by mikey

There is a misconception about NaNoRenO - that it's too hard and stressing. It's not. Remember "one rises to meet the challenge?" With the support of this forum and many co-creators, your energy will be doubled or tripled - you'll feel a part of something and we all will be in the same boat - the best friendships develop when you work together.

At first, I was also hesitant, because I only thought about the stress of making it - and now I can't wait for it to begin because I look forward to all the atmosphere that is always created when people have the same goals and worries. I used to see the complication, but as the 1st of March draws near, all the positive aspects just keep on flowing! If you run a marathon and don't finish it, are you a failure? No! There will be hundreds who don't finish, but you all WERE THERE. That's more than the fat guy in front of the TV can say. There are many people who won't finish the novel writing NaNoWriMo. But they were there, they experienced being a part of something. By joining NaNoRenO, you not only step out of your own shadow and will be more than just a "see-what-happens" spectator, but you also express support for the genre. And every single name will count. When there'll be a NaNoRenO 2005 projects page, your name WILL be there, forever. You were there, when the first NaNoRenO was held.

And if you still think NaNoRenO is hard, just consider this guide. It has tips on how to make a NaNoRenO project with the least effort, cheating, and saving time where possible. So...

What do you really need? In fact, you really need 4 things:
- engine
- backgrounds
- story
- characters
Everything else is optional, movies, music etc. You can get free MIDIs from the web.

Instantly complete:
1. engine - just take Ren'Py! (download takes 5 minutes)
2. backgrounds - go to the free image galleries and pick your favorites, preferably you should already be decided on where the story will take place, let's say a ski resort (this takes 1 hour, if you want to run a few Photoshop filters through them, 2 hours)
3. music (optional) - go to any free MIDI site and pick some tunes (takes 1 hour)

In sum, you have all of these done in 3 hours 5 minutes. Even if you're not using broadband service, this shouldn't take more than 4 hours in all. You DO have 4 hours of spare time, don't you? Just don't watch TV for one evening. So all of these tasks you can have done in one single day. Which practically leaves you with full 4 weeks to spend on:

4. story (2 weeks)
5. characters (1 week)
6. finalizing (1 week)

Now, you just have to plan your story. Make it small, just look at Sango!*, you don't have to do an epic. A simple story with one character - you go for a ski trip and every day you go the ski rental and talk with the nice girl whose father runs the rental shop. Eventually, you get/don't get a date. The previous draft is public domain. ^_^

And you have TWO weeks to write it! It's virtually impossible not to write such a short story - remember that the game CAN be just 10 minutes long - again, look at Sango!, it works. It's like writing a few longer posts at forums. An average reader will read less than 2000 bytes of plain text in a minute. If you just do 17000 bytes of plain text, you'll have a game. Again, you have TWO WEEKS!, which means, you have to do just something over 1000 bytes of text per day. It's your average e-mail. This whole post has over 5300 bytes. Triple this text and you're almost done!

If you can draw, you have one whole week to draw one single character in a single pose, facial expressions are optional (think Kaori). If you can't draw, you have one whole week to e-mail artists to help you. Don't ask them to draw something for you though - simply look at their image galleries and pick a suitable picture and then e-mail them for the permission to use it. If everything else fails, I am certain there are loads of people at manga.sk you can ask for their fan-arts as we call it. I can help you in contacting them, many of them know me. Again, you have one full week to do this, to make/get one single character graphic - and this time might be longer depending on how well you did with the story script. Of course, you can begin sending e-mails as soon as NaNoRenO begins, it costs almost no time at all and if your person responds within two weeks, you'll save one full week you had for the characters.

There is the finish line! Just put everything into Ren'Py and it's done! You have one week to look through the basics of Ren'Py, just take a few hours to see how the script works and get hold of the basics, just simple clicks to advance and options to get you to other plot branches. Nothing fancy, use the default menu styles and settings. And you can be sure that there will always be an emergency NaNoRenO help line in this topic where people will help you because you participate. Just post your problem and we'll help you. I plan to visit the forums more than once a day during NaNoRenO and I'll help wherever I can.

So... just reconsider - and by the way, you can even start NOW, which means you'll have more days at your disposal, and will be doing the IntRenAiMo version of the project. It's up to you. As for myself, I know I MUST do it, because I wouldn't stand looking at all the posts and see all the atmosphere pass me by.

* Sango! was finished in about a week according to creator Dre as stated in Lemmasoft upon it's release

I will also point out that, for the -Mo, I plan to spend a bit of time each day supporting Ren'Py, helping people with the coding of their game. While I'm not planning on adding any new features in the next month, I will help people to utilize what exists in 4.7. Perhaps I will cut a 4.7.1, with very minor bug-fixes.