Ren'Py Tutorial Book - Game Development with Ren'Py

moose_puck

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Sep 6, 2021
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Overview
Get your feet wet in developing visual novels and take a guided tour through easy to follow tutorials using three of the most popular tools (Ren'Py, TyranoBuilder, and Twine). This book uses a two-pronged approach into the fine art of text-based games, showing you what makes for compelling writing as well as the programming logic and techniques needed to bring your visual novels to life.
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Format: PDF (346 pages)


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Last edited:

airakinra

New Member
Jun 19, 2018
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Thank you for sharing this.

If some of the above links are dead.
The book can also be downloaded for the below link.
 
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sc.dev

Developer of The Goblin Tale
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Mar 20, 2023
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It's very useful. Thanks for sharing.
 

anne O'nymous

I'm not grumpy, I'm just coded that way.
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I finally found five minutes to take a look at it... and well, it was enough to know that I'll not need more.

If it's a relatively interesting book to learn about Visual Novel writing mechanism and history, it's a horror when it come to Ren'Py itself, that is supposed to be the main subject of the book.

The first code example appear only at page 115 and is this:
Python:
init:
    $ mar = Character('Markus')

    image home = Image( "home_of_markus.jpg" )
    [...]

    hide markus happy
    show markus sad
    [...]
What mean that the first code example already contain four errors that would have been avoided by the reading of the documentation...

" ".
It appear early in the "Quickstart" part of the documentation, something that anyone should have read at least once, in order to know how Ren'Py works.

" "
Ok, this one is a bit difficult to understand for a novice, but you don't write a book about a subject if you're novice, right ?

Python:
# These two lines are equivalent.
image logo = "logo.png"
image logo = Image("logo.png")
[ ]
Using Image is only interesting when you need to change the additional arguments.

" "
So, when you've show markus happy, you just need show markus sad to replace the image by another one.


Would the author, or at least the technical reviewer, have read the documentation, the init block would have been replaced by:
Code:
define mar = Character('Markus')
image hom = "home_of_markus.jpg"
And hide statement wouldn't have been used, because useless.


Of course, the book is a bit old, since it date from 2019, but all this was already in the documentation at this date. And the rest of the example is globally following the same "I don't know what I'm doing, but well it works" logic.



It probably still worth to be read, at least for the three first chapters, but always keep in mind that the code you'll see is mostly wrong ; at least for Ren'Py, I don't know enough TyranoBuilder and Twine to judge. Because yes, a book named "game development with Ren'Py will teach you how to use TyranoBuilder and Twine :/