Ren'Py What is the average pages in a RenPy game

[Rycharde's Realm]

Yeah, I know, there is probably a buttload of "averages" of pages in a chapter of a RenPy game throughout F95 and beyond. As a newbie to creating a game, I'm looking for a ballpark average.

 

[TessaXYZ]

A total render count of 4000-5000 isn't uncommon for feature-rich games by the end of their dev cycle. Sometimes more. Often less.

 

[anne O'nymous]

A total render count of 4000-5000 isn't uncommon for feature-rich games by the end of their dev cycle.

I don't want to discourage you, because I really like your game so far, and it would be a shame that you don't finish it, but you are far below the reality.

To take random games (understand "games already installed on my computer right now"):

The finished game Corruption, that combine free roaming and grinding, and therefore massively rely on the repetition of the CGs, have near to 8,500 images.
The WIP game Now & Then, a classical VN, already have near to 17,500 images, and I haven't the last update installed.
The WIP game Pale Carnations, a multi-routes VN with few separated scenes, have near to 17,000 images.
The WIP game Shattered, that rely on 3D sprites and don't change much the visual, already have near to 9,000 images ; and once again I don't have the last update installed.
The abandoned/completed game Super Powered, that is free roaming, grinding and partly rely on 3D sprites, have near to 12,500 images.

Actually the average is between 10,000 and 15,000 at the end of the game.
But depending on the game and the possible multi-routes, and including the animations/movies, it can perfectly be five time this or more. By example, a game like Heavy Five, that is multi-routes and have movies, need months between each updates because there's around 20,000 renders done for each updates.

 

[Rycharde's Realm]

Oops! Forgot to add ONE thing to the title and op: What is the average number of dialogue pages (not renders) in a chapter of a Ren'Py game?

 

[MissFortune]

For an initial 0.1 release, at least for a standard VN (meaning non-sandbox), anywhere from 500 to 1400 renders isn't uncommon and probably recommended. It's impossible to predict the actual number of renders a game/VN will have, just out of sheer variance.

What is the average number of dialogue pages (not renders) in a chapter of a Ren'Py game?

For my own VN, I average about anywhere from 2000 to 2500 lines of code and dialogue/readable text. Again, just depends on the game and how dialogue/narration heavy it is.

 

[anne O'nymous]

Oops! Forgot to add ONE thing to the title and op: What is the average number of dialogue pages (not renders) in a chapter of a Ren'Py game?

Like MissFortune said, it depend on the game and the narration style you'll follow. A game like WVM generally have heavy dialogs, and therefore will have way more pages than the actual average VNs since they actually tend to have short one sentence dialogs.
If it can help you, the literature standards (at least those used in France) are 3,000 words for a magazine publication, whatever if it's a one shoot novel or a story by episodes, and 6,000 words for a novel published in a book. But this is to be seen as nothing more than a reference. There's amazing stories told with less words, and boring ones told with more.

In the end, I don't think that the words/pages count really matter.
It's more a question of density of the action. A 6,000 words long chapter where the characters pass their time dithering will always feel like having less content than a 3,000 words long chapter where the tension is at it maximal from starts to stop.

 

[TessaXYZ]

I don't want to discourage you, because I really like your game so far, and it would be a shame that you don't finish it, but you are far below the reality.

To take random games (understand "games already installed on my computer right now"):

The finished game Corruption, that combine free roaming and grinding, and therefore massively rely on the repetition of the CGs, have near to 8,500 images.
The WIP game Now & Then, a classical VN, already have near to 17,500 images, and I haven't the last update installed.
The WIP game Pale Carnations, a multi-routes VN with few separated scenes, have near to 17,000 images.
The WIP game Shattered, that rely on 3D sprites and don't change much the visual, already have near to 9,000 images ; and once again I don't have the last update installed.
The abandoned/completed game Super Powered, that is free roaming, grinding and partly rely on 3D sprites, have near to 12,500 images.

Actually the average is between 10,000 and 15,000 at the end of the game.
But depending on the game and the possible multi-routes, and including the animations/movies, it can perfectly be five time this or more. By example, a game like Heavy Five, that is multi-routes and have movies, need months between each updates because there's around 20,000 renders done for each updates.

Are you sure these are representative of the average? I doubt it, from the games I've played. Those seem like cherry-picked higher counts. On average I've seen it more typical to release ~300-400 images per update (Edit: to be clear, this is for Daz-based games). 20,000 renders per update (apparently mostly comprised of animations, which can be misleading) is definitely not an average, which was OP's question. In comparison, Inner Growth is long as hell and is currently sitting at 4800 renders (200-300 every 3 months). And let's call out something for what it is, which is that half your examples are made in IllusionSoft engines, which are an order of magnitude quicker at producing images than Daz.

And I'm definitely going to finish mine. I have my story fully planned out and I'm estimating around 5000-6000 renders (not including animations) to do it.

 

[jamdan]

It depends on the style of the game.

You can put a game in the Renpy launcher and click the "Check Script Lint" button and it'll show you the number of renders and words in a game.

Parental Love, for example, has around 8.5k renders and 130k words. If I recall correctly.

AWAM Chapter 1 has around 10k renders and 500k words.

It's not really the number of renders, it's what you do with them and the style of the game.

 

[Winterfire]

Both questions only have a real answer "It depends".
I believe that the western way of doing VNs is highly flawed, especially when joined with a destructive compression that you can witness in pretty much any Ren'Py Game here (although it is optional).

If you separate sprites and backgrounds, then do CGs only for the important stuff (Meaningful scenes, Sex scenes, and so on), then you can pretty much make a long game with 10 times less the renders mentioned in this thread.
For instance my game (a little over 10 hours of length) has 120 CGs or so.
Well, with my terminology I am kind of cheating since they are scenes, not CGs, so in reality it is much more but nowhere close to half a thousand (Unless we also consider backgrounds and characters as renders).


As for the text, "lines" or even worse "pages" are grossly inaccurate.
What matters is the word count since you can google the average reading speed (Words per minute) and use that to get the gameplay length.
I use 300 words per minute, so a script of 18000 words would be a hour.


When taking all that into account, your main question still has no definitive answer...
Some games release weekly, some release monthly, and some others will release every 3 months. Obviously that will change the content each game has, personally I had an average word count of 4000 for weekly releases, 7500/8000 for bimonthly and now 10000 words for monthly releases.
Each game has a different genre though, so it is not quite "fair".


I believe you are caring for the wrong thing, rather than counting the words and trying to get into a quota, you should ask yourself (especially for your first release), "What does it take to introduce my story, the characters, the features, and convince the player to check my future releases?"

 

[sliveart777]

About 90% of them don't make it passed chapter one, so realistically 1-2k.

 

[anne O'nymous]

Are you sure these are representative of the average?

It's an average representation, but does it represent the average ? It's something else, and I haven't claimed that it was.
A game like Family Affair have averagely long updates and an averagely long story. The game being split in weeks, week 1 have around 3,500 images, while week 2 around 5,000 images. As for week 3, still in progress, it already have a bit more than 4,500 images. Therefore it's already more than twice what you expect to be the average at the end of the game, this without counting the movies.

I was curious, because it's an interesting question, therefore I dug deeper and looked at some of the finished games I have stored. There's obviously many short games (less than 1 hour of game play) that are way below the 5,000 images. But globally speaking, really few games, above 1 hour of game play and with at most 5,000 renders, have been released since 2019. The average being now around 10,000 images.
Some examples of this evolution, grouped by creators:
Acting Lessons (finished), around 5,000 images ; Being A DIK (WIP), near to 25,000 images, without counting the movies.
dreaming of dana (finished), a bit more than 5,000 images ; Alexandra (finished), around 12,000 images.
Depraved Awakening (finished), around 5,500 images ; City of Broken Dreamers (WIP) around 10,000 images, without counting the movies.

20,000 renders per update (apparently mostly comprised of animations, which can be misleading) is definitely not an average

I never said that it was an average, and even explicitly hinted that it wasn't one.

In comparison, Inner Growth is long as hell and is currently sitting at 4800 renders (200-300 every 3 months).

Inner Growth have really short updates. It's one of the game that have the shortest updates among those I follow. A game like Triple Ex, that isn't really long either, have updates more frequents (every two and half months, for an average a around 400 renders) and more or less two times longer.
In comparison, Family Affair, that I named above, and that also have short updates, more or less as long as the ones for Inner Growth, have an update every month. Like Triple Ex it have an average of 400 renders by update, but it also include movies, what increase the number of renders.
Before he started to redo and rewrite WVM, Braindrop was doing around 100 renders/week, what is the average to expect for someone who have only one computer.

And let's call out something for what it is, which is that half your examples are made in IllusionSoft games, which are an order of magnitude quicker at producing images than Daz.

And the ones I gave now are all made with Daz Studio, happy ?

 

[TessaXYZ]

It's an average representation, but does it represent the average ? It's something else, and I haven't claimed that it was.
A game like Family Affair have averagely long updates and an averagely long story. The game being split in weeks, week 1 have around 3,500 images, while week 2 around 5,000 images. As for week 3, still in progress, it already have a bit more than 4,500 images. Therefore it's already more than twice what you expect to be the average at the end of the game, this without counting the movies.

I was curious, because it's an interesting question, therefore I dug deeper and looked at some of the finished games I have stored. There's obviously many short games (less than 1 hour of game play) that are way below the 5,000 images. But globally speaking, really few games, above 1 hour of game play and with at most 5,000 renders, have been released since 2019. The average being now around 10,000 images.
Some examples of this evolution, grouped by creators:
Acting Lessons (finished), around 5,000 images ; Being A DIK (WIP), near to 25,000 images, without counting the movies.
dreaming of dana (finished), a bit more than 5,000 images ; Alexandra (finished), around 12,000 images.
Depraved Awakening (finished), around 5,500 images ; City of Broken Dreamers (WIP) around 10,000 images, without counting the movies.




I never said that it was an average, and even explicitly hinted that it wasn't one.




Inner Growth have really short updates. It's one of the game that have the shortest updates among those I follow. A game like Triple Ex, that isn't really long either, have updates more frequents (every two and half months, for an average a around 400 renders) and more or less two times longer.
In comparison, Family Affair, that I named above, and that also have short updates, more or less as long as the ones for Inner Growth, have an update every month. Like Triple Ex it have an average of 400 renders by update, but it also include movies, what increase the number of renders.
Before he started to redo and rewrite WVM, Braindrop was doing around 100 renders/week, what is the average to expect for someone who have only one computer.




And the ones I gave now are all made with Daz Studio, happy ?

Again, I think you're cherry-picking. (Edit: And some of the finished games you linked indeed are the render count I'm suggesting is representative of the average). Most of the games you linked are enormously successful, with the devs having the luxury of it being their full-time job. I would continue to insist that 100 Daz renders per week is not representative of what 95%+ of creators here are able to produce.

 

[anne O'nymous]

Most of the games you linked are enormously successful, with the devs having the luxury of it being their full-time job. I would continue to insist that 100 Daz renders per week is not representative of what 95%+ of creators here are able to produce.

Yet, among all the games I linked, the one who effectively reach, and even goes over, this is also the one who earn the less ; not even US$ 1,000/month. But to be fair, it's also the one with the worse render quality.

But an average of 100 renders/week isn't something so unreachable.
You don't radically change everything for each scene, there's a given number that are variations in a pose, expression, camera angle, etc. Using a scene optimizer permit to keep the same base for all of them, what, when you start to be at ease with Daz Studio mean that those variations can be built in few minutes. It compensate for the time needed to build the said base.
If you planed your week, you build as much as possible of those said bases during the week-end, when you've the more free time, and works on the variation during the week, when you've less free time.
And once you've understood how to configure the rendering engine, batch rendering 14 scenes of good quality during the 10 hours while you're out of the house, due to your works, will not be difficult.

This being said, it doesn't mean that those who render less are bad or lazy.
It's like for any other arts, there's those who are exceptionally talented and can build a scene really quickly, because they already see it entirely in their mind, and there's those who are like the majority of us, and need more times, past in trial and error, to reach the same result.
And there's also the point you missed in the comparison I made between games from the same creator : it's always the second one that have the more renders.
It's not unexpected. When you build 5,000 or more renders, without counting the rejected ones and your own personal tests, for your first game, you're also learning how to build renders. It's like anything else, the more you do it, the more natural and intuitive it become to do it ; therefore the less time you need.
And if you don't forget to do the exports, you'll also have your own collections of pose/expression/whatever, and combination of both, that will be better bases for your future needs. Since you're the one who made them and ordered them, you'll find more easily the one that will fit the more what you want to achieve, and so that will need the less adjustments.

 

[osanaiko]

Oops! Forgot to add ONE thing to the title and op: What is the average number of dialogue pages (not renders) in a chapter of a Ren'Py game?

As a couple of data points, I just tried the "check script (lint)" function (thanks jamdan) on two of the games I work on as Editor. Both have been going through active development for about 2 years now, and both have had 4-5 major updates along the way:

Inner Demons by GrayTShirt : 83,697 words and ~3850 images
Nothing Is Forever by MrSilverLust: 219,752 words, ~3800 images, and 3 chess games

Oh my aching carpal tunnel fingers.

Of these, I'd say that Inner Demons is "image heavy/dialogue medium", and Nothing is Forever is "image medium/dialogue heavy". Both are using Daz renders, which are in general slower to crank out than using one of the Illusion games (such as some of those heavyweights like "Now and Then" that Anne'O mentioned).

As a point of reference, the entire Lord of the Rings + The Hobbit series weighs in at 576,459 words.
And the King James version of the Christian bible has.... 184600 words! Not many pictures tho.

 

[mickydoo]

But an average of 100 renders/week isn't something so unreachable.

I have "made" 100 renders in a week but never 400 in a month, I get sick of looking the screen and do nothing for days, or life gets in the way, I shoot for and usually get 50 week.

 

[TessaXYZ]

But an average of 100 renders/week isn't something so unreachable.
You don't radically change everything for each scene, there's a given number that are variations in a pose, expression, camera angle, etc. Using a scene optimizer permit to keep the same base for all of them, what, when you start to be at ease with Daz Studio mean that those variations can be built in few minutes. It compensate for the time needed to build the said base.
If you planed your week, you build as much as possible of those said bases during the week-end, when you've the more free time, and works on the variation during the week, when you've less free time.
And once you've understood how to configure the rendering engine, batch rendering 14 scenes of good quality during the 10 hours while you're out of the house, due to your works, will not be difficult.

I've been doing this for a relatively short time, but I can already say that this just doesn't quite capture the entirety of the work.

"You don't radically change everything for each scene, there's a given number that are variations in a pose, expression, camera angle, etc."

This is highly variable between VNs. Some VNs don't change much between scenes. Others do. The current update I'm working on has 9 entirely new locations that I have to arrange. The most complicated of them has taken me over a week to set up with zero rendering happening, because every moment I had went towards working on the environment, and props, and custom signs that I modeled, and custom textures, etc. Poses are manually adjusted for every frame, because I often have the characters interacting with stuff, or holding bags, etc. It's not "a few minutes". It took me about 2.5 weeks to get 75 renders for this scene. By the time I move on to the next scene, it'll be something like 3.5 weeks for 125 renders. And mind you, I also have music, sound effects, puzzles, etc being worked on in parallel.

Your claim that 100 renders per week is consistently feasible exists in a vacuum, where nothing except posing and expression setting is happening.
Edit: And again, this has to do with the original question of what the AVERAGE development experience is. Most people are not in a position to pump out a hundred renders per week, despite any argument for what's technically possible.

 

[anne O'nymous]

I've been doing this for a relatively short time, but I can already say that this just doesn't quite capture the entirety of the work.

I never said that it captured the entirety of the work needed. It's obvious that I would only address the steps significant in the process. By example, I haven't talked about the images post processing, because it's a step that fall naturally in place ; there's only one moment where you can do it, when the renders are done.

Your claim that 100 renders per week is consistently feasible exists in a vacuum, where nothing except posing and expression setting is happening.

Two things here:

Firstly the most obvious, there's a difference between "[not being] something so unreachable", what I said, and being something that apply to all the cases, whatever the context.
Secondly, what I said, and started this part of the discussion, is that "doing around 100 renders/week" (note the "around") "is the average to expect" (note the "average"). And this is far to mean "consistently feasible".

Said otherwise, no, I never claimed that all creators must do 100 renders/week. What I said is that the average is around 100 renders/week. This mean that there's creators who are above this average and can do 200, or more, renders/week, while there's creators that are below the average and do way less than this.
And once again, the fact to be above or below this average prejudge nothing about you. Among those who are above, there's some who do shitty renders, and among those who are below, there's people who naturally suck at visualizing what they want to do. Be noted that the second part is not an insult, it's something you have no control over.
Personally I totally suck in the eye/hand coordination. Even with a basic model in front of me, I'm totally unable to draw it. I know that it's something different, but, well, if someone felt offended by what I said, now he know that I also totally suck at something that is so natural for the majority.

I have "made" 100 renders in a week but never 400 in a month, I get sick of looking the screen and do nothing for days, or life gets in the way, I shoot for and usually get 50 week.

It's something that fall in the "not everyone is a master artist" part. When you look at master painters, writers, whatever kind of art, not doing it is generally worse for them, that doing it for absolutely no reason. And as for the talent part itself, this pleasure part goes from one extreme to the other, depending of the person.
There's creators who would build scenes even when they don't need them, because it help them take a break from the rest, and there's those who need to take a break from scene building, because they feel overwhelmed after some times. Being one, or the other, do not mean that you are better or worse.