So I've spent a lot of the summer playing visual novels as stress relief while going through the travails of the job hunt and sorting out whether I should open a bookstore (we won't mention how much I spent determining that isn't going to work - but at least it's not thousands of dollars had I actually gone ahead and done it to failure).
I figured I might as well turn that into something and create something that can at least get some money coming in, so I decided to create a visual novel. TyranoBuilder Visual Novel Studio is $15, which is literally the lowest cost initiative of all my planned income-generating projects in this wild, yet mundane from the outside season.
Because I have zero programming experience, hilarity is going to ensue. Funny things always happen in the field anyway.
In fact, we got our first example as I was working through the tutorial. I had a character join a scene, only for this to happen:
Went to do a VN tutorial, accidentally wrote giantess fetish porn instead.
I fixed it with the Positioning Tool (insert your own positioning your tool jokes here), so that was just a funny moment with an easy solution.
Less funny - I spent 3 hours last night and into the early morning hours trying to solve a problem after moving on from the tutorial and starting on the game itself:
I was creating an option for the player to name the main character, and on the test text to be sure the name took, I was getting the following:
Instead of the name, it kept coming up undefined.
I was tearing out what remains of my hair over three hours, looking up different tutorials and advice from people who ran into similar problems. Nothing worked. Finally, about 5:30 am, I went to bed and decided to try again in the afternoon when I woke up.
After waking and taking care of the dog, I decided to look at the actual script in debug mode. That's when I saw something curious...
"f.f.name"
Stupid me. I kept seeing f.name everywhere, so I named my variable f.name. It turns out that f. in TyranoBuilder means variable, so what the game actually thought I said was, "the variable is another variable called name", and it was giving me an undefined error, because that second variable had no definition.
So I went back into variables, changed the name from f.name to name, and it finally worked.
Three hours... over something that was a literal two-second solution.
Welcome to programming.