The Ren’Py Visual Novel Engine
Ren’Py is an engine that supports the creation of visual novels and dating sims, forms of computer-mediated storytelling. It supports a movie script-like syntax that makes creating simple games easy, while still being customizable and extensible by advanced creators. With no additional work by the game-maker, it supports features expected of all visual novels, like loading, saving, preferences, and rollback.
I’ve always been interested in this concept of creating a ’storytelling engine.’ This one in particular is based heavily on Python and has you writing a lot of scripts. In this case, this is one of those things I know I could do myself in Flash, but the fact that someone took the time to make a universal engine is appealing to me, in that I *wouldn’t* have to do it myself in Flash.
The appeal of these things is that the time saved from not having to do it yourself can be spent on better telling a story. This is the main appeal to me. I’m not sure how complicated the games can be, but when you refer to them as “visual novels” it suddenly becomes more acceptable to make them just narrative-heavy interactive works of fiction. It’s worth trying out.