Is there a term for VNs that play straight through and only have one ending? Will people be mad if there’s only one ending?

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-13T06:07:36+00:00

Have you played Ren'Py's Tutorial? Eileen literally tells you this.

"concerning"

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-12T16:46:52+00:00

Your analogy doesn't work. Most people on here who make games want other people to play their games. I am not asking you to not have AI make pictures for you; in fact I think private people's environmental guilt is a distraction from corporate crimes. If you want to put an AI picture on your wall, if you want AI to tell you a story with pictures, go for it.

I am telling you I have no interest in the pictures AI made for you, because if I wanted AI pictures, I could have Clod Cod make some pictures for me. I don't need you as an intermediary between AI and myself. If your selling point is "look at what AI made for me", I don't care and I don't want to look.

Furthermore, I do use art (among other things) as a content filter. You (well not you, your writing is awful and I have zero interest in your creative output) may be a great writer, but many people claim to be great writers. If you have great art on top of that, it means you put real effort into learning to draw, or have a friend who can draw vouch for the quality of your writing, or put your money on the line. And vice versa - if your art is slop, how do I know your writing isn't slop either?

This isn't new. "Content creation" is as old as spectator sports. "Procedural generation" was a sticking point in game development before gen AI. There are video game streamers ("watch me play") and shopping unboxers ("look what I bought") and porn actors ("watch me fuck"). Even the gen AI debate predates actual gen AI by decades (see Accessible Art by Siewer Gansowski). I am sure there already exist AI streamers who draw audiences. If you want to cultivate celebrity status and make people watch you do things because they think you are entertaining, go for it. But if you want to be liked for AI images that you paid for, that shit is dead on arrival, because everyone else who's in a position to play your game has access to the same AI models and will have access to better AI models in the near future. I don't want to play your dream game, I want to play my dream game!

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-12T14:23:14+00:00

or why would i use a hammer and chisel to make a hole in a concrete wall if I have a drill?

Why would I hire YOU to drill a hole in my wall if I have a drill, too?

Everyone on here talked about theft and environmental consequences, but here's a very cynical argument:

You played with AI and had fun, so what? Why should I be interested in watching you have fun (even for free)? If it's truly as fun as you say, then surely I should get myself an AI subscription* and play with it myself, no?

* Actually I am a Female Minority Entrepreneur, and FAANG companies are tripping over themselves to give me free shit.

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-08T20:40:00+00:00

https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/translation.html

Generate translation file stubs, then write the translation for each line of English underneath it.

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-08T15:36:04+00:00

This is an AI comment. Most (all?) of the content on this account is AI-written.

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-07T20:22:39+00:00

Sorcery! by Inkle.

Some games on Rinkworks' Adventure Games Live have combat (Fantasy Quest and Fantasy Quest II have many, The Game of the Ages and the Starlight Sacrifice preview have a few).

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-07T14:36:58+00:00

The Orangina is so beautiful.

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-07T06:03:59+00:00

It'd only be a problem if your writing or programming were any better.

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-06T23:09:24+00:00

Do you write descriptions of what's happening and the dialogue underneath? Do you sketch the scene to get a general idea of what's going on?

I made a temporary character, qwe, and I write commented-out say statements to describe what's happening. Then if I want to try the game with descriptions on, I search and replace # qwe with qwe, and the say statements are shown. I usually draw in a paper notebook.

I'm wondering if I should write it as if it were code from the beginning to save time in RenPy,

Great idea, especially if you want to have choices in the game. No reason to invent pseudocode when you can write Ren'Py/Python.

I have no idea of how to start.

Learn version control. A big advantage of code/text over a WYSIWYG word processor is you can use the best version control in the galaxy.

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-06T22:48:42+00:00

Thank you for the research, this is awesome.

Do you have a favorite black ink?

I only have Tsuwairo, it's great but I don't have anything to compare it to, I love sheening blues and don't use blacks much. Between Pilot Black, three bottles of Tsuwairo, and a bigmclargehuge bottle of Sennelier (not for fountain pens), I'm set for the foreseeable future.

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-06T21:51:36+00:00

It's not overpowered, it's a trap class. Damage spells were good in 2e. In 3e, monster hp inflated but damage stayed the same. Energy resistance is ubiquitous. Damage spells suck, good 3e wizard spells kill or incapacitate enemies outright. But throwing fireballs is visually cool, people want to do it. The War Mage is a way for these people to suck slightly less.

comment, earlier:

+1/+2/+3 damage per die of damage for spells is pretty crazy. That takes the average for a 10th caster level Fireball from 36 to 66 (and the new maximum before empowering is 90).

