[ prog / sol / mona ]

prog


SICP Visual Novel

7 2024-02-18 08:13

>>6
I've made VNs before, and I considered posting something like "leave it to me." However, at this time I am preoccupied with some other nonsense and cannot devote sufficient time or attention to writing something that would be worth waiting over ten years for. I could halfass it, or I could do proper research and actually read the rest of SICP.

10 2024-02-20 23:37

>>9
Really nothing. Any of us could just crack in and get something made with no preparation, and it might even get finished.

The trouble comes from trying to meet your own standards of quality while working within your skill level and time budget. It’s easy to say "what it's missing is voice acting" or "the plot should contain an allegory for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand" but every scope increase is a footgun for any kind of creative work. I think this was the downfall of the revival project linked in the OP. Maybe the people behind it hadn't done anything like it before. Again, I like to think my experience lends me some wisdom in that regard, but I can't launch into it just yet.

18 2024-03-17 01:57

I do think the snake needs a name beyond just "snake" and I was planning to call him Yomi, which in Japanese can mean "reading," "hell," or (more rarely, and if my memory serves) something along the lines of a sampler or preview you offer someone to pique their interest.

The other characters obviously have to be elaborations of Alyssa, Eva, Ben, etc. from the text of SICP itself. Cy could be short for Cyrus. Eva could be short for something. Not sure what.

34 2024-03-25 00:17

>>31

there's likely to be Python programmers here

I have my doubts.

Anyway, the ending. The protagonist has an existential crisis and/or mental breakdown over the inherently subjective character of meaning, even with all the power of symbolic computation at his disposal. The snake taunts him and leads him on a wild goose chase through his own unraveling sanity. Finally, he comes to terms with his unsettling phenomenological questions. It appears he may have somehow merged with the snake. He looks in the mirror and declares, "I have read my SICP today."

37 2024-03-25 00:59

>>32
In theory, you don't write any actual Python when scripting a Ren'Py game. All the dialogue, animations, and even UI layout are supposed to be done through a custom language that is parsed and expanded into a graph of Python objects. The engine traverses this graph to predict what assets need to be loaded at what points in the story, thus allowing you to play through the whole game without ever seeing a loading screen. This is not a bad idea on paper, and any competing VN engine should more or less aim for this same design.

The problems are with the implementation. The documentation is extensive, but not thorough, largely because the DSL layer is a leaky abstraction. You can "see through it" to numerous internal details of the engine itself. Interacting with some of these does involve writing Python. Understanding their behavior usually involves reading the source code. In some cases you have to write C and rebuild the entire engine to change how things work.

Introducing another language to this mess would not fix anything. Use Ren'Py with its DSL or throw it out completely and write something better from the ground up.

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