discussion As a total noob with Renpy what is your advice

[Cratosstratos]

As the title says, im a very mutch noob with Renpy. For thoose more experienced guys out there. What is something you would have loved to know when you first started out?

Also any advice, guides, etc you can recommend.

 

[misterfluffums]

What's your programming experience? I'm curious whether Ren'Py is your first language or that you've programmed before!

A few pieces of advice in general:
- AI is very convenient, but use in moderation (I know how hypocritical this sounds XD). It's a force multiplier that saves a lot of time if you have a bit of experience, but while you're learning it may hamper your ability to learn if you only consider "does this code work or not" and not "do I fully understand what the AI is doing in this piece of code".
- Feature creep is the enemy. You'll have thousands of ideas that you want to implement, and only time for a hundred at most.
- If you're not having fun anymore, you won't finish. Slow and steady wins the race,
- I don't know if you're planning on having AI artwork or are going to make renders, but if you're using AI: creating LoRAs is easy and does wonders for character consistency.

Have you played the Ren'Py tutorial that's included in the SDK? That basically contains 95% of what you need for a first game.

 

[xpop49]

How dummy friendly is it

Can a total noob like me do something with it if I put in enough effort

 

[Matm95]

How dummy friendly is it

Can a total noob like me do something with it if I put in enough effort

Renpy is pretty friendly, not RPGmaker friendly, but still very friendly.

Knowing some programming concepts makes it much easier though, so it will help if you have any experience with any programming language.

 

[Shawnchapp]

How dummy friendly is it

Can a total noob like me do something with it if I put in enough effort

As programming languages go it is a high-level language (high being "easiest" low being hardware/machine code" its python but renpy has built tin function making very much easier. It's ease comes from the fact thats its pure readable text, no messing with machine code "0101010"

 

[AbdulGoran]

How dummy friendly is it

Can a total noob like me do something with it if I put in enough effort

I'd say very friendly, ren'py has a pretty wide user base so it's easy to find guides and help while learning and python is a pretty good language to start with if you're totally new to programming.

 

[Michael_Long]

What's your programming experience? I'm curious whether Ren'Py is your first language or that you've programmed before!

A few pieces of advice in general:
- AI is very convenient, but use in moderation (I know how hypocritical this sounds XD). It's a force multiplier that saves a lot of time if you have a bit of experience, but while you're learning it may hamper your ability to learn if you only consider "does this code work or not" and not "do I fully understand what the AI is doing in this piece of code".
- Feature creep is the enemy. You'll have thousands of ideas that you want to implement, and only time for a hundred at most.
- If you're not having fun anymore, you won't finish. Slow and steady wins the race,
- I don't know if you're planning on having AI artwork or are going to make renders, but if you're using AI: creating LoRAs is easy and does wonders for character consistency.

Have you played the Ren'Py tutorial that's included in the SDK? That basically contains 95% of what you need for a first game.

Is AI even capable of writing code, and most importantly, correcting errors made in it? I personally found one html game in which the cheat menu did not open due to a missing symbol ) , and the debugger indicated only an approximate place between 38037 and 40008 characters. For interest, I entered the copied block in duck.ai, back in ithy.com, and on github in copilot, and none of them wanted to fix the detected error. And Copilot completely messed up the code by adding > symbols to places where they have nothing to do at all.