Pygame VS RenPy

Hi everyone! I'm excited to share a fun personal project I built recently: a retro-style 2D racing game made with Pygame. It's called 🎮 Atari Speed Racer, and it brings back those classic vibes of dodging traffic at high speeds!

Pygame

For this we decided on Pygame which is a a free and open-source cross-platform library for the development of multimedia applications like video games using Python. I had previously been shown what Pygame could do and thought it would be a great fit. Its python so pretty easy to pick up and my son had very limited coding experience to begin with and installation was easy.

pygame never used it, but its popular python library, heard good things about it. i suggest if you are not trying to make resource intensive game, and you want to learn python which is a really valuable skill.

Pygame is a framework of python modules and libraries for writing games. It is modular and great for learning the basics of the Python programming language.

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.

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.

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.

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/

..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!

Ren'Py - Visual Novel Engine. Python, Cython, C

Here are 2 interactive story game engines: * https://www.renpy.org/ * https://twinery.org/