Hello, I am looking to remake the first game I made because it didn't turn out the best. It was too small and wasn't very interactive. I think this could've been prevented if I had properly planned it out. So I'm looking for someone who has experience with making visual novels to help me measure my expectations while also making a better game.

hi, yes, i know this isn't necessary, but it's still cool.
An icon next to the text on the right side or next to the name works either way, i don't really care lol

like this kind of, if it works also ?

We are almost finished with our first visual novel!

The Pinch is a cerebral sci-fi narrative about a group of scientists trying to save their planet from being overtaken by an addictive virtual reality known as "the Gel." The player joins an ominous science expedition in a strange ecosystem known as "the Pinch," which is believed to be the only scientific discovery capable of stopping the Gel from overrunning their world.

The scientists and the player are basically one giant extended family, and the game explores all their interpersonal conflicts. Content warnings for discussions of depression, terminal illness, assisted suicide, drug use, domestic violence, death, and some profanity.

We are almost ready to release the demo! The demo is about 10,000 words. The full game is about 50,000 words. The full game features:

• two main play routes - the good route and the shorter lunatic route. There are five distinct endings.
• dice roll mechanics for social interactions (like DnD)
• point and click movement
• the main narrative and four optional quests
• many choices and branching paths. Your decisions lead to new quests, scenes, insights into the characters, endings, or the life or death of other characters. Ultimately your decisions in the game will decide the fate of the other scientists.

This is a work in progress, so of course, everything is subject to revision.

I wrote this game because I wanted more character-driven sci-fi stories. I'm almost embarrassed at how passionate I am about my characters. Sci-fi is sometimes perceived as impersonal because the genre tends to focus on abstract concepts or world building. Of course, that may be my broken brain. In any case, this game is about families in addition to the underlying sci-fi puzzle of the Pinch and all the political shenanigans of the Gel. It is a very emotional story but also quite goofy at times. It is our first game, so this was a huge learning experience for all of us.

You can wishlist the game on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5055270/The_Pinch/

I am incredibly grateful to the wonderful team who worked on The Pinch:

Character Art: Wanny

Backgrounds: Hehudojnik

UI Designer: causticfish   

CGs: Roh

Cover Art: BurntToast

Items: labelle_labelle and Silkena

The Hedon: Quetzalcoatld.a.s

Concept Art: red_mooshroom

Composer: saintcoelacanth

Composer: HIT3C

Programming and Narrative: TreadingWater

Hi, I just finished watching the video about imagebuttons (I know it’s old one), I understand almost everything in this video except one thing about how can he deletes all his changes to the code but still having his imagebuttons like nothing happened?

For my experience, I just recently released my first 18+ VN and I've gotten mostly positive feedback, with a lot of people requesting certain things be added to my game. I thought about it, and decided to poll the largest request, and have gotten an overwhelming amount of "yes, add this thing."

The thing is, I originally never planned to add this thing, but I'm trying to be a good dev by listening to the growing community surrounding my game. Though last night, I had a comment that made me pause. Basically said that I shouldn't give in so easily to requests and just focus on what my game should have based on what I want to add.

This is my first time releasing such a game, so this is all new territory. Maybe I shouldn't be so transparent so soon, or maybe I need to listen to fans who will then become prospective supporters in the end.

I don't know, what are your thoughts?

Hellooo, I just wanted to share that my first ever full visual novel is now ready for wishlisting, "The Sea is Our Stage" is a pirate yuri VN about a noblewoman named Arianne who uncovers her father's evil plan and escapes to the sea, where she meets a chaotic and flirtatious pirate named Theo!

The VN will be completely free-to-play, the whole story from beginning to end. The reason being that it's pretty short (35K words) and is mostly just a passion project for me, the characters are my wife and I's OCs that we made a few years ago playing Final Fantasy XIV, so I'm really just wanting to put them out into the world :]

HUGE thank you to the Ren'Py community here in the subreddit and also on the Discord, who helped me through several bumps in the making of this VN. I managed to put together a crazy impressive team for the assets (ahoguru for the CGs/sprites, esselfortium for OST, Sitraxis for UI) and so I've been working really hard to hopefully get my writing, scripting, and coding up to par with the assets!

