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The Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine

renpy.org

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Re: The Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine

#11

Post by Frotag »

For context, visual novels are basically ~novella sized stories that come with visuals like static backgrounds + a few dozen renders per character. The character renders tend to be mostly the same, with small variations in facial expression, pose, maybe outfit.

All that to say, you probably won't like VNs unless you like reading. Don't expect much gameplay / animation. That said, the more famous stories tend to have multiple endings determined by a handful of choices you get during the story. On occasion, some games go for sandbox-style gameplay where you roam the map to grind out currency to unlock visual novel scenes.

In terms of genre I'd say at least half are dating sims, with the rest being some kind of adventure or mystery story. I'd also guess at least half are nsfw / r18. Renpy VNs tend to be made by indie devs from everywhere but Japan, which has a VN industry with in-house engines.

Writing quality tends to be what you expect from indie authors / devs. That is, filled with tropes, tending towards the wish-fulfillment types. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, you'll be surprised what you'd be willing to overlook if the premise / plot seems interesting.

Re: The Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine

#12

Post by jandrese »

optionalsquid wrote: post #7

As somebody who has read a large number of visual novels (VNs), I consider Ren'py one of the better engines as a consumer: - It has all the basic featured you'd expect, ranging from proper backlogs, to key bindings, and much more. You'd be shocked how many VN developers think that they can just pop out an VN engine themselves, and end up producing something that lacks even basic features. - It is performant. You'd be…

One thing Ren'Py does well that many other engines do poorly is forward compatibility of saves. When VNs are released in pieces over time it is important to make sure the saves carry forward. Nothing kills momentum like "you will need to start over from scratch after every update".

As far as competitors go, the list is not very long. Sugarcube/Twine works ok, but tends to bog down as the projects grow large because it doesn't have a good way of breaking up the core logic across different files. The save system is also a bit of a problem since the in-browser saves tend to get lost in version updates. QSP is just a buggy confusing mess every time. People try to shoehorn RPGMaker into doing the job but it is just so clunky and slow. Custom engines, typically built in Unity, are almost always massive resource hogs and lacking in one or more of the basic features Ren'Py provides by default. Plus there is just the community aspect of it, with Ren'Py having so many developers there is a lot of institutional knowledge to be had. If you run into a problem you are probably not the first, someone else has probably solved it already.

Re: The Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine

#13

Post by Frotag »

riffraff wrote: post #3

Curious, I discovered this today as I played a visual novel built with it: Doki Doki literature club (free on steam). Interesting read/play, but not for everyone.

Honestly I wouldn't recommend DDLC to someone new to VNs. It's hilarious but it parodies the dating sim genre by amping up the defining tropes to 11 before it then (minor spoiler, see footnote [2]). So you kind of need familiarity with the genre to understand some of the jokes. One of the more famous dating sims is probably Katawa Shoujo which is also free under a CC license.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katawa_Shoujo

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[2] does a 180 and makes fun of the plot holes

Re: The Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine

#14

Post by jsheard »

Frotag wrote: post #11

For context, visual novels are basically ~novella sized stories that come with visuals like static backgrounds + a few dozen renders per character. The character renders tend to be mostly the same, with small variations in facial expression, pose, maybe outfit. All that to say, you probably won't like VNs unless you like reading. Don't expect much gameplay / animation. That said, the more famous stories tend to have…

> For context, visual novels are basically ~novella sized stories

Usually, but some of them are infamously ludicrously long. Like 2-3x War and Peaces long.

Re: The Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine

#17

Post by optionalsquid »

jandrese wrote: post #12
optionalsquid wrote: post #7

As somebody who has read a large number of visual novels (VNs), I consider Ren'py one of the better engines as a consumer: - It has all the basic featured you'd expect, ranging from proper backlogs, to key bindings, and much more. You'd be shocked how many VN developers think that they can just pop out an VN engine themselves, and end up producing something that lacks even basic features. - It is performant. You'd be…

One thing Ren'Py does well that many other engines do poorly is forward compatibility of saves. When VNs are released in pieces over time it is important to make sure the saves carry forward. Nothing kills momentum like "you will need to start over from scratch after every update". As far as competitors go, the list is not very long. Sugarcube/Twine works ok, but tends to bog down as the projects grow large because i…

I took a quick look via query.vndb.org, and the top 10 most popular engines in terms of releases are Ren'Py, KiriKiri, TyranoScript, Unity, NScripter, LiveMaker, RPG Maker, YU-RIS, Flash, and Artemis (from most to least).

This is of course not an exact ranking, since the same game can have many (nearly identical) releases, but it roughly matches my experience

Re: The Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine

#18

Post by TheDong »

kibwen wrote: post #6
TheDong wrote: post #4

This was used to make 'Analogue: A Hate Story', which in my opinion was an interesting visual novel to read, with some more unusual interactive elements as well. It feels to me like 'Hate Story' and its sequel ('Hate Plus') really pushed the bounds of what a visual novel engine can easily do.

It's an extremely popular engine for visual novels, to the point where it's fairly safe to assume any given VN is made using Ren'Py. For example, last year's Slay The Princess.

I don't know if that's a given.

Needy Streamer Overload was the big visual novel of 2024 I think, which was Unity.

The most popular modern-ish visual novels I know of, like Fate Grand Order, Dangenronpa, and Ace Attorney, aren't Ren'py.

I feel like Ren'py is in the minority for modern popular visual novels, and it's definitely in the minority if you include re-releases of older visual novels.

I'd expect it to be in the vast majority for independent visual novels.

Re: The Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine

#19

Post by opencl »

optionalsquid wrote: post #7

As somebody who has read a large number of visual novels (VNs), I consider Ren'py one of the better engines as a consumer: - It has all the basic featured you'd expect, ranging from proper backlogs, to key bindings, and much more. You'd be shocked how many VN developers think that they can just pop out an VN engine themselves, and end up producing something that lacks even basic features. - It is performant. You'd be…

The best thing about Renpy is that the text rendering actually looks good, which is true of shockingly few VN engines even today.

Especially when you increase the window size or run fullscreen, most VN engines just render the whole game at a fixed resolution and upscale it up but Renpy makes the framebuffer match the window size and renders text at the full resolution.

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