Industry Practice - Week 21 to 27:

In this blog I will be talking about what progress we made from week 21 to week 27 with the meetings we had, learning Ren'Py and the coding put into creating the game. I decided to make this blog weeks 21 to 27 as the blogs were very short and just repeated what was said in the previous week so I decided to combine them into a bigger blog where I wasn't repeating myself too much.

Portfolios: 

Most people use either Artstation or LinkedIn to have their portfolios on so that they are easy to view and access. For these websites its a good idea to have an artist statement and a biography.

My artist biography:

Katie Wallace [she/her] lives and works in Nottingham, United Kingdom. Previously studied a Level 3 in VFX and then transitioned onto a BA in Games Art at Nottingham Trent University’s School of Art and Design. Currently a second-year student who specialises in 3D modelling and art, but also has experience in 2D digital and traditional character design. Experience using a variety of software such as Maya, Zbrush and Unreal Engine. 

My artist statement: 

Working primarily in 3D modelling and digital art, Katie designs virtual 3D models and specialises primarily in Maya to create her assets. Katie works collaborating with animators and other artists developing characters, environments and backgrounds for game play. Whilst she specialises in the Game Art Industry, her background in VFX makes her work transferable across disciplines and means she can make her work accessible for a wider variety of clients. 

Interview Guy, 2025. 3D Modeller Job Description [Updated for 2025] [online]. Interview Guy: Job Descriptions. Available at: https://interviewguy.com/3d-modeler-job-description/ [Accessed 10 May 2025]

Meetings:

During the meetings we would talk about what everyone had done between each lesson and what I needed them to focus on. A lot of the meetings were quite short as it was mostly just carrying on with creating what was already assigned as it was taking us quite a bit to make all the assets as we hadn't got as big of a group as most other teams as we had people drop out of our group so we didn't have as many people working on the project which meant that we were further behind on the project than most. 

Learning Ren'Py:

We spent a lesson learning how to put different images into Ren'Py, putting in the script to Ren'Py and how to make sprites appear. With spending a lesson learning how to use Ren'Py it was very helpful when it came time to code our game and make sure that we knew how everything worked. We did have to learn how to do other things once we started making the game however it was a good start.


Displaying Images [online]. Ren'Py: Displaying Images. Available at: https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/displaying_images.html#image [Accessed 4 April 2025]

Using these 4 statements means that we could have different images up so they change with the scene however we mostly used them with sprites to show and hide them. We learnt that to add a background you need to use scene then bg for it to be placed on the background layer and then the name of the image that is saved in the file folder. We had different scenes to use that are the same however the lighting is slightly different so we needed to have several different versions of the same image so we changed the name of it to show what was different. For example, the first image below is called bedroom light to show that it is the scene that has the brighter light version rather than the scene with beneath it that is called bedroom mid to show that it is the scene that is placed there on day 3 / 4 to show the progression of the room getting worse and messier as the MC's mental health gets worse.



With the sprites we found that we could have 2 different sprites on at the same time but whilst we were learning Ren'Py we still needed to find out how to move the sprites from the middle as they were on top of each other however it was a step in the right direction with finding out that it was possible to have multiple characters on at the same time. You can see in the image below that both Rowan and Ash can be seen on top of each other however it is something that Jess did figure out when she was coding the sprites in.


With putting in the text I had to find out how to make it so that a specific character talks when dialogue is said. I found out that you need to use the define statement to say that this letter when said before quotation marks is talking about this person. You would put define then the letter and then after the equals you put that it's a character and then the character name you want it to use which is shown below.


Below is an image with how I was able to put it into the the script file and then how it looks in game. It shows up with the character name that is associated with the letter at the start of the quotations. I still needed to find a way to be able to do narration where there isn't anyone speaking.


Coding the game:

When we went to code the game we decided that I would start with putting the script into the game first and then Jess and Louie would add the ui assets and put the code in to get the sprites in the scenes and have the backgrounds to load when they should.

