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Ren'Py is a programming language and runtime, intended to ease the creation of visual-novel type games. It contains features that make it easy to display thoughts, dialogue, and menus; to display images to the user; to write game logic; and to support the saving and loading of games. It's hoped that, through the use of executable scripts, Ren'Py will reduce the effort required to make a visual novel game.
We have released Ren'Py as open source to promote the development of original English-language bishoujo games. (Although Ren'Py itself supports any language that can be expressed as UTF-8, and for which a TrueType font is available.)
If you're interested in seeing Ren'Py in action, there's no better way than by downloading a game made using it. The following is a list of completed games made using Ren'Py:
Many of these games are mirrored at the Ren'Ai archives.
Please note that we can't vouch for the security of games written by other people. Like any other program, Ren'Py games can only be trusted as much as you trust their creators and distributors.
Ren'Py 5.5.4 "Engine X" was released on August 7, 2006. It comes with a demo game intended to show off some of the features of the engine. This demo game was last updated in version 5.5.4.
We strongly recommend using the latest version of Ren'Py when developing and releasing games. It may also make sense to send us a copy of your game before release, so that we can check it to be sure it will work perfectly with Ren'Py.
Ren'Py is licensed under the very liberal MIT license, in the hopes that it will prove useful to the widest possible variety of game authors. It was written with python and pygame.
There is now an official Ren'Py blog. New releases are announced on that site, along with release notes. It provides a number of tools, such as RSS feeds and mailing lists, to help inform you of a new release or other important information.
Rio, creator of Amgine Park and The Garden Society, has created a series of new Ren'Py tutorials. For someone new to Ren'Py, this is light-years better than the old tutorial, which is now called the reference manual. Check it out!
We believe that Ren'Py, and Ren'Py games, should run on Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) and later. We've written up a guide to running Ren'Py games on OS X.
Ren'Py is being developed on Linux, and should run on other Unix-like systems as well. We've written up a guide to running Ren'Py games on Linux/Unix.
We've modified a version of the SciTE text editor to support Ren'Py. It supports syntax highlighting and code folding for Ren'Py, and the indentation defaults have been changed to make them more appropriate for Ren'Py scripts. This editor supports Windows, and is quite a bit better than using Wordpad or Notepad. You can find releases of it here. We've also written a guide to integrating SciTE and Ren'Py.
We've written an emacs mode that supports editing Ren'Py scripts by automatically indenting code and syntax-highlighting keywords. It's been tested only in XEmacs, and requires that python-mode be installed. Ren'Py mode is contained in the file renpy-mode.el, which is included in the current release.
A NSIS installer script for Ren'Py games can be found here. Future version of Ren'Py will include the latest version of this script.
Shaja has created a Ren'Py ImageDissolve transition generator. It comes with a tool that can generate images that are used as part of transitions, a number of pre-generated transitions, and a demo that demonstrates these transitions. We've mirrored it here (1.4 MiB), for your convenience. To use it, just unzip it in the base Ren'Py directory. The thread introducing it can be found here.
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions about Ren'Py, don't hesitate to contact us. In rough order of preference, methods of contact are: