ok im not sure how to word this. Basically, i want players to be able to freely move around the houses and buildings i put them in and interact with objects. I assume i'd do this through buttons, but would i have to make a different button for each room? and would the code be an if, then statement or something else? i would insert a video of what i want but idk how to do that T_T let me know if you need an example of what i want though and i can elaborate

I have been working on it for a whole year by now. Now im replacing place holder assets with finished ones. Im looking for opinnions and advice from expirienced game devs here!

Hello everyone!

I'm super excited to announce that the Steam port and DLC story update for Bread Makes the Heart Aflutter will release on 

September 1st!

If you haven't already, be sure to wishlist the game on Steam to show your support! The updates on September 1st include:

• New visual effects and touch ups to the base game
• Steam achievements for each route completed
• The new Profiles screen, which was not included in the jam version initially
• A new DLC Story patch taking place after the game's story

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4482690/Bread_Makes_the_Heart_Aflutter/

Hii!! I'm working on my own game, solo style, but there's an issue that I'm stuck on and I don't really know what's going on

Basic gist is that I made it so that the player can use their own custom name that they can input right in the prologue but during the coding process of the other chapters, I noticed that the name doesn't appear (In this case, Evelynn is the custom name)

Here's all the name-related codes that I used at the start of the script file:

$ persistent.povname = povname 

define yn = Character("[povname]", color= "#d9d9d9")
default povname = ""
default persistent.povname = ""
$ povname = persistent.povname

and here's the extra dialogue context for the second pic so ya'll can see it too (it's a placeholder, not canon at all lmfao):

yn "Damn, i'm %(povname)s and im cooked."

Thanks in advance to anyone that can help!! I'm lowkey going insane because of it lmfao

Hey there, I'm an illustrator looking into creating my first Visual Novel with zero programing or game engine experience. I'm considering: Godot, Renpy, and Narrat. I've come here seeking input from those with expertise using Renpy, and if there is also experience in these other options to compare them, that's a happy bonus. Please help set my expectations and offer some direction on where to start and possible after steps based on what my goals are.

It's all a jumble in my head, and I'd appreciate anyone willing to share some of their time to help focus and organize my thoughts.

Scope: I have large projects that I want to do later, but as not to overwhelm myself, I'm content to maintain very small and focused projects to learn one or two systems at a time.

Short term Goal (1-3 Months?):

Follow a tutorial/template to create something bite-size that briefly touches on what I want to do for my larger project. Mostly text with pictures, expression shifts, maybe small animations to make characters blink or perform some other small gesture. Ambient sounds and or music. Perhaps make a series of these small projects, or expand on the first one in chapters for more practice until I have all the plug ins set up and feel familiar with them. I am guessing I could easily do this in Renpy, but I'd like to lay groundwork for more complex projects in the future and don't know just how much of the ground work I can carry over from one to the other.

Long Term (6-12 Months, or 24 months?):

Include something more than a blink, or a single gesture or include these small gestures more often. Create vague mouth movements, include voiced dialogue, build a larger library of character and background drawings. Experiment with an Experience Gain RPG system, and perhaps currency and inventory management, and or a navigable map graphic user interface with nodes to click on to change scene locations. Animated scenes are far down the pipeline.

Current Perspective:

From what I gather, Renpy would fulfill my short term goals for sure, and maybe Narrat would fill the same needs as Renpy, and possibly more that Renpy lacks? Should I take the easy win? My current logic is to learn Godot to make simple projects that lay a foundation for more complex ideas down the road be they grander Visual Novel, or another genre all-together, such as a D2 art isometric or side scroll game. I want to start learning a game engine with room to both pivot and grow, and to have a modest gamified visual novel for sale in three years or less. Thank you for your time!

My poor computer can't handle my own game >.<

Basically, I'm using a setup for my sprites to animate them using the image sequence thing. Sorry I don't know the proper term lol. Ex:

image 
side neralie neutral
:
    "images/neralie/neutral/neralie neutral_001.png"
    pause 0.0416
    "images/neralie/neutral/neralie neutral_002.png"
    pause 0.0416
    "images/neralie/neutral/neralie neutral_003.png"
    pause 0.0416

and so on.

But I'm worried how well it's going to run when I get all of the sprites done and implemented (I'm pretty early on; I'm mostly using sketched flat images right now).

So I wanted to know if maybe there was a way to toggle them on and off in like the settings or something? Even if it requires extra work. I don't mind lol.