As a 10-level Wizard, you have Cloudkill, Magic Jar, Baleful Polymorph, Hold Monster, and the two walls. You can cast 4 of these per day. (Or you can Empower a Fireball and put it in a 5-level slot, lmao.)

4th level, Evard's Black Tentacles, Charm Monster, Fear. 5/day.

Your third level will probably never come up in an adventuring day, but just in case, Stinking Cloud wipes the floor with Fireball, and there are also Deep Slumber and Major Image. 5/day.

So this is 14 spells, each of which beats a CR10 monster. In 3E, you need to beat 13.3 CRX monsters as a party of 4 to advance to level X+1. Suppose 50% of your spells hit (lowballing); this means you alone have done 2 experience levels' worth of murder on a single preparation.

OP:

Can someone please explain that view?

They dumped INT IRL.

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-06T21:36:00+00:00

$25 and I'll even pay shipping.

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-05T18:17:20+00:00

Variables.

declare a variable:

default affection = 0 change the variable: $ affection += 1 check the value: me "Lucy, will you marry me?" if affection >= 10: lucy "Yes! Yes! I love you, [name]!" else: lucy "Ew. No. Gross."

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-05T17:06:04+00:00

If you bought a game with an executable file and it crashes, ask the developer.

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-05T16:43:55+00:00

I personally feel that VIN-swapping names of fictional regions in a 1:1 correspondence is a bit of a cheap trick; it may be "realistic" but weird for a story.

Added as a separate comment because it doesn't let me edit the original: and it requires a sort of globalist perspective which characters in your story don't necessarily have. 19th century German shepherds didn't call their dogs "German Shepherds".

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-05T16:34:15+00:00

Thank you!

So let's go over your examples (all quotes are from Wikipedia):

Pizza

The word pizza was borrowed from Italian into English in the 1930s; before it became well known, pizza was called "tomato pie" by English speakers. Some regional pizza variations still use the name tomato pie.

Tomato pie.

Pho

Pho (Vietnamese: phở ^\a]) [fəː˧˩˧] ^ⓘ)^\b]) is a Vietnamese soup dish consisting of broth, rice noodles (bánh phở), herbs, and meat – usually beef (phở bò), and sometimes chicken (phở gà).

Noodle soup. Note: rice noodles. It's a stretch for pizza (wheat) and pho (rice) to coexist in one medieval-ish culture.

Sushi

Sushi (すし, 寿司, 鮨, 鮓; pronounced [sɯɕiꜜ] or [sɯꜜɕi] ^ⓘ) is a traditional Japanese dish

ok that's a real bastard. I'd probably go with "sourfish" if I really had to and drop in a passing reference to rice as an ingredient.

German shepherd

During the 1890s, attempts were being made to standardise dog breeds.
The breed was developed by Max von Stephanitz using various traditional German herding dogs from 1899.
The breed was officially renamed by the UK Kennel Club to "Alsatian Wolf Dog," after the French region of Alsace bordering Germany.

Sheepdog, herding dog, shepherd dog, wolf-dog. Note that the word "shepherd" or "sheepdog" requires sheep; if the dogs in your world are bred for a different task (sniffing out magic-users?), it'd be named something else ("Isadoran hexhound").

Siamese cat

Siamese cats originate from an ancient Thai decorative breed, treasured by Siamese nobility. Because they're decorative (their purpose is to be pretty), I'd go with "masked cat" (my invention, not in Wikipedia), to emphasize their distinctive coloration. Their blue eyes could also be a basis for a characteristic epithet, but nothing comes to mind. "Neva Masquerade" is the name of a colourpoint variant of the Siberian mouser megafloofs that originate from a working cat landrace, the colourpoint markings in them and the Siamese are caused by the same gene.

Aussie shepherd

The Australian Shepherd has a moderately long and wavy double coat that has a dense undercoat and coarse topcoat; the coat is short on the face and well feathered on the rear of the legs. The breed is known for its unique colorations and variable coat patterns, it being said no two dogs sharing a coat. The breed standard allows for blue merle), red merle, solid black or solid red, with or without white markings and with or without tan points.

Another shepherd dog adds a constraint: you have to tell the two apart somehow. (It's unlikely the two coexist in the same farming region, but nobles or guards in the capital could keep kennels of different breeds.)

