methanoliver / awesome-renpy

A curated list of awesome goodies for RenPy visual novel engine. Inspired by the numerous awesome-lists everywhere.
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awesome awesome-list game-development gamedev renpy renpy-lang renpy-visual-novels

Awesome RenPy Awesome

A curated list of awesome goodies for RenPy visual novel engine. Originally this started as me dumping my bookmark folder, but since this accrued some interest, I decided to make this more of a thing. Things that were known to be obsolete at the time of writing -- which happens relatively often in the RenPy land -- did not make it into this list unless they were otherwise significant or were the only example of their kind.

Who am I kidding, this will languish in obscurity like every other attempt to produce an index of these things...

Contents

Documentation

RenPy's own documentation is somewhat scattered, at times incomplete, and often, insufficiently detailed.

That is, of course, no excuse not to read it, but if that was not helpful:

Introductory

Python

Specific

Non-English documentation

Patreon articles

These are articles from PyTom's Patreon, most of which explain a certain feature in more detail than the manual does and provide example code.

Internals

Explain certain obscure, but sometimes critical implementation details.

Features

Explanations on the use of a particular feature.

Menus

menu: statement has a lot more flexibility than you would think.

Platform support details

Details on what you need to do to get your project to run on a particular platform.

Interoperability

Interoperability with the rest of the world.

Examples

Code examples implementing a particular feature.

Project templates

Templates to start off a new project containing commonly requested features a stock RenPy new project does not offer.

Frameworks

Pieces of code big enough to be called libraries.

General

Network

Visual novel elements

Gameplay elements

Device imitation

Extra content

In a classic Japanese title, these would go into making the contents of an "Extras" menu.

Cookbook

Most useful RenPy code comes in the form of code snippets, examples, and other small pieces, rather than a well-packaged library. As such, many of these links link to Gists, forum posts, and other such locations wherein a given code snippet is presented in context. You can always wade the depths of Lemmasoft RenPy forums yourself for more.

Snippets

Not all of these are confirmed to work in current versions of RenPy.

Text

Effects

Particles

Displayables

User interface

Other snippets

These are useful, but difficult to categorize.

Minigames

Self-contained minigames can occasionally be found. Some assembly is usually required.

Shaders

Shaders are the most arcane part of RenPy, because they require branching into GLSL, while accounting for RenPy intricacies. Some of the effects achieved thereby are very useful, however.

Code examples

Occasionally, entire games are published as open source, though not necessarily free. Whenever they contain anything useful as example code, they go in this section.

Other

Tools

In-engine developer tools

These are meant to be built into the project at least during development, and thus are a cross between libraries and standalone tools.

Standalone developer tools

These are software unto themselves.

General

Continuous integration

Unpacking and decompilation

Conversion

End-user tools

These tools are made for end-users, rather than developers.

Assets

No visual novel is complete without artwork and sound. Beware and carefully observe the license terms!

Asset libraries

Fonts

Individual libre artists

While you can search through places like DeviantArt, Soundcloud and Bandcamp for artists offering their work under one or another variant of Creative Commons, there are certain prolfic ones, and knowing them in advance will make things easier.

Asset generators

Sound generators

Character sprite generators

Other generators

AI-powered generators

Most of these are only useful to produce background images, as getting the detail and specificity required of anything else out of them is impractical. But free backgrounds are free backgrounds.

Asset editing tools

Graphics

Sound

Video

Curios

Things that are awesome but not really very useful go here.

Support

You can find a community of RenPy users in your language, provided it's one of:

Other Awesome Lists

Other amazingly awesome lists can be found in awesome, awesome-awesome and awesome-awesomeness.

Those should be of particular interest for RenPy users: