The Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine, often called RenPy for short, is afree and open-source game engine that facilitates the creation of visual novels. Ren'Py is a portmanteau of , the Japanese word for 'romantic love', a common element of games made using Ren'Py; and Python, the programming language that Ren'Py runs on. The engine was developed for and targeted at multiple platforms, including Microsoft Windows and Linux.
The engine allows movie playback for animated sprites, full-screen movies, in-engine animation, and full animation and customization of UI elements via the feature "Screen Language". The Ren'Py software development kit is officially supported on Windows, Linux, and recent versions of macOS; and can be installed via the package managers of the Arch Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, and Gentoo Linux distributions. Ren'Py features a built-in tutorial game that demonstrates core features such as dialogue scripting, adding images, transitions, music and effects, branching choices, and other functionalities.
Ren'Py includes the ability to create branching stories, save file systems, rollback to previous points in the story, a variety of scene transitions, DLC, and so on. The engine also allows for movie playback for both full-screen movies and animated sprites, in-engine animation (using the built in "Animation and Translation Language", or ATL), and full animation and customization of UI elements via "Screen Language". Ren'Py scripts have a screenplay-like syntax, and can also include blocks of Python code to allow advanced users to add new features of their own. In addition, tools are included in the engine distribution to obfuscate scripts and archive game assets to mitigate copyright infringement.
Ren'Py is built on pygame, which is built with Python on SDL. The Ren'Py SDK is officially supported on Windows, recent versions of macOS, and Linux; and can be installed via the package managers of the Arch Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, and Gentoo (in experimental overlay) Linux distributions. Ren'Py can build games for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, OpenBSD, iOS, and HTML5 with WebAssembly.
Ren'Py includes a built-in tutorial game that demonstrates core features such as dialogue scripting, adding images, transitions, music and effects, branching choices, and other basic and advanced functionalities.
Ren'Py had been recommended as a video game creation engine by several publications, including Indie Games Plus, MakeUseOf, PC Gamer, and The Guardian. Ren'py has been used in classes at Carnegie Mellon School of Art, Faculty of Art at University Tunku Abdul Rahman, Kampar, Perak, Malaysia, and as a tool for information literacy.
Notes
Citations