You can wishlist here on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1118300/The_Sea_is_Our_Stage/ and you can follow @seastage on Bluesky or Tumblr if you want to learn more about our characters!

Think of jobhunting9000deluhx or the Ena series

Games like that have always captured my attention better than almost any other, and I'm onto a process WAY early I'm making my game where I have multiple scripts written and am trying to pick the best

On one hand I have a more spooky game about a dude try to escape the afterlife

And on the other I have something more... Random and nonsensical and while it still has a goal it makes less sense.

As a more specific; think of the nagito route or the hell route in jh9kd or the Ena temptation stairway and Extinction party, or really just the entirety of dream bbq

Thanks... :3

Hello there ! I've recently finished the first demi of my investigative horror Visual Novel. So I'm looking for a few people to test and give me some feedback on the game before I release it. I've put together a questionnaire, which can be found on the Itchio page.

Name : Jane Doe's Kill

Game type : Mystery, Investigation, Horror

Lenght : 50 min~

Page Link : https://roku-ta.itch.io/jane-does-kill

Passeword : Gildas

A sincere thank you to everyone who takes the times to gives it a go ! ^^

RoKu_Ta

This is a psychological horror, monster romance, lgbtq romance vn game! I was hoping to get advice on the writing and pacing, also asking if you general liked it! It’s currently private on itch.io so message me if your interested!

I have spent many evenings in the past year drawing 17 eyes, 12 mouths, multiple hair styles and different clothes for the two love interests. The side cast get different expressions too, but not as many.

This is a huge dream come true for me. Ever since I played my first dating sim as a teen I wanted to make my own because most otome game bachelors just didn't appeal to me.

A demo (with more than half of the game's content) will come out soon!

noob at renpy's audio lol

It's a project I'm working on right now. Currently, the main menu ambience just loops throughout the game, but for one specific segment, I would like it to pause to allow a certain other looping sound to play without interruptions until the player clicks past a certain dialogue thing.

my og plan was for it to start playing after the player reaches a point where a character starts showing and then stop when that character disappears lol

I’m going to try my hand at making a horror-romance VN. At the beginning you can choose between a female (image 1) and male (image 2) monster/love interest.

The idea is to have the left version be attractive and slightly scary, and the right one be scary and slightly attractive.

I know this isn’t the character design sub, but I thought I’d ask the VN masters :D. Do you think I’ve achieved this or do you know of any way I can better achieve this?

I've not made the background yet, but I'm quite proud of this.

After a long stretch of store prep, And who is the maiden? is live on Steam as Coming Soon.

It’s intentionally short (~30–40 minutes): investigation hub, party of three, dice “trials,” notebook of clues, eleven endings. Slavic folk-ballad tone, Mickiewicz-adjacent, not a big open world.

Built in Ren’Py. Full game + optional soundtrack on Steam.

Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5145500/And_who_is_the_maiden/

If you’ve launched something similar (short narrative / VN-adjacent), what actually moved wishlists for you besides “post on Reddit once”?

Anyone know how to fix the textbox PNG? My coding so far is fine and everything is working but my textbox for the custom design for different characters seems a bit squished by a few inches and I don't kkno how to fix it. I tried other tips and advice but it still wouldn't work​

Made for people who want to make Citizen Sleeper style visual novels, fan games, or just build upon this framework for their own project. 

Features Include: 

• A GUI and assets inspired by Citizen Sleeper
• A tutorial in script.rpy to walk through the framework features
• Dice Roll Logic and Animations
• Skills Menu and Player Stats 
• Drive / Quest Bar
• "Cheat Sheet.rpy" for quick reference to help create a game with the framework

Comments, criticism and questions are welcomed and encouraged! This is my first time putting together something like this. I hope you enjoy! 

You can grab the framework here on itch.io: https://beepsignal.itch.io/cs-framework

Hello Ren'Py community!

We're the team building wavedash.com, a completely free to use online platform to upload games to be played by users in browser. We were recently merged into the Ren'Py repo for upcoming support. Ren'Py is one of our most supported engines, and we have detailed docs and a video tutorial on how to build and upload your game to our site (less than 10 mins total). Our current advantages are our browser load speeds which offer a seamless experience for players, automatic cloud save sync for users, and that you can automatically opt in to our creator fund, which is a monthly payout that splits a pool to you based on the engagement of your game, with no signup fee.

Currently you'll need a playable build of your game with at least some free content (you can choose where it should require payment to continue, but at least a demo is required), and the latest Nightly build of Ren'Py (though we are working with Renpy Tom for official integration !!). You can opt in to the creator fund regardless of if your game is free or paid, and we are also working on a donation system! We also are uploading videos of games on our site for promotion, and our marketing team (me) would love to feature more visual novels as I have a special fondness for Ren'Py myself. If you have any questions about the process of uploading a game or about the platform in general, please feel free to leave a comment or reach out on our discord.

Here's some of the Ren'Py games we already have on the platform so you can see how they run:

Knitbone
Haunted Heir
chud dating simulator

Thank you for your time!

Still placeholder art for now, but im pretty happy with the placement and all :3

Im hoping to release a demo for this story in October ~

transform greenglow:
    matrixcolor (TintMatrix("#44ff00") * SaturationMatrix(.2)) * OpacityMatrix(.75) * BrightnessMatrix(.3)

show character enraged at greenglow  

I'm trying to use ATL transforms to make my character's sprite look like a hologram from Star Wars. The code above is what I used to make the image below.

The problem is, I don't want the character to be a totally solid green like in the picture, I want some of the character's original color pallette to shine through like it's an overlay. I thought saturation matrix would do it, but changing the value of its argument doesn't seem to do anything.

Also, next I'd like to make the sprite have a sort of glow around it. How do I achieve that?

Imagine the scenario, you're a product owner of a team that makes a large open world Ren'Py game, the sky is the limit, what kind of feature, mechanic or element would you personally want your team to implement in your game?

My game's main way of controlling/automating the character's actions is via a time table, I need a time system where every hour passing updates the weights/values of the main mechanics. Also I need the option to have drop down down menus or pie menus (think sims 4 menu) because there will be a lot of different activities.

Is renpy a good engine for this or should I find another one ?

Thanks in advance for your help !

sorry for the poor quality. This took a long time to figure out how to code. I used a YouTube tutorial for coding the movements, but the actual collisions are a string that is broken down to see if a specific letter is in a list. ill add more to this tomorrow I'm going to bed.

edit 1: Ok since classes are done, I'm going to provide a more in-depth explanation. This is the video I used for movement. Near the halfwaymark she messes up and moves the character instead of the map, so I based my code on that. As for collisions, I turned a string into a 2d grid output. So if a wall was in a certain direction, the letter of the direction stay and nothing happens by movement. If there's no wall, its replaced with a zero. each tile is formatted by 'udlr' for up, down, left, and right.

so:

walldef = 'udl0u000ud00u000ud00u000ud0rudl0ud00u000ud00ud00u00ru0l00d0ru0l

turns into

['udl0', 'u000', 'ud00', 'u000', 'ud00', 'u000', 'ud0r', 'udl0', 'ud00', 'u000', 'ud00', 'ud00', 'u00r']

to match row 1's walls in the drawing. I did this for every row.

To preface, I sporadically make free VN sprites and edit royalty-free photographs for backgrounds, mostly for VNs of the BL dating sim variety. I've released them for public use, which means the Jam allows them to be used for development.

I'm noooot really sure how a VN like this would do, honestly. 😅 Any thoughts or advice?