Moonlight Walks - American Bishoujo

**renpytom** · 07-09-2013

Moonlight Walks is a short romantic visual novel, digital storytelling involving images and text. It takes place the summer before you go away to college, and you're spending it visiting with your aunt and uncle on a small island in the Atlantic ocean. One night, while out taking pictures of the full moon, you meet a girl walking down the beach.

It's probably not for everybody, but it's been downloaded quite a bit since it was originally released for Windows, Mac, and Linux in 2005. It's now available for free from the OUYA store. (The OUYA version features the updated graphics from the 2009 re-release.)

**Grimbarian** · 07-12-2013

I'll be checking this out over the weekend - and I'm really interested in using the software to create my own visual novel too. Any issues with exporting it to OUYA/Android or things that need to be taken into consideration from the start?

**renpytom** · 07-12-2013

Originally Posted by Grimbarian

I'll be checking this out over the weekend - and I'm really interested in using the software to create my own visual novel too. Any issues with exporting it to OUYA/Android or things that need to be taken into consideration from the start?

The version of Moonlight Walks in the OUYA store uses a new version of Ren'Py/RAPT that's mostly done, but hasn't been released yet. There won't be any major changes, but I do need to clean it up, package it, etc. I'm debating creating a plugin that adds in-app purchasing, as well. (I'm leaning towards that being something I sell separately from Ren'Py.)

Ren'Py games run on OUYA (As well as Android, Linux, Mac, and Windows), but you do need to do some work to make sure it runs well. Some tips are:

1) Make sure the game is controllable from the keyboard and the OUYA controller. For example, you need to make sure that buttons highlight with readable colors, and that you can tell which is the selected button.

2) Make sure the game is playable on the TV. This generally means bumping up the text and button sizes quite a bit, to mobile-phone sizes. (The TV is huge, but it's far away.) Similarly, you need to avoid the edges of the screen, since those aren't shown on all TVs.

3) Finally, you want to teach the user the controls - it's not always obvious which controller buttons are important. I have some code to do that here: http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/vie...p?f=51&t=22214

**Grimbarian** · 07-12-2013

Thanks for the reply renpytom - I've downloaded the software (will download your visual novel soon) and gonna have a good run through of both tonight.

**Chromatose** · 07-15-2013

I just finished playing it, and while the dialogue and pacing felt a little rushed in places I really liked it. It left me wanting more in general, more depth, more art, more dialogue, music, which means it did it's job well. I would love to see more visual novels like this one on the OUYA.