A Sick Man Learns Ren’Py

Apparently, all it took for me to make progress was being sick for a weekend.

I’ve been quietly working on a dating sim about a sea slug girl for a few months now. It’s been a bit slow-going; between developing Riverboat Pachinko, job-hunting, and job… working, I haven’t really found the time to sit down figure out Ren’Py. That is, until this weekend – when a cold completely fried my brain, basically ensuring I wouldn’t be writing any coherent cover letters for a few days.

What I did have the brain capacity to do, was to sit in front of several hours of Ren’Py tutorials on YouTube. So… I did – and it went surprisingly well!

This is nothing particularly impressive at the moment – but it’s about two hours of work, all of which was done through a head cold. It helps that I already had a pretty good idea of what sort of game I was trying to make, and had a grasp on how to go about coding in the systems I had in mind. I also had some basic python experience, so the only gap in my knowledge was really Ren’Py itself.

Overall, that part of it has proven to be… not too complicated, actually. My biggest hurdle was probably understanding how the engine separates Python from its own script; I assumed going in that I would need more Python than I actually do, and tripped over myself a few times instinctively trying to call functions in the middle of Ren’Py scenes. It didn’t take to long to realize what was going on there, though.

All-in-all, prototyping with this engine seems to move incredibly quickly – compared to the usual setup I deal with in Unity. I started small with this one, of course, and the real test will come when I start trying to work in some of the more fiddly systems I have in mind. However, I’m at the point where I think I might be able to actually get something substantial done on this in the next few weeks.

For now, though, I’m still sick – so I’m going to scrap the rest of what I was going to write here, keep this post short and simple, and go to sleep 🙂
Thanks for reading, and be well!