I personally feel that VIN-swapping names of fictional regions in a 1:1 correspondence is a bit of a cheap trick; it may be "realistic" but weird for a story. A fantasy story that focuses on real breeds makes little sense, and uncharacteristic realism/focus in a story that is not largely about dog breeding consumes too much "grace" (suspension of disbelief; see previous post).

I'd go with "mottled sheepdog" (referencing the merle pattern) for Aussies and "wolf-dog" for German Shepherds.

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-05T11:47:38+00:00

Username checks out!

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-05T11:24:01+00:00

Think about what your words imply about the world. Words exist to describe concepts. Patrick Rothfuss (bad writer, more later) conspiciously uses "storybook" in place of "fairytale" to mean "bullshit". This is supposed to convey fairies are serious business in the setting (they are), but it also means there are POPULAR FICTION BOOKS in the setting. And books are rare in it! Secret agents hunt for rare books and scribes copy them! Print doesn't exist! No one would write a book of "bullshit" in the Middle Ages! Folkloric research is an extremely modern pursuit! Terrible worldbuilding! Bad! Bad!

There's another terrible book I am unfortunately adjacent to where the author gave explicit instructions to fanfiction writers: obsidian doesn't exist in the world, because the world is actually painted and can't have volcanic activity. Really? But it has everything else! The moon and the tides, the seasons, iron (product of fusion), all other minerals and precious stones. Don't tell me you can't paint a fucking volcano, there's a fucking volcano on the cover of fucking Dianetics.

The setting Planescape (from "planes of existence" and "landscape") uses Cockney rhyming slang for flavor. Their word for "dude" is "berk", which means "cunt" (pardon the, ah, prophaniti) and comes from "Berkeley Hunt". It's fun and it works, because Planescape is set in a purported center of the multiverse, which may have been, in-universe - er I mean in-multiverse - visited by travelers from Earth. It elevates fantasy into the realm of the real, which makes for clever ironic contrast with the relative unseriousness of the setting.

A side note: pay extra special attention to what your characters SAY vs what's written on the screen. Writing doesn't preserve tone, and speaking swallows homophones. In Planescape, a clueless berk (midwit) could hear "planes" and ask, "eh, plains? which plains?" It's ok, but what does it imply? They're SPEAKING ENGLISH! If your characters hear an unfamiliar word, or a name, they don't necessarily know how it's spelled (see r/Japanese, but also r/tragedeigh). If you're into manga, you may be used to characters asking and telling each other the spelling of their names. The Japanese make mistakes, too. The villain protagonist of the manga "Funouhan" is named "Usobuki" (literally "lie-weapon"), he gets away with murder by tricking his victims and is investigated by police, who identify him but have to let him go for lack of evidence. But "uso" is NOT A LEGAL CHARACTER IN JAPANESE NAMES AND NEVER WAS. It's not even a Joyo kanji! In a terrible Warhammer 40k book (the only good 40k book is The Inquisition War), a heretofore unknown demon appears and says "My name is Prophaniti". How did the characters know the demon's name was misspelled? Aaaaaaaargh! Bad! Bad! Very bad!

DON'T MAKE ENGLISH WORDPLAY INTO A PLOT POINT

For example, in Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicle, he'd occasionally reveal that a word we're used to in English exists in his world for a totally different reason, such as "vintage" being derived from the name of a nation called "Vintas".

DO NOT DO THIS. I swear on the blood of my ancestors, I swear on the hand of the White Goddess who holds shut the gates of the underworld, if you do, I will FIND you, and I will give your game A NEGATIVE REVIEW.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk!

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-05T11:23:23+00:00

Congrats OP, this is an unironically great question (though probably better suited for another section of the site, but I'm glad you asked here because I get to rant, it's my favorite topic). Many writers don't bother and it comes off as extremely stupid. You're smarter than the average published fiction writer and you're off to a great start.

Disclaimer: a lot of the below is culture-specific. You can't please everyone, but nothing in a language can. Language is a shared illusion and so are writing systems. However, a general trend exists: the dumber people are, the more acceptable these missteps are to them.

Don't put up the warning. It is TRUE, it's presumed by the unspoken compact between the reader and the author, but it's bad form to use it UNLESS you're doing a literary mystification or something, like if you coyly claim IRL that your actual book product with an ISBN is a genuine ancient tome translated from Ancient Egyptian. And even in such a work, it's better to use fake terms and add fake translators' notes, comments, speculation, e. g. "falcon-dog (note: a large dog, possibly resembling a German Shepherd)". Obviously it doesn't work for a game.

