Web Hosting – Ren’Py Visual Novels

Ren’Py is a game engine used by thousands of creators worldwide to tell stories across computers and mobile devices. Its visual novel script language is user-friendly yet powerful enough for large visual novels or life simulation games, while also remaining open source and free for commercial use.

This course introduces the basics of Ren’Py, a visual novel (VN) scripting tool which enables anyone without programming experience to make video games featuring character sprites and story dialogue. We will use Ren’Py tools to develop The Question as our example game.

The game is an interactive story that prompts the player to answer a series of questions to move along in the storyline and advance it further. Each answer provides progress forward in the narrative and determines the outcomes. Designed using Ren’Py scripting language’s labels and jump statements for control transference; an indented block of script statements defines each label, and when someone selects menu choices their respective first statement runs upon clicking them.

Ren’Py games can incorporate music with the play music statement. Each filename in opus, ogg vorbis or mp3 format will be read and processed as audio data; additionally it may optionally include fadeout and fadein clauses to gradually fade out the old music before beginning to play the new one.

The configuration file specifies which files should be downloaded prior to starting the game and which should be loaded as needed. Lines beginning with # are comments while lines starting with – indicate files to download prior to beginning, such as background images and music files. Lines starting with + indicate which should be loaded as they become necessary; other files may only be partially loaded before they can be completely uncompressed and loaded fully.