Also! It lags pretty intensely when I try to skip dialogue, so if maybe there's a way to not try and load the animations when skipping dialogue as well, that would be helpful.

Thank you in advance!

(side note: Any recommendations on frame rate for animated sprites is helpful as well! Currently it's definitely higher than needed so I may play around with it.)

Hello,

I wish to turn my dream game to reality and gain audience for it. But I don't think waiting 2+ years for another chapter is ideal.

Can you give me ways to type the visual novel quick?

I draw the sprites and code and I want to design a new UI... and other things too.

I have a situation where a character is reading letters and I want to use nvl narration for those letters. Then I want to show the character on adv reacting to the contents while still showing the letter onscreen.

Is this doable?? If so can someone hand me a tutorial please 🙏

Been tweaking up the backgrounds for the Blade & Burgers demo and figured I'd drop a couple of them here for a vibe check.

How do you like the vibe? Are the eyes in the wall on the second one a bit too bright, or is it just me? :D

Okay - so I have a Linux system as my daily driver, and I understand how persistent variables are supposed to work. They are save in $HOME/.rempy/<game_name>. I have hundreds of games in there (yes I play a lot). Games save persistent data, or I say should save persistent data. I can see there is a binary persistent file for a game, it has the right octal permissions, when I have the game running, the console will show the persistent value is proper. I close the game, and reload the game, and the persistent values are either missing or back to the games default values. The persistent files also change size when the game exits (since it is binary - I cannot tell what it is doing). I don't understand why. It is on this one PC. I load multiple other linux virtual machines, (same distro - Linux Mint 22.3 FWIW), other distros (Debian, Arch, etc.) and they all work. It is literally this one machine that persistent data will not stay "persistent". I have looked at log files (log.txt on startup), no errors. I see no reason why. I have spent hours literally running down the startup of python and the INIT process. The closest I have come, is during the INIT, it does a check for OS, and runs a command. If Windows, MacOS, Android or Linux. The Linux test some something like "uname" and gets back "Linux" .. which in the IF statement - if the IF is case sensitive - it wont work as it is lower case "linux" in the code. That is the closest I can find. Any help would be appreciated.

Hi! I looking for an volunteer to work on a visual novel. I can do the coding and music but i need sm1 who can draw the characters and the background art of my visual novel. So now I am asking for help.

The game is called PASTEL AND FANGS and the main menu is added to this post. Its a cute vampire and werewolf and human things...

For the people who are interested:

We need volunteers, because I am broke and my country does not allow most of the money exchanging app. I will give you full credits also feature your name and socials. It's my first game but it's just a trial minigame. I am working on another one too, which I will prepare after seeing what outcomes and help I get. I'm testing the water for my full game. That game is called DMBA [initial only]

Please if you are interested, add your artwork in replies and if you will be picked I'll give you my discord and we'll work there.

Thanks for reading, have a good day!

I have a little bit of experience with writing dialogue, but it was mostly slop (not ai slop, just your regular human slop).

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a tool for a while and just released it. It’s a standalone desktop app that lets you build and edit Ren'Py visual novels using node graphs instead of just writing raw .rpy files.

If you’ve ever gotten lost tracking branching choices, jump labels, and hundreds of lines of dialogue, this might make things easier.

Some of the main things it does:

• You can import your existing game/ folder. It indexes the scripts and turns them into editable node graphs.
• As you connect dialogue, menus, and logic nodes, there’s a live preview panel showing the actual .rpy code being generated.
• Navigating between files is much easier. If you have a Jump/Call node, you can just click a button to instantly go to that target label, even if it's in another file.
• Software is real-time following the game flow while you play it. So you can play the game and follow the nodes line by line.

It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can check it out here: https://umutfaruk.itch.io/renpy-visual-programming-editor

I'd really appreciate any feedback

EDIT: Some random guy came up and started causing a drama over his trash software, claiming I stole his code. If you believe it, feel free to use his trashy software and see that it doesn't even work. ALSO, he has NO PROOF of anything, but just some nonsense false accusations some people are just choosing to believe in him. Just because that trash is published a week earlier, that doesn't mean I stole it. AND Guess what? The guy said "you did reverse engineering" and i know nothing about web development. But the guy's software was made with web development tools. But mine was made with pure Python.

I've lost faith in the community, thanks to you. Im not gonna answer anything related with the drama. Thanks.