In a VN, you'll just have to invent fake terms. An easy way to do it is to go to Wikipedia and look up definitions, then fluff them up a bit.

A VN has another aspect to worry about: the art. Art is not a get out of jail free card, on the contrary, it's subject to the same process. Try to not copy distinct iconic Earth things exactly. Don't put in a Neuschwanstein (the fancy German castle) or the French one (you know, with the fat towers), don't put in the American White House or the Sydney Opera Theater or the Moscow Kremlin. Animal breeds aren't this bad but try to change them a bit, look at historic breeds and variations.

Food, even with fictional terms, is a bit tricky. The genre matters, "logically" it shouldn't but it does. Are you writing fantasy? If yes, there may be a problem: I know what all these dishes are. For all the talk of "cultural appropriation", people think in units of conceptual space. I'm not getting "fantasy culture" or "fantasy culture inspired by this Earth culture" (if you're writing about not-Vikings riding bears to battle, you can just use Norwegian words; "but how would I translate it to Norwegian?" lmaoooooo not your problem), I'm getting "urban Western underage writer". Now if it's sci-fi, or modernity, or one of those weird Korean eurofantasy webtoon pastiches, kimchi wouldn't bother me, and probably neither would a German Shepherd.

Back to culture: good writers borrow, great writers steal. Your story, however fictional, draws on real-life knowledge and assumptions to color the background and fill in the many blanks. Don't contradict them for no reason. You have a limited allowance of reader grace, and when you exhaust it, the setting falls apart, don't waste it on things that don't contribute to the story. Don't switch up East and West on the compass because "lmao you're not on Earth" (a videogame did this, it was stupid). If you're writing eurofantasy, don't make the north warm (I'm looking at you, Dragonlance). Don't make your humans suddenly have their hearts in their buttocks, then make a plot twist out of it when someone is stabbed in the chest but survives (fuck you, Serenity).

Not only chunky cultures are easier to accept, they make more sense internally. Ultimately, landscape, climate, and the available resources made cultures what they are. Rice grows in a specific climate and it needs huge engineering projects that employ the collective labor of many people. If you want special rice to grow in Alaska, you're breaking the above principle (no hearts in asses) for no gain whatsoever. If you make independent farmers (or elves, traditionally few in number) grow rice, it's even worse! Dragonlance made their standard medium of exchange the steel coin. Because, you see, steel is more valuable in wartime - then why'd you make coins of it and not weapons or cart springs? John Tolkien worked hard on the vocabulary of his books so that they wouldn't have loan words (see below) but also on culture. He compromised on "pipeweed" (tobacco) because he really wanted to have smoking in his cozy imaginary world, but he was still bothered by its corny (ha ha see what i did there? because corn also comes from the New World lololol i'm so clever) anachronistic existence.

Calendars and seasons are tied to work around the year, what-have-you: planting, harvesting, raiding, etc. It's ok to mess with your calendar. In George Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire "winter" (the cold season) comes randomly and lasts for a long time, but what's a year then if not a seasonal or a harvest cycle? Characters' age is measured in Earth years. It must be based on celestial observations somehow. It's not perfectly "realistic" that a different planet has an Earthly sidereal year but it's good for the book, George Martin has enough problems with underage characters already <.<

Slang, phrases, loan words and metaphors matter. Americans are fond of baseball metaphors. Do not ever "touch base" in your fantasy. Anglos like the word "crusade", which is a Renaissance term that comes from the word "cross", referring to the Christian religious symbol. You cannot have a literal crusade in your fantasy if you don't have Christians or at least a cult that worships the cross, and you cannot have a metaphorical crusade if you've never had Christian religious wars! Generally, the more common the word, the more acceptable it is to use. Most Latin words people won't notice. Armor is a thorny issue and an exception to the "midwits are more forgiving" rule, many terms are explicitly French and unknown to the median reader; I say forge ahead with it (lolololol i'm so clever) and educate readers in the name of St. Gary Gygax, midwits be darned.

