Introduction
 The Healing Song is a visual light novel project. It is mainly for entertainment and seeks to use Ren’py to develop and publish a light novel series with the first chapter available as a demo.​

Process
When scripting began in Ren’py, it was very straightforward to input the script of the story within the engine. Declaring the characters, images, and sounds were straightforward. They followed directory hierarchy which is something I use within for work and personal use.

When it came to the functionality for the player, that’s where it became challenging. Implementing the logic for the player’s choice to cement them and Yuliana in to route where they would end the game in the first chapter, move forward to the second chapter where they are in Kain’s route, Aine’s route, or Yuli’s route. That was the basis of the light novel as the first chapter cements you into a route at the end.​

 The third major element is that I kept in from an old project is working with animation. I was able to figure out some limited animation for Yuliana and Kain to be able to mimic speaking whenever it was their turn to speak in the conversation. As the sprites had two states for speaking rather than blinking.​

The fourth element I worked on is some audio, I wanted to use Audacity and see how recording and editing audio would be. It was good practice for the future audio use that I plan to add.

Method
The programs used for the visual novel:​
Ren’py:​
A visual novel engine that runs on the Python programming language.​
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Visual Studio Code:​
A code editor program that supports debugging and development. It supports plugins, where I downloaded plugin support for Python and Ren’Py. ​

​Photoshop:​
A raster graphics editor. I used the online version to develop the background art for the visual novel as a substitute for the art. ​

Audacity:​
A free digital audio editor and recording software.​
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Google Drive:​
A cloud-based storage service where the files are kept safe for scripts, programs and assets and other people can access it.​
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Collaboration:​
My friend Luca is an artist who made the portraits for the main characters. ​


Timeline
September
The first week of classes where we met our faculty advisor for our projects. I started to shift gears from one project to another because I wanted to practice skills I knew at at small level rather than start from scratch.

October
This month was the month of development with brainstorming the story, I started to program the story with in the ren’py script and started to implement affection counters.

November
This month focused on debugging and figuring out the animation for the visual novel. It was also the month of preparation for the presentations and poster sessions.

December
On December 10th, it was the final presentations for my classmates, we presented the progression and deliverables we had to show to our faculty advisor, and other professors. A main piece of feedback was to add more sound to make the visual novel pop out more. To make a talking sound to match the talking animation.
On December 12th, the poster session happened. I was in Room V120 where students and professors came by. It was very packed with many students and professors from the department. It was very fun and interesting to see how the progress from our work cultivated to this event.

Conclusion
It was an interesting experience to retry being a programmer and writing again. I think I am pretty happy with this process. It really helped developed my skills and learn some more by getting this opportunity to do so within my time at City Tech.
Results
Google Drive Folder
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1JdJrN6-JuarPMFoQgciuKrtGfNBzMdkC?usp=sharing