What I wish I knew before starting with choicescript

General
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When I started learning Choicesript back in May this year, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

It was suggested to me because I love reading, and I bought two books, which were TWC, and as I discovered how fun it was to be able to interact with a textbase story. I decided to start writing my own game.

The path to learning choicescript was not linear for me, it went from:

  1. excitement to get started.
  2. frustration to learn about coding
  3. happy to sort of get the gist of it
  4. back to frustration about choicescript error
  5. roaming through choicescript help
  6. happy to get the problem solved
  7. again asking questions
  8. realizing that it was an easy self fix
  9. finding out about dashington
  10. posting first WIP demo
  11. having people liking it
  12. feeling the rush of doing something awesome
  13. trying to keep WIP updated
  14. realizing that it is not easy to keep WIPs life and work-life balance
  15. getting excited about a new project
  16. realizing that you are now working on two WIP at the same time
  17. …

Well you get the gist lol

All that to say that I really am enjoying Choicescript, but hey I wish I knew all that.

:grin:

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That feeling is valid. :slight_smile: But I think some of us still need to go through it to appreciate what future-us would tell us. :wink:

Congratz on your progress. :tada:

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Thanks, we def need all that to look back on :slight_smile:

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Oh gods yes. I remember my first time with choicescript and I was so proud at myself for getting the hang of *choice lol.

Thankfully, when I first started choicescript, there were already lots of resources. That’s why I’m so thankful for Choicescript Wiki and Choicescript IDE. And the community here is extremely, and I cannot stress this enough, helpful. Old threads are also very helpful. But maybe I wish I knew that asking people for help is fine. I know that no one will judge me, but the prospect of talking to someone is scary (introversion intensifies), and it’s absolutely fine to get confused. Even though you feel that it’s just a dumb or simple question, it’s okay to feel confused.

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Haha so true, asking for help is fine and I was amazed by how helpful the people in this community were.

I often roam hours trying to find the answers to my question before finally asking, but when I do ask they do answer. :slight_smile:

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This somehow managed to sum up my first year on the forum :sweat_smile:

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Great to see that I am not alone haha

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Congratulations on learning it :slight_smile:

Even though many players/readers don’t really think of it, it is also impressive because writers naturally have to write the story and then coding on top of it (same things with the RenPy engine).

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You are so right, it took me like a week just to code one scene when a writer would have just sat down and write haha.

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  1. I’ve been lurking here for a couple years, but never started my own WIP because I couldn’t figure it out for the life of me. Then like a week ago I decided I was just going to trial and error my way through it and now I have the prologue almost done! Now I love choice script.
  2. This community is EXTREMELY helpful. I spent. probably 4 hours last night trying to find a bug, couldn’t find it. I posted asking for help, literally within 5 minutes I had my answer and now my game works again. Absolutely awesome.
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That’s awesome, keep on going :slight_smile: