What makes a Ren'py game brilliant?

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What makes a Ren'py game brilliant?

What seperates a Ren'py game from other engines?

What makes a Ren'py game Brilliant of bad- any examples?

 

[polywog]

That it's open-source, so anyone can nude mod the game.

 

[Virulenz]

Renpy is the most useful engine because you can choose how to control it. Mouse or Keyboard, if you want both. Other engines are less flexible in this regard. The savegames are also easy to edit, a huge plus for cheater or to skip bugs. The scrollback is more than useful, do a wrong choice, click to fast and miss text, repeat a nice scene or anything else, no problem, scroll back and do it right/again. Basically renpy is the superior engine unless you really want to see how your MC walks around.
If you want to make a renpy game bad, disable console, scrollback and any other useful feature.

P.S:
If you refer to content with your question, check the other topics, there are enough "whats good, whats bad" topics already, so i only focused on the engine from the player point of view...i guess a devs view will be different ^^

 

[tomcire]

It is user friendly and portable, plus it has everything already built for a VN, if you have some coding skills you can add some parameters and logic without to have the job done.

 

[Silver]

There are so many reasons why games that use renpy as its engine are so much better, compared to non renpy games. It's quite easy to cheat in the game. If you don't know cheating codes, you can open its script file to see how the game flows, thereby finding the cheating codes. Every renpy game has a console, which is quite useful in altering the game's story.

A lot of games are released periodically with little to no new content, but with same content over and over again. Downloading such games costs bandwidth, and times. It's possible to release them as delta encoding way, but virtually no developer invests their time to produce delta encoding updates; hence you have to download the complete game again. To over time this problem, games are compressed by a dedicated team in f95, and it's only possible because of the renpy game engine. while it's true that it tames a couple of minutes more to download the full game, over time it wastes a significant amount of your time when you download a lot of games from here. on top of that Internet bandwidth is consumed unnecessarily. A lot of talk about saving planet, consuming resources efficiently, but strangely nobody talks about consuming bandwidth efficiently. Internet bandwidth is a limited resource; hence people shouldn't consume more than necessary. I strongly believe that games need a delta encoding when releasing their new updates.

I don't think it's possible to compress unreal, unity like games, because they don't allow to access the content of the game to compress. Even if accessing is possible, recompiling them might not be possible. I dunno much about them, so it's hard to say, but I am quite sure it's so easy extract, compress, and recompile content from any renpy game. Renpy games work on any platform. It's easy for developers to make games for renpy too.Saving in a renpy game is so easy too. in addition, it shows a thumbnail of the saved scene, which makes it possible to remind on which scene you were before exiting from the game.

However, a game developed with renpy is like an open source project. Everyone can see the codes, assets. So if you want to protect them, then you are out of luck. So that's the only disadvantage of a renpy game as I have seen so far, but a skilled developer can always access to the game's content, for instance GTA V doesn't support modding officially, or at least it didn't at first, but so many mods have been available for it. A lot of AAA games are cracked more often, and their content are extracted, such music, videos, textures of the characters etc.. so it's just a matter of time, and interest. If so many people are interested in your game, then it will be cracked, and thoroughly inspected.

 

[おい！]

What makes a Ren'py game brilliant?

The Devs in the same way the Devs can make a Ren'Py game bad.

What seperates a Ren'py game from other engines?

IMO from a players perspective, Ren'py is no better or worse than Flash, Unity, RPGM etc....... if a Dev lacks the skills then the game will be shit no matter what engine is used.

What makes a Ren'py game Brilliant of bad- any examples?

https://f95zone.to/threads/summertime-saga-v0-19-5-kompas-productions.276/ no bugs.
https://f95zone.to/threads/goodnight-kiss-2-v0-7-5-dirty-secret-studio.26946/ always full of bugs.

 

[anne O'nymous]

IMO from a players perspective, Ren'py is no better or worse than Flash, Unity, RPGM etc....... if a Dev lacks the skills then the game will be shit no matter what engine is used.

While I agree for the dev parts, I still want to weight what you said :

The rollback feature, let you have a glance in the future when the choice offer to you are too obscure. Generally the reaction you get quickly show you that it wasn't in fact what you wanted to do.
The skip feature is a big help when you have to replay a game, because you want to follow more than one path by example. You'll pass fast over what you already know, being stopped at what changed.
The auto play feature is interesting when testing games. It let you pass the, sometimes long and really boring introduction, and base your opinion on what is effectively the game.
The possibility to define the number of character per second when the text is displayed is also something great for those interested by this kind of feature. This while you still have the possibility to have instant display if you want.
There's also the infinite number of save slots. Really useful when the game have multiple path and you want to follow more than one, or follow two because you aren't still sure that "this one" is what you think.

It doesn't mean that Ren'py games are the only ones to have those features, but they are the only one to have all of them natively. Therefore, even if the dev decided to remove one or another, it can still be easily restored.
And all this really is a life changer for the players.


Then, there's the fact that you can see the source code. Among all the advantages presented by Ren'py, this one is probably the most important. There's too many indie devs thinking that they have some kind of universal mind process, and that every players will understand what they had in mind at this moment. And generally it lead to games barely playable, because the player have to pass through a trial and error phase before being able to make the story continue.
What is solved easily when someone with enough knowledge can access the code, then share his discovery with the rest of the community.

 

[Volta]

Why is Ren'py a great format, in short: Easy to learn and beginner friendly without sacrificing too much in the way of functionality, lightweight and multi-platform ready so almost anyone can play the game, free which is great for scrubs like me and of course it was designed with VN's in mind so it's piss easy to make a basic kinetic novel which is a good place to start for most people.

As a modder Ren'py also shines since it works in python and the .rpy files are easy to understand and edit even for someone with beginner level skills in coding like me.

What makes a good ren'py game, subjective but IMO:
Use the software for what it was intended for: VN's, if you want to make an RPG use RPGM, if you want something more adventurous go for unity, use the software for it's intended purpose and it will work for the player and the dev, it's like trying to dig a hole with a hammer when there is a perfectly good spade right there.

Bugs, don't release a half baked version it's a waste of the devs time and mine.

See a project through in a decent timescale, abandonment and 6months between updates makes you look like an ass and detracts from your game, small and good is better than huge and disappointing.

Be a little original, put a spin on a classic, just don't do exactly the same cookie cutter (incest) thing as everyone else, do your own thing.

if your using Ren'py for a VN learn from others mistakes, why was acting lessons the target of controversy?, the left field twist that was unsatisfying (house fire), why was pine falls ultimately a wasted opportunity?, the plot didn't go anywhere and the story felt like it finished early.

If your going to use choices make them matter, otherwise why are you interrupting the story with a text box? you don't need a new branch every time you make a choice but neither should you cover your player in choices that are pointless, red herrings are fine if you resolve them well, take a look at Depraved Awakening for a game the handles choices better than the vast majority of games do.

Oh and a dev should obviously enjoy the game they're making, nothing worse than a game where the dev falls out of love with his/her story and just wants to get it finished and gone, it's rare but sad to see it happen.

 

[Joshua Tree]

From a players perspective I'm almost inclined to say there is no bad engines, just ineffective creators. This not just for adult games though. un-optimized games and crude code. can make for a bad experience.