Ren'Py


The Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine is a free software engine which facilitates the creation of visual novels, a form of computer-mediated storytelling. Ren'Py is a portmanteau of ren'ai, the Japanese word for 'romantic love', a common element of games made using Ren'Py; and Python, the programming language that Ren'Py runs on. Ren'Py has proved attractive to English-language hobbyists; over 1000 games use the Ren'Py engine, nearly all in English.

Features

Ren'Py includes the ability to create branching stories, save file systems, rollback to previous points in the story, a variety of scene transitions, DLC, and so on. The engine also allows for movie playback for both full-screen movies and animated sprites, in-engine animation, and full animation and customization of UI elements via "Screen Language". Ren'Py scripts have a screenplay-like syntax, and can also include blocks of Python code to allow advanced users to add new features of their own. In addition, tools are included in the engine distribution to obfuscate scripts and archive game assets to mitigate copyright infringement.
Ren'Py is built on pygame, which is built with Python on SDL. The Ren'Py SDK is officially supported on Windows, recent versions of macOS, and Linux; and can be installed via the package managers of the Arch Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, and Gentoo Linux distributions. Ren'Py can build games for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android,, OpenBSD, iOS., and HTML5 with Web Assembly.

Reception

Ren'Py has been recommended as a video game creation engine by several outlets, including , MakeUseOf, and The Guardian. It has been used in classes at Carnegie Mellon School of Art,, Faculty of Art at University Tunku Abdul Rahman, Kampar, Perak, Malaysia, and as a tool for information literacy.

Notable Games