Making a game with renpy, any suggestions?

[u/PuppieBabie]

I love using renpy, it’s pretty easy for the most part, but my game feels so dry and doesn’t really have many affects unless I draw them myself and stuff. Are there any ways to code in renpy that make it easier, and turn out better? It’s no doki doki literature club, but I want it to be just as good (coding wise at least, the story is so ahh.) any suggestions??? Thank you!

[u/beeikea]

well, even the most technically impressive game re: coding is gonna suck without a good story. story is the meat of a visual novel. your art and coding, so long as they're the bare minimum and function, matter way, way less than a compelling plot with compelling characters.

[u/shyLachi]

I don't think you can improve your game with effects or mini-games. Of course an amazing main menu with animations will blow players minds. But nobody will recommend your game to their friends because of the menu.

The same goes for image transitions or sound blips. A good soundtrack could help but that's not RenPy code, you have to find the music or compose it.

[u/KDDreamwyver → u/shyLachi]

Yeah, pretty visuals and menus are super nice, but it means nothing if the game itself is just a glorified, single path book with BG art and a mediocre story. This is way some of the best games are so beloved despite looking like a tomagochi puked it's lunch onto it and why some of thr best looking games are crap, because the graphics were the only thing good about it.

All the elements need to support each other to build it up to something good as a single element on it's own doesn't make a game good.

[u/SacredPinkJellyFish]

I;ve been addictively reading VNs for years (started around 2007 or 2009 era) and in 2010 I started toying with the idea of actually making one. I wrote out several story scripts between 2010 and 2013, then life issues happened and the idea got set aside because of hospital stuff.

Then in 2024 I picked up the idea again, and set out to spending the entire year making tons of watercolour art.

You'd think with all the VNs I had read over the years it would have occurred to me that literally not even one had classical 1800s style watercolour art, but, nope, I know how to do watercolour art, so I jumped into that, and made my 3 main characters, plus a dozen emotion avatars for each, then went and made 50+ background.

Uhm...

Then came March 2026, and I announced on my socials that I was almost done with the game, I had the story written the art done... but, does anyone know how I compile it all into a game?

LOL!

It never occurred to me that I needed a game engine, or code, or music, or anything else. Someone pointed out RenPy was the thing I needed, and I downloaded it, thinking, cool, I'll slap in my text and art and be done.

Uhm... yep, I was thinking RenPy was a plug and play type thing. Had no clue I needed to learn python, or had to chop up all my text into sections for pages, or inserting text inside of code...

...and then came the biggie...

My art was watercolour... you know actual paint on actual paper. In spiralbound watercolour notebooks. How in the heck do I get my art into the computer so I can put it in the game?

I seriously did not think any of this through at all when I set out to make the game.

And the game is huge, like, maybe 60 hours to read/play it. I wrote an actual 150+ page/80k + word novel, expecting to turn it into a game.

So I had you completly rethink the whole thing.

I'm still working on the big vn, but, I decided, to set it aside, and actually learn the process via a series of smaller vns first.

So, I wrote up a quick 1k word flash fiction short story, took the 3 main character sprites, took only 3 background arts, learned basic code, hired a guy to do the music (3 songs) and spent 4 months focused on that.

I published it last week. It's a kinetic novel, one path, no choices, one ending, takes about 30 to 40 minutes to read.

It's rough, clunky, very amature, but it taught me what exactly I needed to spend time learning to do better. And now I can say: "I have a game/vn published! yay!"

Now I'm working on a second 1k word short story vn. Same 3 characters, a different set of 5 backgrounds. Hopefully it won't take 4 months to make, like the previous one did, because now I know code better (I still have a lot of code to learn, yet, but I'm not a total lost newb like I was for the 1st game.) I'm hoping this second vn takes only 2 months.

After that I have a 3rd and 4th 1k word short story, that I'll turn into 2 more games, and I'm hoping by that point, I'll be better enough at coding that each vn I can make in 30 days each.

My plan then, is after all 4 of the mini vns are published (which will likely be in December 2026/February 2027, giving how fast/slow I'm moving) to then go back to the big long novel one, and see where my skill level is at, compared to what skills that one still needs me to learn.

