Text Printers and Tech

I'm using both Naninovel and Text Animator for this project. While Naninovel has all the tools I need to produce an entire visual novel, I like the extra flair that Text Animator offers. They're replacing Fungus which is deprecated but now Community-Driven.

I've used Fungus in other projects and it does what it does well. My main point of contention with it was that all the dialogue needed individual nodes to be built and it takes you out of the writing process at every step. I think I really ran into the same problem when it came to Twine. While I'm generally a visually oriented person, it breaks the flow. I've been using Playmaker for various prototypes, and it suits how I can organize visual scripts--though I 110% spend too much time making the flowcharts look prettier than they need to be. 

When it comes to writing, I want to be at my station just writing and the fewer interruptions the quicker I can put down the words. The 'distraction free' writing tools come to mind. When I was working on Clive, the tool was TyranoBuilder however I was writing the whole thing with textual markdown system rather than the drag-and-drop code snippet interface. As a side note, I learned much later that it's based on language (TyranoScript) which is very fast. Being able to write with no distractions really fit me while trying out Ink/Inky. It's so close to a natural language that it just flows when writing. I made a sort of ShindanMaker style character generator to help me brainstorm up ideas for characters I could draw along with randomized scenarios. If there's interest in it, I can post a link at some point.

I know it's silly to have bounced around from multiple different authoring systems when RenPy is right there. And the simple answer is that I've always wanted the ability to use Live2D with minimal friction--though I think it's now part of the engine. Working in RenPy would also just sort of lock me out of tools that I do have lying around that I've collected over the years. (And by collected, I mean spent way too much money on and never really use.)

It did take a little bit of work to put Naninovel and Text Animator together, the documentation for which is a little strange, but I figured it out. It's not the first time I had to hook the two together, but I don't remember exactly how I did it the last time. Pretty sure I had the same issues. Now that they're up and running, I can get to the less showy task of writing.

These aren't the final-final sprites, they still need touching up in places, some shading to be done, but definitely stuff that can be done when I'm at low brain power. Writing is the major thing I need to push on here... like big NaNoWriMo effort. There's a semi-solid outline with the major beats. Writing definitely takes a lot more focus for me. Like 4-cups-of-coffee hands-jittering-into-quantum-space focus.

Aiming to have a playable chapter (hopefully two) by October... Mid-October at the latest.