I have a new project idea I want to get working on. Happy to discuss further, but in essence I want to make a story where the main character is the leader of a religion centered around gluttony and weight gain. You start off arriving in a new city with a handful of followers and a bit of cash, and gradually expand your influence and other people’s waistline (hell, maybe your own too…)
The issue I’m facing is that I’m bumping into the limits of more accessible low/no code options like Twine or RPG Maker. I want to add some interesting background mechanics and stats, and I think RenPy would be great for that. However, I’m also aware that if I have to drag myself through the RenPy learning curve, I’ll never make the game.
So, there we have it. I have an idea, a plot and a willingness to write. Can you, dear reader, take on the RenPy side? Of course, I also welcome story ideas : )
I know AI is controversial but I found Claude really helped me get to grips with ren’py coding. Im no programmer and it maybe doesn’t do the best code but for getting started it will give you the basics well enough to be functional and can do some more complex things too - for instance a hud display that appears on hovering the mouse at the top/side of the screen.
As someone that has some basic familiarity of aspects of ren’py, asking for experience with it is more complicated than it might seem, but I also don’t think you need a dedicated coder if you keep things simple.
Because it is based on Python (via pygame), if you have big ambitions you generally want a knowledge of python as well, especially if you want to make ren’py do things it doesn’t normally want to do. That’s how DDLC for instance, is able to do so many mind-screw-y things in the engine.
Also, there’s a difference between types of coding; while you can get away without detailed coding knowledge to write passages and do some basic stuff if you follow the (many, many) guides and tutorials online, UI is a lot harder by comparison since ren’py has its own ways of doing that which can lead to a bit of a rabbithole. Forks iirc experienced this a fair bit.
So, yeah. Programming is a pretty broad role in ren’py so I suggest making sure the stuff that @JakobY mentions are also considered if you want more experienced applicants. It’s an easy engine to begin in, but it is not the most flexible or easiest to master if you stray away from a linear visual novel. It can definitely do more than VNs (and I personally think it deserves more use than RPGMaker by aspiring coders since it is more open-source and thus lets you make changes and overcome engine limitations more easily) but once you leave the comfort zone, a skilled coder becomes a handy thing.
Twine can do everything you’ve described if you know what you’re doing, it’s just not the best at helping you implement such features and is more lacking in UI tools out of the box. There’s a reason why Sugarcube has its own suite of addons, after all. Twine is not no-code either, it just obfuscates the code elements for the (intended) benefit of writers. Like with ren’py, if you want to get messy, you can, but you will want to also understand HTML (possibly even jscript since there’s stuff for that as well).
Hey, sorry for the delay. Very close, I have a plot, an outline of the loop and conditionals but I don’t have visual assets unfortunately. I’m thinking of going the Tram route and doing text until I can commission an artist
Yeah the issue I was facing is that I could do the basics but the complicated stuff got very complicated. Things kept breaking and it made me lose all interest because I had to put so much focus into just having functional mechanics