MechanicalSoup VS RenPy

Compare MechanicalSoup vs RenPy and see what are their differences.

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MechanicalSoup RenPy
5 189
4,778 5,638
0.4% 1.6%
5.2 9.9
9 days ago 7 days ago
Python Ren'Py
MIT License -
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

MechanicalSoup

Posts with mentions or reviews of MechanicalSoup. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-10-29.

RenPy

Posts with mentions or reviews of RenPy. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-02-21.
  • The Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Feb 2025
  • A Beginner's Guide to Learning Ren'Py and Creating Your First Visual Novel
    1 project | dev.to | 20 Feb 2025
    Ren'Py is a free and open-source engine that simplifies visual novel development. Whether you're an aspiring writer, artist, or programmer, Ren'Py provides all the tools you need to create professional-quality visual novels without requiring extensive technical knowledge.
  • Building an educational game with AI tools and Azure Static Web Apps (Part 1)
    2 projects | dev.to | 8 Jan 2025
    Since Python is my go-to language, I was naturally drawn to Ren'Py, a visual novel engine built on Python. It met all my requirements, offering an easy-to-use scripting language for writing the story, defining quizzes, and customizing the UI. It also provides the flexibility to extend its built-in functionality using Python and export the game to desktop, mobile, and web platforms. Additionally, the availability of the Ren'Py Command Line Interface (CLI) allowed me to automate the process of building and deploying the game.
  • Anime Is Eating the World
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Sep 2024
    So many things are wrong with this article but I’ll start with Haruhi Suzumiya being a ‘light novel’ (a novel printed in large text as if for seniors with a few illustrations) as opposed to a ‘visual novel’ (something you would make with https://www.renpy.org/)

    It is hard to know because financials aren’t public but it’s not clear to me that Crunchyroll has really addressed the commercial provlems anime had in western markets. In the VHS era there was a fight over subtitles vs dubs which was acute because you could not put multiple content tracks on the media, in the DVD age you could.

    More fundamentally, dubs cost a lot of money in comparison with subs and were always terrible until the people who made those terrible dubs gained experience and some of them got good. At the time people though subs had a limited market but now subprime anime (and sometimes good anime) gets shoveled onto Tubi and people watch it —- today we’re in the habit of watching movies with subtitles because you can’t make out the dialog on half of the new Hollywood movies anyway.

  • Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
    38 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Sep 2024
    Many great suggestions in this thread. Some that I didn't spot:

    Lua isn't tough to pick up given you already know JS and Python. It's a bit of a weird hybrid of the two in its own unique ways. If show that you are learning it with you child, sometimes that can be a great experience. Löve2D can be a fun, very self-contained sandbox: https://www.love2d.org/

    On the Python side, Ren'Py can be a great place to start. Visual Novels may not be half as popular outside of Japan, but Visual Novel-like conversations are everywhere in modern games and you can start with easy to script "Choose Your Own Adventure" Visual Novel conventions and expand to a wide range of genres from RPGs to "life sims" to some form of turn-based strategy games easily from there (and just about anything with more work). Ren'Py starts from its own relatively simple conversation-focused scripting language with Python-like conditions, and then allows you to expand towards custom Python code as you get familiar with it. https://www.renpy.org/

  • Ren'Py
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Aug 2024
  • When did you Really get the Hang of Programming?
    2 projects | dev.to | 25 Jun 2024
    ..and even more recently, I truly felt like I got a hang on something when I made my first ever visual novel with Sublime and Ren'Py!
  • Lessons from Open-Source Game Projects
    76 projects | dev.to | 10 Apr 2024
    Ren'Py - Visual Novel Engine. Python, Cython, C
  • Ask HN: Software to Develop Interactive Stories?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jan 2024
  • cRPG's often have poor writing. Why is that?
    2 projects | /r/CRPG | 7 Dec 2023
    Here are 2 interactive story game engines: * https://www.renpy.org/ * https://twinery.org/

What are some alternatives?

When comparing MechanicalSoup and RenPy you can also consider the following projects:

Scrapy - Scrapy, a fast high-level web crawling & scraping framework for Python.

Pygame - 🐍🎮 pygame (the library) is a Free and Open Source python programming language library for making multimedia applications like games built on top of the excellent SDL library. C, Python, Native, OpenGL.

RoboBrowser

ink - inkle's open source scripting language for writing interactive narrative.

pyspider - A Powerful Spider(Web Crawler) System in Python.

Cocos2d - Cocos2d-x is a suite of open-source, cross-platform, game-development tools utilized by millions of developers across the globe. Its core has evolved to serve as the foundation for Cocos Creator 1.x & 2.x.

Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video.
Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
getstream.io
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InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
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