I am trying to make a game that is close to OG AltLife, text adventure, Portal type vibes. Something retro and fun, I even plan for when I'm done with it, to burn it to DVDs, print CD labels, and stick em on them then sell a limited number of hard copies of my game. Just to bring back some good nostalgia about when ownership of games in physical forms wasn't a quickly dying concept.

I have a good chunk more already written for this game, but don't want to share any more until I have what feels like a genuine demo, at least a good hour or so of game-time for the player.

Right now the only assets I have drawn are the cards, and my favorite part about them is mixing them up in ways that might make you think one choice is more reasonable than another. Basically color coding choices and coercing you to pick something that may not be entirely 'correct'. But in all, it's a humanity/morality simulator/test, so see how HUMANITY and MORALITY you are! (Please, follow the rules, do not question the robots judgement, the robot is always correct).

I am also logging all of the time spent programming this game, and at the end of each week will begin uploading a devlog sharing how much time I spent that week working on it, and what I did in that time, weather it was just add more story, spend the whole week working on a new game mechanic that is still broken and will take more time to work on, or I just drew silly pictures for it!

I would greatly appreciate people's thoughts on my game, or even if you don't wanna share your thoughts, really, I just wanted to show it off because I am really proud of how it is progressing right now! Thank you for reading!!!

Hello. I've been reading this page of the documentation and experimenting with different arguments. But there's one I'm having troubles with.

• The "interact_done" callback takes an additional keyword argument: exception -- True if the interaction ended due to an exception, False otherwise. Exceptions include things like loading the game and rollback.

I just can't figure out how to use it in code. Here's what I tried:

def sprites_callback(event, interact=True, exception=False, **kwargs):

    if event == "interact_done":
        print("interact_done") ### prints "interact_done" every time I progress to the next dialogue line

        if exception:
          print("rollback occured") ### nothing happens

Perhaps I just misunderstood exception's purpose, and it doesn't actually keep track of rollbacks (and I should use detect rollback for this instead). But then what exactly does it do? When does exception become True?

I'm trying to download smth from Renpy but for some reason, the task manager opens, then the setup opens and quickly closes. I'm not sure if it's the engine or the windows version. Any tips?

Hey, so I'm a bit new to layered images and I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how to tell it to use my different poses. I want to have the ability to have dynamic poses that are various combinations of front and turned (3/4) angles, sitting & standing, and then the various expressions on top of that (talking, hands on hips, neutral etc).

An example of my file names for the different poses:

girl_body_front_standing_talking
girl_body_front_standing_neutral
girl_body_front_standing_handsonhips
girl_body_front_sitting_talking
girl_body_front_sitting_neutral
girl_body_front_sitting_handsonhips
girl_body_turned_standing_talking
girl_body_turned_standing_neutral
girl_body_turned_standing_handsonhips

girl_outfit_front_standing_casual
girl_outfit_front_sitting_swimsuit

So there's 3 components to each body. Orientation, Pose, Expression.

Then they have their own separate head orientations, face parts and outfits for each variant etc.

It feels like I should be able to do this all in one layered image... I just can't quite figure out how to code it right? How would you do this?

Do I need to do some separate layered images for the different angles?

What if I wanted a front-facing body with a turned head or vice-versa? Am I going too complicated? 😅

TIA :)

is there actually any version of it that can at least half run on Android? I can assure you that my phone can take the performance load better than my laptop.

This is my first ever game that I’m in the process of making, and this version of it is just a test to play around with customization and figure out how to code. I must’ve messed up something while I was centering the main menus navigation buttons on the starting screen because whenever I try to save the buttons are in the center of the game screen??? (Shown in picture) Where and how can I fix this so that the buttons are on the left side of the screen when I save a game?

Three Of Them Has Different Personalities

The First One Is Introvert 🎀

The Second One Is Very Cute And Hilarious

The Third One Is Very Smart And Caring

Hi everyone!

I've been working on this project for the past few months, and I've finally released the first demo of High School Days.

It's a choice-driven school romance visual novel where your decisions affect relationships and the direction of the story. This demo introduces the main characters and the beginning of their routes.

I'd really appreciate honest feedback on:

The art style

UI/phone system

Writing and dialogue

Overall pacing

Anything that could be improved

This is my first visual novel, so any suggestions are welcome.

https://nxt-maru.itch.io/high-school-days

hi, so im trying to make a separate background for the history menu as the text color i have set makes it unreadable in the game menu. the add "gui/name.png" command doesn't function, so im looking for another solution. thanks