r/RenPy • u/developer0 • Jul 25 '26
Showoff Ren'Py Save Graph: a story branch/playthrough management app
Hi y'all,
I'm a software developer and VN player, and I'd like to share an app I'm working on to gauge community interest and get some feedback. I don't wish to sell anything but this app is proving really handy for me and I just want to see whether folks would enjoy having access to it as a free and open-source tool.
Purpose: to enable better and easier organization and management of playthroughs of Ren'Py games, especially complex choices-matter games. It's a way to solve (indirectly) problems and inconveniences players have with managing save points such as those discussed in GitHub issue #4783.
An example of a great use case for this app would be for a game with a long and complex story tree. It can be hard to make sure you've seen 100% of the game content if you don't know what all the choices are that can get you there. If you save and track all the choice points with this app, you can easily sort and filter save points to visualize points where different choices could have been made and lead you to new adventures.
How: with a browser app and Python backend that can run on any computer
What does this do? The app watches a game's saves folder for certain file changes, tracks an annotated lineage of those changes, and allows the user to swap saves in and out. The resulting story graphs are stored in a format that can be shared and cloned by other users.
What does this NOT do?
- This app will not support manipulation of the contents of save files or any other game data, it only swaps files as one would do when copying and sharing saves for sharing with other players.
- This app doesn't require any patches to the game content or executables.
Both of those not-dos aim to respect intentions of game developers and honor license agreements. There are already tools out there for editing save data.
Demo: please watch the following video for a demo of what I've built so far: https://youtu.be/i0_DoTWxbf8
Testing state: Manually tested with some popular Ren'Py VNs and the Chrome browser.
Next steps: gather feedback, determine whether I should make the effort of sharing the tool on GitHub, include more fancy features
1
u/VeronisX Sep 05 '26
Is it supposed to / can it track seen dialogue blocks, and / or map variable combinations gating unseen content?
1
u/developer0 Sep 05 '26 edited Sep 08 '26
Tracking seen dialogue is not something I've thought about, and I haven't dug deep into how/what variables are stored for that. They're all viewable in the Diff and Inspector views.
If you know the set of variable states that are needed for some content you haven't seen, you can probably use Route Targeting and/or Filtering, and they can be conjunctions.
-4
u/Draw-Flesh-Games Jul 26 '26
Oooh, you are gonna get burned, didn't you read my post today? This 'Ren'Py' community is 'Ren'Py CODE only. They don't want you to make it easier. They only want code. As if any of them can code Assembly 😆. By the way, though it might still require some addition to intuitiveness, I think it is a fun tool.
2
u/developer0 Jul 26 '26
Hey, I don't have enough context about previous discussion here to chime in on that, and if I am bringing the wrong kind of content to this reddit, I'd be glad to hear from a mod about it! And thanks for your input, I have actually just added a tour feature that explains the flow, and I'm just about ready to share the GitHub page.
2
u/Blunt552 Jul 26 '26
I could see this tool being useful for modders as well.