I wrote all the script out however whilst I was putting it into Ren'Py I found that I didn't know how to put options in for the players to choose which choice they want to go with. Whilst going through the Ren'Py documentation I found that to make a choice you can use menu's. In the image below it shows one of the choices that I created for our game. 


I couldn't find the way to get another choice nearly straight after another choice however when I was trying to do it I hadn't connected the choices to another label as shown below. With a choice you need to have it jump to another label. With the image above it goes to choice1_yes and then it would jump to the label that it was connected to.


Whilst I was writing in the script out I found that you need to use three quotations above and below the text that you wanted to have narrated instead of having a character say it.  In the script there's quite a few places that have narration where I needed someone not to speak but to explain what is happening so it was quite useful to know. 


After I had finished with putting the script into Ren'Py I gave Jess and Louie the file so that they could add the ui elements to the file and add all the sprite and backgrounds as well as the transitions to have them appear and disappear when they need to. 

For the endings I needed to make a way to make choices matter and have it effect the ending I tried for a while to find a way to have weighted choices so each choice has a number connected to it and if that is the highest number at the end of the game that is the ending that you get however I couldn't find a way to do it like that. I asked in our class discord and got a reply that suggested to use variables instead so I had to add a value to the choices I needed to matter and have it at the end where it will see the biggest valued choice and then give the player that ending. For this to work I first needed to make each ending start at 0 so none of them were more likely to happen than the other from the start by having the default be 0.


For each choice I had a line of code similar to the one in the image below where it says the name of the ending and a + and = sign to say that it is add to the original default number and then the number it is adding them by. I had these for each ending on different choices, for example I needed the Ivory ending to be more important than the bed ending so I have the Ivory ending set to 5 as you can only get that choice once however with the bed ending it comes up 4 days and it adds up however it can't be higher than 5 so if you pick the choice that gets you to the Ivory ending it gives you that instead of the bed ending. It took me a while to work out how it works however once I had leant how it works and what I needed to do to be able to get it to work it was quite simple to fix.

Feedback of character design: 

We got a chance to get feedback on designs that we had made and I posted the design that I had made for one of the characters I designed and wanted to get feedback from others about what they thought of the design. Louie posted the characters all together with the ones that we had so far that didn't include Ivory or Rowan.



The images below are ones that Jess drew in our style based on the drawing that I created of the depression character. She made different expressions so we can use them throughout the game where the character has different emotions at that time. We decided that Jess would redraw all the characters that the rest of us designed so that they fit into the art style that we were aiming for with our game.



This is the image that Louie posted which is of the character designs that we all created but with Jess redrawing them in our style. In this image anxiety and ptsd are the wrong way around as the character in the middle is the ptsd character and the one on the right is anxiety.





I was quite happy with all the feedback that we were given for the designs as it meant that we could continue forward with our asset creation without having to change anything about the designs and it showed that the designs were quite good as they were well liked.

Alpha and Beta testing:

We hadn't had chance to have people play test our game when other groups had theirs tested so we asked other groups when we had a decent amount done so that they could give feedback on it. We did both alpha and beta testing during a similar time frame as we took feedback that we were given and then changed certain parts about the game such as spelling errors and other issues with images popping up when they shouldn't. When we had finished all that we needed to in terms of finishing changing it with the feedback that we needed to change and adding other parts that we were missing we decided to do beta testing so that we could make sure that we had the game to the best it could be. We got a lot of useful feedback that we could use for improving the game. 

Feedback from testing:

We got a lot of useful feedback from the people that played the game that we did use such as getting feedback about spelling errors and grammar that we didn't see when we played through and other issues that were found like some of the characters showing up when it should be a different character instead.

Some of the feedback we didn't use was for example where we got feedback on having a mute button for the music for the game however there is a menu in the preferences tab where you can turn down the volume or turn it off if you don't want to listen to it. We did think about maybe making a easier to find button for muting it however we decided that we didn't want to try and find a way to do that with the amount the time we had.