[HN Gopher] The Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine
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The Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine
Author : Tomte
Score : 70 points
Date : 2025-02-21 20:09 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.renpy.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.renpy.org)
| riffraff wrote:
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| you can download it without steam for free (or donate if you
| like) at https://ddlc.moe/
| teddyh wrote:
| Review by "Yahtzee" Croshaw:
| <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krq6-1ht_kk>
| Frotag wrote:
| 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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| .
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| .
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| .
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| [2] does a 180 and makes fun of the plot holes
| TheDong wrote:
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| 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.
| TheDong wrote:
| 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.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| 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 surprised how poorly many VN engines
| run really poorly. Fast-forwarding past already-read text is
| often capped at a surprisingly slow rate, with your CPU pegged at
| 100%, due to how inefficient many engines are
|
| - It is easily moddable, as you just need to plop a
| (pseudo-)python script into the game folder, so you can easily
| tweak or turn off annoying bits of UI
|
| A number of localization companies have also ported (typically
| older) Japanese titles to Ren'py, instead of having to struggle
| with poor to non-existent support for non-Japanese systems in the
| original engine, as well as extremely expensive engine licenses,
| and just straight up poorly written bespoke engines. Examples of
| companies having done this includes JAST USA, FAKKU, MangaGamer,
| and (IIRC) Sekai Project/Denpasoft. In other words, the heavy
| hitters of VN localization.
|
| The other main contender for best VN engine (in my mind) is the
| KiriKiri engine, which I believe is also open source, but which
| lacks the large, English-speaking community that Ren'py has
| built.
|
| Despite that, Ren'py does have a bit of a poor reputation in the
| older VN reading community, more specifically among readers who
| mainly read localized, Japanese VNs, due to its association with
| low-budget, originally English visual novels. Typically the same
| people have only heard of DDLC and Katawa Shoujo, when it comes
| to originally English visual novels
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| 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
| opencl wrote:
| 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.
| simion314 wrote:
| Agree, as a person with accessibility issues, I prefer this
| engine because it has a basic TTS support that I can mod and
| plug my own custom TTS script. I also seen people reinventing
| poorly the engine in Unity so for me text based games or visual
| novels in Unity are just a NO , because of TTS support.
| jandrese wrote:
| They have a database of over 4,000 visual novels built with this
| engine, but that barely scratches the surface. If you know where
| to look there are many thousands more projects built on this
| engine.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| The Visual Novel Database (VNDB) alone lists nearly 12,000
| titles that have used Ren'py:
|
| (Warning: This site contains a lot of text and images that are
| not safe for work. And it records a lot of works that many
| people will probably find distressing)
|
| https://vndb.org/v?q=&ch=&f=N1802fwRen_7Py-741&s=26y
|
| But as you say, that's barely scratching the surface. You can
| probably find many more on itch.io and in other communities,
| that nobody have bothered to add to VNDB
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| That's weird, I don't think those old TypeMoon and Key visual
| novels used Ren'py. Maybe Ren'py is able to read files made
| for other engines like NScript or KiriKiri and that's why
| they show in the search?
| Frotag wrote:
| 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.
| jsheard wrote:
| > 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.
| joaohaas wrote:
| >~novella sized stories
|
| _laughs in umineko and higurashi_
| alt187 wrote:
| I really wish they'd implement proper XDG stuff, because the
| engine is great and I love VNs but all I can think about is the
| ~/.renpy littering my home.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Some really cool stuff has been built with Ren'Py. A (fairly)
| recent example for me is Roadwarden, a 20hr long RPG.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| If you're wondering what's up with the name, "Ren'Py" is a pun on
| the Japanese word "ren'ai" (Lian Ai ), which means "romantic
| love".
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| And at the risk of stating the obvious, Py is for Python and
| Ren is for Render
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