a game using Naninovel -- and my first time making any game in Unity, too!
I've actually had Naninovel for a while now, but figuring out Unity for the first time was intimidating enough that I stuck to Ren'Py.
But a little gamejam was a great excuse to finally try this new program, and after some initial hurdles and frustration, I found out I like it a lot more than I expected...!
Cool Things About Naninovel/Unity
- how visual everything is! often times in Ren'Py, when I made a change, I didn't even know what the change did. But you can often see the results of a change in Unity immediately in the scene viewer, without even opening the game
- Unity's menu-based system lets me see potential things I could do, whereas to even find out what potential there is in Ren'Py i have to turn to the documentation
- Naninovel really streamlines a lot of things that I simply do not understand about Unity and lets me avoid them entirely
- animating things is fun and feels simpler than in Ren'Py! In particular, the particle effect system is really cool
Frustrating Things About Naninovel/Unity
- the program is really big! I literally couldn't even install Unity at first because I had to make space on my computer. and every time I make a new project, it comes with all sorts of functionality I don't really intend to use
- Naninovel expects a certain amount of familiarity with Unity, so sometimes I tried to look something up in Naninovel, and the answer was just "you can do this using Unity functionality"...
- on the other hand, when I tried to do things based on Unity tutorials, I often found that it didn't actually work in Naninovel because of the changes Naninovel has made. (I'm sure there are workarounds for this, but I don't know them as of yet!)
- It seems a lot harder to change certain things on a game-wide level -- with Ren'Py, I could make the whole game a different font quite easily, or change the frame used by every textbox at once, but with Naninovel, I really needed to edit the font for every text item individually
Other Thoughts
- this is the second game I've made where the paid DLC bonus is a cute little card instead of an artbook. I actually think these are way more fun to make than artbooks, especially when I don't have much to say about the characters in particular. I'll definitely keep this in mind for future releases!
Overall, I'm really glad I got the opportunity to finally try Naninovel! I don't think I'd use it for every game, but it lets me do really fun things that are difficult in Ren'Py, and I'd love to take advantage of those features in the future...!