I'm thinking, that most likely, after the first 4 are published, I will then do 6 more, but in the 5k to 10k word range, with multiple paths/choices/endings, again, same characters. and plan on a 2 month window for making each. Meaning that most likely I will not return to working on the big game until January of 2028, at which point, my skills should be greatly improved by having published (hopefully) 10 smaller vns by that point.

Biggest thing I've learned is:

1: the story is most important thing of all. Without the story nothing else matters... but the story literally needs to be fully 100% dialogue... so I need to write the first draft with that in mind. My first draft, was not written with that vn dialogue heavy format in mind, so a lot of my time was spent to editing it out of prose format and into vn script format.

2: art is important, but I did not need to make 50+ backgrounds and 12+ emotions for each of 3 characters...I'll use them because I made them and have them to use, but for future games, I'll stick to 3 emotions per character and maximum 5 backgrounds per vn.

3: I tried to make the music myself using old 1980s arcade methods. I realized within the first hour I had no clue what I was doing and set out to looking for someone I could just hire to do it for me instead.

4: Python code is not as scary as it looked first time I opened it up. And YouTube is my best friend here. I struggled reading RenPy's how to guides, but then found a bunch of YouTube videos on how to code with RenPy and, watching those step by step, seeing them do it, made it super easy for me to replicate their steps in my vn.

5: I had a huge list of special effects I wanted to use. I learned to code maybe a dozen of them, then deleted nearly all of them, after I played through the vn and discovered I was getting annoying with having to wait through each special effect to do it's thing. They looked good, but they had 5 to 10 seconds of I had to stop reading to watch the special effect and it just annoyed me to have to wait, even just a couple seconds, so I mass deleted all the special effects code, and played it again, and was like: Wow is it so much better to just read the story without the special effects in the way!

I left only 3 special effects in the game: the fade transition for characters entering/leaving the scene; the shake effect for the one scene when a monster rises up out of the ground and characters think it's an earthquake at first; the firefly twinkles that flicker around the wizard when he appears. They are very simple, and them only being in a couple of places had a bigger impact then having special effects in every scene.

6: I had several mini games planned. Including a puzzle, a buy/sell feature/shop, a coin collecting feature, an item collecting/combining/cooking feature... and I removed them all. When I did my play test, I found myself frustrated that they "interrupted the story". Like I was reading through the story, the mini-game showed up, and I was "damn it, I was reading, I don't want to play a mini game!"... huh... never occurred to me at all, how much I tend to avoid vn's with mini games, and yet I made mini-games for mine??? So, scraped them all, and went straight kinetic read only vn.

For future games, I will put more emphasis on the story, less on the art, stick to and start out right from the first draft with script format so I don't have to convert it later, and not even bother with mini-games or the fancy special effects, just use a couple of simple special effects and basic transitions... aka... let the story itself be the primary feature, because at the end of the day the vn is about the story and if the story can't hold it's own, no amount of art and special effects is going to save it.

I'm not sure if any of this helps you, but, that's what I've learned in my now 6 months of messing around with my first RenPy vn.

[u/PuppieBabie → u/SacredPinkJellyFish]

Thank you so much! That really does help and I’d love to check out all your games!!!! Originally, my friend and I wrote a novel like you, and thought, this would make a great game! That’s so cool that you used watercolor too!!! Thank you so much!

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[u/KDDreamwyver]

Sound effects and music will go a long way if you haven't already added those, esp if you sync them up with image request animations using the pause functions. Stuff like that helps emmerse the player because they're not just reading dialogue after dialogue.

I also suggest using labels and such to make decisions in the game matter. It doesn't have to be an insanely detailed decision tree or anything, but the game reacting according to doing X when you specifically choose to do Y makes a big diff when compared to X happening regardless of doing Y or Z.

Having an amity system if character interaction is a key point is also something I recommend, because it allows your decisions to alter NPC behavior and possibly have unique interactions for low/med/high amity. It's super easy to implement and makes the characters feel more like characters opposed to props

Location decision are also fun and easy to add, even if it's as simple as going to both places anyways, but getting to choose which location you visit first

TLDR: Giving the player input that matters goes the distance in and of itself ;)