Let's say I have a pack of images and animations that I want to turn into a small renpy novel, what kind of knowledge is necessary to make it work and how to start?
How hard is to use renpy?
- Thread starter ArtoriasABW
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The thing about Ren'Py is that the entry level is very low compared to the alternatives (Unity, RPG Maker, Unreal...). It is built to make visual novels in the simplest way possible.
Ren'Py runs on its own language, which you can learn on the website, in the tutorial game that comes with it, and even in Ren'Py Discord.
There are plenty of tutorials online about the do's and don'ts if you're starting. I would say if you have a basic background in coding, you will be fine.
If you're trying to be clever with it, you're going to have to study it more in-depth.
Python language would be very beneficial, but not crucial.
Ren'Py runs on its own language, which you can learn on the website, in the tutorial game that comes with it, and even in Ren'Py Discord.
There are plenty of tutorials online about the do's and don'ts if you're starting. I would say if you have a basic background in coding, you will be fine.
If you're trying to be clever with it, you're going to have to study it more in-depth.
Python language would be very beneficial, but not crucial.
Ren'Py is basically Python with some accessories aimed at building VNs. Python itself is among the simplest languages to get into since it's very human-readable and handles basically all the low level plumbing for you.
It should be very easy to pick up, in my opinion. The things you should look-out for is not reinventing the wheel. If you're trying to achieve something, someone has likely already done it. And most of the time, they will have achieved it better than a novice would. There is no shame in taking code from others that they provide as solutions.
If you want everything simple and basic its not too hard. But things getting complicated ALOT if you want to make it fancier, either way i suggest you to hire a programmer to run things smoothly
Let me put it this way. I hadn't done any programming at all since probably 1993, and that was dabbling. No serious coding at all since more like 1989, and THAT was in Commodore BASIC. I was able to crank out a simple choose-your-own-adventure style prototype in a few hours. In all honesty, if you are not doing anything complicated, you don't even actually need any real programming experience at all, although it would make things even easier. A simple beginner's guide or beginner's tutorial can have you up and running in no time. The best thing about Ren'Py is that a total newbie can put together a kinetic style VN with minimal guidance, but someone who really knows the ropes can make some really great advanced games using the same platform.
Can Renpy be used to modify an existing Renpy game? Does that come with any added difficulties?
It's pretty easy to use. Just watch a few youtube videos and you'll be good to go unless you want to get into some of the more complex stuff. But for a simple VN, nah.
Renpy just like Python is very easy to learn. It's just time consuming. So don't despair if you spend several hours on it and you have 10 minutes of gameplay.
And if you are just getting started, follow the rule of KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid. Don't try to jump into the deep end with a sandbox Visual Novel RPG with 25 love interests, each with 15+ hours of story, hundreds of quests, a dozen stats, etc.... For your first game, just do a simple VN with a few choices, and then when you are done, and realize it sucks, do it again, and again, until you have something you feel is actually worth putting out there.
Renpy produces 3 filetypes - .rpy, .rpyc, and .rpa.
.rpy are raw source files, effectively .txt files for all intents and purposes, you can edit them with any text processor.
.rpyc are compiled sources. There's decompilers both online and for download that will turn them back into .rpy.
The engine compiles .rpy files at runtime, they're interchangeable with the respective .rpyc. The game will run the same regardless of which one is in the folder, maybe with the exception of longer load times.
.rpa are archives. These can contain both the previous two filetypes as well as assets. Winrar won't work on these, you need a special program to extract them. unrpa works well.
Again, .rpa is equivalent to its unpacked contents. But unlike with .rpy and .rpyc, where you can have both files and the .rpyc gets overwritten on startup, the engine will complain when you have both the .rpa and its content present.
I tried to used it out of scratch and didn't know what to do. After watching one Tutorial it was quite easy. My advice is to first make a very simple game with stock picture to get the hang of thing, once you learn what to do then you start working on it with something complex with Daz or drawn image.
My advice is to chose your editor wisely, as stated above, you kan use any txt editor, but I have chosen notepad++ because it has the ability to format your .rpy files in a way that makes it a lot easier to not loose oversight of what your are doing.
Short answer yes you can steal other games codes with unrenall.bat but be warned they're seperating their codes in different script files. That means if you have 0 knowglade about programming you will face it alot of errors and dont know how to fix them.but you still can use their codes for designing your main menu and settings. But it takes along time to understand everything. If you want to create fancy menus along with different choices stats etc I suggest you to collab with a programmer to make your life easier.
It's not easy
it's pretty easy to get started, especially if you have some python or general programming experience and you know how to get dev environments up and running
if you want to build more complex interactions like many branches or click adventures or complex points systems then it gets a bit harder
if you want to build more complex interactions like many branches or click adventures or complex points systems then it gets a bit harder
And keep in mind, if you branch your story, you can end up doubling the amount of work you have left to do with each branch... So don't start out with a game that has a lot of branches... If you do have a branching story, wait til close to the end to branch it, unless you have a LOT of time to write each branch.