Ren'Py and Visual Novel Development

Off-Topic
#1

Have you ever wanted to make your own Visual Novel? I think many Visual Novel fans have thought about it, and a good many have, so it only makes sense to have a thread dedicated to it. Since Visual Novels are fairly simple, in terms of gameplay, many Visual Novel engines have cropped up over the years, that are very easy to use and to create VN-type games.

Ren’Py is probably the most standard and well known of these engines, and for good reason. It’s an incredibly simple, easy to use program that uses Python as it’s base language. Even as someone who knows practically nothing about programming, it’s my engine of choice. That said, although it’s easy to do the basics in Ren’Py, it offers an enormous breadth of customization, making it suitable for both Kinetic Novels and complicated statistic based Dating Sims.

After @DaBackpack mentioned it in the Random Video Game Ideas thread, it realized that there are a lot of Ryukishi07 fans who do make Visual Novels, or at least tinker with them. So, here we go! If you need help with something, or just want to show off your creation, do it here! (Ren’Py is mentioned by name, but if you use Novelty or RPG Maker instead, that’s fine too!)

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#2

I’ll go first!

I’m taking this Interactive Fiction graduate course and for our first project I opted to use Ren’py. I actually wanted to tinker with the engine a bit and ended up making a text adventure game demo (like ZORK or Colossal Cave Adventure). I’m touching up the demo in accordance with some feedback I received, but I’ll post a link here when the demo is fixed!

1 Like
#3

Wait, complete with a text parser? Or does it give the player options?

#4

A full text parser, but the number of legal commands is only like 10 right now, plus an object:

i.e.

take key
use key
look
think

I might open-source the code for the format since I don’t think ppl have really tried this before

1 Like
#5

I’ve been messing with Ren’py a bit for my own small project, just seeing what I can do with the engine though mostly.
I’ve been just working on a little system that combines a few different mystery games into one, Ren’py has a really useful replay system that helps a lot with it, so it’s been going well.

2 Likes
#6

I like Ren’Py’s history system a lot, I wish more commercial VNs had something like it.

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#7

I once wrote a visual novel’s scenario for a Ren’py group that came together on…what was that website…lemmasoft? Something like that.

Naturally, once the visual novel was finished, progress on putting it all together slowed, stopped, and finally was abandoned. Even now, it languishes in the Skype chatroom, no one paying any attention to it…

I’m not upset, though, as it wasn’t that great of a story anyway haha. I just feel bad for the artists, the background artist especially; they did very good work.

2 Likes
#8

I decided to open-source the “engine” I used for my Ren’py text adventure game. This also serves as a kind of “demo” for the game I’m actually making with it.


or
https://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=40435

You can find an executable demo in the zip file on the top level. If for whatever reason you want to alter the code, you are totally welcome to in accordance with the license.

#9

It’s great that there’s people like you who make their code open source! I’m totally incompetent when it comes to programming, so sticking together other peoples code is the best I can do, and I’m sure there’s many others who are in the same situation.

1 Like