Ren'Py Renpy or stand alone dev?

[Prince St Studio]

Hey everyone,


I’m currently working on a 2D slice-of-life game that features multiple gameplay paths and systems — things like travel mechanics, crafting, and even some minigames. It’s a pretty ambitious mix, and we’re building it in MonoGame right now.


I’m finding MonoGame gives us a lot of creative control, but I’ve also noticed a lot of projects here use Ren’Py, which seems faster to get up and running — especially for branching stories and dialogue-heavy content.


For those of you who’ve tried both (or other engines like Unity, Godot, etc.), I’m curious:

• What have been your pros and cons when choosing a platform?
• Have you ever hit roadblocks or felt boxed in by one engine vs. another?
• What engine do you recommend for managing complex gameplay systems alongside visual novel elements?

Would love to hear your thoughts!

 

[Mispeled]

From what you're describing, Ren'py works fine for that.
It uses python and, while it limits certain aspects of python, it offers enough freedom.
The biggest limiter with Ren'py just comes down to screen rendering, it is heavily limited by its framework and can't do high demand complex image manipulation like pixel manipulation across a whole image, and often requiring to do some less than ideal code to make certain things work.
You can do all the OOP through python for things like crafting or minigames and you have many ways you can handle travel mechanics. From imagemap, to screen images, to just image button with hover transforms or secondary hover images.

What Ren'py does is that it saves you all the time to do the core systems of a visual novel, which is the logic, dialogue, a good framework for the UI that is easy to change, a save/load system, a rollback system, easy way to play music/sound on different channels, so on and so forth.

As for engines like Unity, Godot, and Unreal, I would only recommend them if you're trying to do a different gameplay loop from a typical visual novel. If you want the player to be able to control the character, walk around manually like an isometric game, or even a 1st/3rd person 3D game, etc. If there is combat involved that isn't doable as a slideshow, at best you could do a japanese style combat system with Ren'py but anything more complex is better to use an actual game engine imo.

In the end it depends on what you want.
If your minigames are things like a memory card game, blackjack, russian roulette, so on and so forth, you can do it on Ren'py without much issues so long as you find a way to make it work within the screen limitations.
If your minigames are things like literal golf, billiard, and more interactive games, then you'll want to use an actual game engine.

 

[Prince St Studio]

That sounds exactly right thank you for the response!
We're happy we chose to use a stand alone creation rather then Renpy, I also prefer the UI of our standalone. But yes,already having the save game, dialogue system created is a huge plus to using Renpy! That took ages lol

 

[Scooter_Tramp]

Unity is a memory pig & Unreal is endgamer unfriendly. I only play Ren'py games and won't even take a look at anything else...