Why build a game in RenPy?

 

 

Why build a game in RenPy?

This was something pretty important to settle before I got to work on Piety. It came down to a number of factors and personal experiences.

Mobile platforms

Once upon a time, Flash worked everywhere, and the iPhone was not yet popular. You could build stuff on the web and people looking for lewd content knew about places like new-grounds. Today, one of the most used platforms by far is mobile devices. I was kind of shocked by the numbers shared by other devs by the large number of players willing to play explicit games on their phones. To this end, I was originally looking at using Unity before they threw developer confidence into the trash. This left Renpy as a viable possibility as it has builds across PC and Mobile. I’ll be able to target PC, Mac, Linux, Android and Apple devices all with RenPy.

It just works

Coding is very straightforward, using a mixture of RenPy’s own language and Python, it’s easy to develop and make complex UI or mechanics. It uses just about any popular media format I would want to use, and distribution builds are a breeze. One of the most important features, roll-back, is readily available and easy to maintain as well as making and managing saves.

Free Open Source Softare (FOSS)

Circling back to the issue with Unity, RenPy is FOSS. It will not cost me extra to develop with and is something that is continuously developing. It has a nice community and active developer scene. While I don’t intend to work on furthering RenPy itself, I am happy enough with just using it to build games. Other platforms such as Godot exist, but I have yet to delve deeply into it, and it is also a general purpose engine opposed to targeting VNs. Twine also exists, and I may touch on it if a particular idea strikes.

RenPy games are pretty fun

There’s a huge library of existing games that use RenPy and are sources of inspiration. There are a few great examples of expansion based games such as Hypnosis by Expanding Universe, Research Station M-OO by Galactase and Fattening Career by Bladerune9. I recommend you check these out for their stand out excellence.

 

The next post I will provide some progress on Piety. I’m still hoping to squeeze out some sort of build this month, but am expecting some extra work the next few weeks. If not a release, I’ll at least drop down some news or screen shots.

 

Tick Tock

New game in the works: Piety

 

 

Piety is my first new project to share. It is a RenPy trainer visual novel. The plot hook is thus:

You are a corrupt bishop of the Church of Everlasting Radiance, the foundational religious organization of the kingdom. Learning of heretical rituals of a long distant past, you move to the boonies to fortify your position away from prying eyes. Here, you will gather your Maidens, loyal women who through their bodies perform powerful rituals that can effect the very nature of the world around them. With thorough training, you will corrupt their minds and fill their bodies as they become avatars of the land’s fertility and your strength.

 

Planned tags : ass expansion, breast expansion, corruption, harem, management, pregnancy, sex, trainer, weight gain

 

The general plot and design has already been built while I am currently in the process of fleshing out prose and content. My aim for the first alpha release is to provide the first few “weeks” of gameplay with the stable gameplay loop established. I am looking forward to all sorts of feedback and will be experimenting with using AI generated content for reference. I know that the community is derisive about AI art in general, but I am hoping that feedback can steer the game to its best form. I expect to have some form of build ready to share before the end of this month (February).

 

I'll need to find a rhythm for posting updates, but I am aiming for at least twice a month including releases. I'll be writing up a storm, so lets hope for the best.

 

Tick Tock

Rebooting the Blog

 

Hello all. I am formally announcing my return to the development of lewd games. It has been over a decade since the last posts here and the world has really changed since then. I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two since then and with Flash being long since in the grave I have moved on to other platforms.

 

My intent going forward is to build rich games for Renpy and/or Twine focusing on the types of fetishes I personally enjoy such as weight gain, breast expansion, ass expansion, and pregnancy. This is a group of fetishes that is still under-served, so I would be happy to finally add some quality games to this list myself. I intend to grow out my communication channels such as through discord or a subscription service soon, so look out for that too. I am still a solo dev, but am open to collaboration and using new tools such as AI generation as well as traditional 3D art.

