Lecture 9: Fiction for the 5 second generation

Do you like interactive fiction but need pictures? The Japanese have the just the thing, Ren'Py. Words, colours, music and even a couple of choices here and there, what more could you want?

Right Ren'Py, essentially its a nice little programme. You write in characters, add sound and music, and for the win from a first time point of view the programming language actually seems far simpler than interactive fiction. Intrigued, try this. This a random game I found on the internet, but one of the biggest successes of the medium has to be Inanimate Alice. A great strengh of Ren'Py is that it can be put in an exe. format, so everyone can get it and stare inanely at it on there touch screen phones and other fashion statements. Sites like this show the potential for Ren'Py and visual novels to be distributed on mobile technology, but blogs such as this also highlights the issues it can face. When Apple owns your soul and everything else in world, Ren'Py will be the last thing standing - showing a few querks with the distribution still.

This will be nice, apart from the fact that for all the easy programming language and pretty colours Ren'pys are very limited. You won't be able to pick up the screw driver or put on the dressing gown - you'll be able to choose whether to ask the girl out - or not, and be irritated out of your mind by the music. In this respect its a little like hyper-fiction (sad times) and those adventure books where you could go to page 77 to fight the dragon. To be fair visual novels like Inanimate Alice do have little games and alike which can be quite fun. Fiction such as Ren'py and Interactive Fiction are still individual occupations such as actual reading from actual books but at the same time require a new sense of literacy - helping identify them as new and deveoping disruptive technolgy arguably. So don't blink or soon they'll be beaming stories into your head soon.

That is all for this week, come back next week for more e-publishing related rants :). If you want to make a Ren'Py, download this and this might help. Nos da :)