NoName

Post Mortem

The NoName project succeeded in accomplishing its main goal of providing an easy-to-use, high performance library for creating visual novels in C++. Given more time, however, there are a couple of additional features and improvements we can imagine adding to the project. Currently the layout of the UI elements is relatively freeform and up to the user to determine. Some elements of it, such as character and button layouts, are hardcoded into our library, which is not ideal. We considered adding a template system that would allow for more elegant placement of UI elements, but ultimately determined it was out of scope.

    Additionally we would want to add a more robust save system that would allow enable creators to refer back to previous decisions made by the player. This way, creators could include subtle dialogue changes based on decision history without having to create a new scene for each variation. As of now, since choices only affect the directly next scene, all that is required for saving is getting the active scene’s name (which we have a function for) and setting the current scene to that name on load (which we also have a function for).

    If we were given more time, we would’ve invested in using Pybind for the user interface as SDL_ttf is what we are currently using for text display. SDL_ttf isn’t as efficient to update in real time, such as with changing the fonts and colors. Depending on the property change for the text display, the texture we rendered the text on could be required to clear and destroy. The property change would then be implemented by creating a new texture with the new desired text properties. This isn’t the most efficient update for text properties and Pybind would be an easier to use library with more reliable, stable UI components. Furthermore,  we would update the changing font and color feature to apply to all the scenes since at the moment, changing the font or color would only apply to the scene the player is currently on.