 

As to the past and why I bailed, I doubt I have any particularly convenient answer. I can mostly blame inexperience and lack of maturity. I have planned many projects up to this point and have taken my time to filter down the best ones. I strive to not make those same mistakes in the future. But I am a firm believer of proof through actions, so I welcome you to watch and be the ultimate judge.

 

I am excited to share what I have in store for you and invite you along for the ride.

 

Tick Tock

Epok Engine Update 2

Hello again. I've been steadily working on the engine and managed to get that minimal test state that I was aiming for. While I didn't go the whole way, I've implemented the first "conversation" of the Chat Mapper example project into a playable game. You can mess with it right here. It is very short, but it helped me straighten out the last few functionality bugs on dialog. If you manage to crash it or break something, please let me know.

These are the controls so far.
Mouse click - advance text, activate button
Ctrl Key - Speed up/skip text.
1 key - Quick save
2 key - Quick load

The other major feature that's in is the load/save feature, which I cannot recall if I ever got working before. It works in this simple version but should also function once I implement more complex objects. In the future I expect to build a complete interface to access saves.

With this big hurtle done, most of the key functionality is implemented. The remaining work is pretty much all UI for basic screens and various modals. These need to be designed out first and will most likely depend on what sort of project I plan to use the engine for. While it may seem obvious what I'm planning on doing with the engine, I wont make any official announcements until I've created enough plans and designs before hand. 

For the technically inclined, I've included a pastebin of my XML file used for this example here and the resulting library class here. I'm interested in making the tools and the engine I've developed opensource but for the time being I've attached some licensed software into the mix. If anyone has any experience dealing with opensource work, please contact me as I'm pretty clueless on how this works. Thanks.

Epok Engine Update 1

It's been quite a while, but I can assure you that the time has been spent inefficiently and on completely unrelated things. As usual, I can't give specifics on timelines, but I can at least say I'm making progress on the Epok Engine I mentioned a long time ago.

So a long while ago I thought up making the engine to support future development I quickly ran into a seemingly impossible to break wall when trying to merge a development pipeline between Chat Mapper and it's Lua scripts into flash. It was crazy talk, and was pretty discouraging when I found out this couldn't be done. Many months passed before I looked at this again after doing more professional level action-script work.

Still, I wanted to use Chat Mapper for its nice organization, so I chose to use it simply as dialog flow designer (which is what it should only ever be), and developed an entirely new system that uses an XML file filled with "Dialog Nodes". I built a python tool that is able to read in the XML and compile entire Class files containing all these nodes into native Action Script. Therefore I can run all sorts of events and triggers throughout the dialog navigation.


In terms of the Epok Engine's progress, it's now using a better UI backend that isn't horribly broken and has a fully functional and dynamic dialog and choice system. While it may not sound like much, this is pretty much all you need for the most basic of games. I plan on testing my text replacement system next, as well as getting the save/load system in early enough. I have some neat ideas to allow old saves to work well.

The immediate project goal is to be able to simulate the Chat Mapper Example project, which will prove the systems works and allow for additional fixes. What happens afterwards is pretty open on what I can do with the engine. I wont make any announcements yet as I don't want to get peoples hopes up too early.

I'll post again once I have something interesting to say.

Happy New Year!

Happy new years everyone!

Just wanted to provide a small update on the project Epok status. After much research and searching, I've discovered that my original goal of just finding a Lua interpreter coded in Flash was pretty crazy and short sighted of me. It looks like these things just aren't normally done since creating such an interface between flash and other languages is hugely inefficient. The closest things to what I wanted, Lufacode, only dealt with compiled Lua code making it completely useless to me.

This leads me towards utilizing alternate plan I mentioned in my previous post, building a custom script interpreter. While this problem isn't that foreign to me, it is still a steep one to climb. I've been doing research on building a proper one so I know that I'm at least on the right track. The integration with ChatMapper will still work as I can insert additional scripts fields into the output dialog xml. So yeah, this one will keep me busy a while longer.

On other news, I've been in talks with another user about collaborating with his team on CGF. It's still really early but I just wanted to let you guys know that there's still plenty of interest in getting that game idea executed. I'll give more information as that situation develops.