We recently published an article on the Most Used Game Engines on Steam and one entry surprised me, RenPy, a game engine for creating Visual Novels has a shocking 1081 games published on Steam. Given the engines popularity, it seemed only appropriate we should cover it here on GameFromScratch.
RenPy is described as:
Ren’Py is a visual novel engine – used by thousands of creators from around the world – that helps you use words, images, and sounds to tell interactive stories that run on computers and mobile devices. These can be both visual novels and life simulation games. The easy to learn script language allows anyone to efficiently write large visual novels, while its Python scripting is enough for complex simulation games.
Ren’Py is open source and free for commercial use.
The project is open source and hosted on GitHub and is released under the MIT open source license. The engine is well documented with translations available in several different languages. You can check out RenPy in action in the video below.
One word of warning, and this seems to be a common bug. The RenPy installation changes a setting in the NVIDIA control panel that will result in No DC being displayed in the top left corner of Godot or Blender. If this occurs, there are two ways to fix it. If you do not modify your NVIDIA driver settings, head on into the NVIDIA Control Panel, go to 3D Settings and click Restore Defaults.
If on the other hand you make lots of customizations to your driver settings, you want to locate Threading Optimization and make sure it is set to auto (this is also in Manage 3D Settings).
