Unity Ren'Py Should I use Ren'Py?

[Jamurai77]

Hey guys,
Started planning/scripting my first game inspired by Pinktea's Slave Lord series. I really like the old flash style games like 'Meet N Fuck' or Zone-sama games with the buttons controlling animation loops and whatnot. I was thinking to use Ren'Py because I am a total coding noob but I'm not sure how I can achieve those types of interactions. I saw that Pinktea switched to Unity after Flash got done away with. Can I make the same type of button controlled loops and drag and drop interactions in Ren'Py or do I need to look into something more flexible like Unity? Apart from those animation scenes the game will be basically a kind of visual novel, nothing particularly complex. Any advice/feedback would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

Function		Renpy	Unity
Custom buttons where you want		O You must be registered to see the links	O You must be registered to see the links
control animation loops		requires coding to directly control unless someone knows a better ref? (edit see this)	You must be registered to see the links learning the unity API
drag and drop		O You must be registered to see the links	O You must be registered to see the links
UI		O Existing and customizable	X Create from scratch
VN Support		O Existing, infact Renpy is the standard most other VN's try to match in terms of features and easy to use	X no code yourself or use paid assets like Naninovel (which tries to do a lot what Ren'py does)
Saving and background art		O Existing and automated, no fuss	X code in the feature yourself, or directly control, or use an asset such an Naninovel which gives easy functionality.

Out of the box, Ren'py is going to do what you need without you needing to be a programmer first, easy to learn what you need along the way.

to do some things in Unity, you have to know enough programming or be familiar with enough assets to lay the groundwork, and even after you have a start, it may still take effort to get everything to work together, such as trying to get the save system to work with the VN system if it's not an all in one solution like Naninovel.

Plenty of awesome people here who can help with renpy code if you have questions.

only really use unity if you want to be able to do more, or have more complex projects, or really want to customize things, such as UI effects.

edit: Pinktea likely switched to unity due to its ability to support similar animation data to flash. you likely don't need to worry about this if you will be prerendering animations into images like most. Flash/vector animation is niche and fallen out of favor, replaced with vertext animation like for Spine2D or Live2D characters, which there are plugins for unity, and I think support for it in renpy if I'm not mistaken.

 

[Quintillian]

Flash/vector animation is niche and fallen out of favor, replaced with vertext animation like for Spine2D or Live2D characters, which there are plugins for unity, and I think support for it in renpy if I'm not mistaken.

Looks like there is:

You must be registered to see the links

 

[anne O'nymous]

control animation loops [...] Renpy [...] requires coding to directly control
unless someone knows a better ref?

Directly controlling movies need coding, but pausing them, having them loop as long as the player want, with interruption that will happen whenever he want, is really easy to do.

This should be enough :
/!\ wrote on the fly /!\

screen myMovie( movie ):

    add movie

    imagebutton:
        auto "UI/stop_%s.png"
        action Return()

    imagebutton:
        auto "UI/pause_%s.png"
        action If( renpy.music.get_pause( "movie" ), PauseAudio( "movie", False ), PauseAudio( "movie", True ) )

define movie1 = Movie( play="whatever.webm", loop=True )

label whatever:
    call screen myMovie( movie1 )

 

[Jamurai77]

Wow, ok thanks for the quick and detailed responses! Will go ahead and start with Ren'Py. Hopefully I will have a short demo to post within the next few weeks.