Devlog #1: Intro script and map/journal buttons

I’ve mainly made really small projects for Hack Club and this is the first bigger one I’m making so I’m super excited to start this on Stardance! Gonna start making much longer and more detailed devlogs since that was feedback that I got from my last project. I’m making a visual novel game for the Congressional App Challenge this year.

The story revolves around a 16-year-old girl (Ada, named after Ada Lovelace) trying to get community service hours for graduation. Her school requires her to volunteer in each area of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations. She gets help from her teacher, Ms. Katherine (named after Katherine Johnson). The game is called 17@16 because Ada is trying to work towards these 17 areas at 16 years old and is trying to make an impact in her local area, which is the 16th congressional district in her state.

However, the unique part about the game is that it’s based around real volunteer opportunities in my area. I think that if students can play a game and see a story behind some of the programs where I live, they will be much more interested in becoming involved rather than if it were just listed in a database. The game will have a map of different community service opportunities in my local area.

I’ve mostly just done planning for this on paper, but as for my actual coding progress, I started writing the script for the intro part of the VN. This will take place before the actual game (which is divided into 17 levels, each is one UN goal) to set the story, introduce the characters, and explain what the SDGs are. This part was easy to do since I am coding in Ren’Py.

Then, I started making buttons because I plan on having a journal and map feature. I didn’t feel like making final assets since Lapse has been really buggy for me in the past so I used some basic elements on Canva. This part was more challenging since I’ve never made new GUI screens or buttons in Ren’Py. At one point I used ChatGPT for help because my code didn’t show the buttons at all no matter what I tried. Turns out there was an append screen command for configuration that I somehow completely missed lol

TLDR I learned:

• How to update scripts in Ren’Py (took me way longer to figure out than I’d like to admit lol, every time I make a change I have to save it in VS Code first with CTRL + S and then reload in Ren’Py with SHIFT + R)
• How to make buttons on the home screen, quick menu, and as an in-game button
• How to hide buttons (ex. I don’t want the journal button to show if the journal is already open)
• How to transform images