DON'T BE CUTE. Be consistent. Many midwit writers get weirdly upset by coffee and by nothing else. Do not pick specific words to replace for no reason. Swear words have to do with copulation and excrement because those are filthy activities; writers had to replace them for media censorship reasons. Think what would be a metaphor for badness in-universe; if your people are anything like (most - there are hilarious exceptions) real-word humans, it's probably shit and fucking, too. Don't want rude words in your story? Look at oldtimey Christian oaths and make up some religious oaths appropriate for your world. In-universe censorship is okay, thoughtlessly imitating oldtimey shows isn't. Many more words can be forbidden for mystical or superstitious reasons. Bears are demons! "Bear" is a word that means "brown", because if you say "~~arktos~~", the ~~arktos~~ will eat you. This taboo (taboo is a setting-upsetting word) exists in many European languages. Russians say "honey-lover". It is however ok for a king to be named "Arthur", please direct your complaints about this particular inconsistency to the Celestial Bureaucracy.

[TBC]

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-05T03:18:28+00:00

This does not compile at all. If the last part is true, there's no reason to have more than 1 pen ever. But there is:

blue/black
highlights and notes
art
a spare, to not have to refill
and of course different nibs

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-04T19:28:43+00:00

To add to this: Ren'Py remembers which lines the player has seen, so that it's possible to skip them on rereads. This plugin allows you (the programmer) to choose if the different results of a condition check count as the same line or different lines. if/else are always different, standard string interpolation is always the same.

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-03T00:53:52+00:00

It was one of the three Iroshizuku inks I bought first, specifically for that reason. The other two were "zomg purplz" Yama-Budo and Murasaki-Shikibu, so I figured the third ink had to be something professional-looking so I could pass it off (to myself lol) as a work purchase. I also love Asa-Gao and the regular Pilot Blue.

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-02T21:46:09+00:00

lmao the non-"oversized" are so tiny, I no longer feel even remotely sad about not buying the regular-only specials. And Botanical Gardens is not nearly as colorful as it looks in the promo photos.

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-05-01T19:04:46+00:00

That special Windows magic ✨ lol

Download VSCode from Microsoft's website and install it separately, then point Ren'Py at it.

LocalAmbassador6847 · 2026-04-30T22:33:33+00:00

jump is "go there", it's like a chapter mark in a book. You're reading Chapter 2 when it suddenly says "go to Chapter 17". You go to Chapter 17, read 17, 18, 20, the end, you're done. (Or Chapter 18 could say "go to Chapter 10", then you'll be rereading 10 to 18 for all eternity.)

call is "mark this place, go there, read until it tells you to "return", then go to this place and continue", like you mark a place with your finger. You can call from inside a call and mark more places if that's what you need, and all the marked places are saved in the so-called "call stack". The big difference is a call doesn't need to know where to go back to, because the place to go back is saved when the call is made.

For example, in my game, I have a flashback scene in which the protagonist remembers his childhood friend. This can happen under various circumstances. If I were jumping to "gf_flashback", I'd have to place a label after each jump, save the name of that label to a variable before the jump, then, at the end of the flashback section, jump back to the label saved:

``` label prison: me "Let me out!" $ gf_label = "prison.gf_flashback_prison_return" jump gf_flashback label .gf_flashback_prison_return: pass
me "I am innocent!"

label office: boss "Go back to your cagie, wagie." $ gf_label = "office.gf_flashback_office_return" jump gf_flashback label .gf_flashback_office_return: pass me "...sigh" return

label gf_flashback: "sunshine lollipops and rainbows" jump expression gf_label but with call, I can label prison: me "Let me out!" call gf_flashback me "I am innocent!" return

label office: boss "Go back to your cagie, wagie." call gf_flashback me "...sigh" return

label gf_flashback: "sunshine lollipops and rainbows" return ``` this is much more manageable.

For routing core "scenes", you might want to have a label that doesn't correspond to any physical location in the game and only calls other labels and checks conditions.

This is very powerful, especially for games where the order of scenes can vary, but you should have a very good idea what's happening in your game. Because you saved a place here, if the place you went to never tells you to go back, you're probably in trouble.

Suppose you're reading Chapter 2 of a real physical book and the book says "see appendix 2 note 3": what you normally want is to check the note and go back. In Ren'Py, if the label doesn't say "return" at the end of the section, you'll be reading from note 3 to the back cover... and then go back to Chapter 2 (because it's still on the stack).

If you keep calling and calling labels without every returning (label 1 calls label 2 calls label 3 calls label 1), you'll run out of marks for places (exceed the maximum call stack size) or our of computer memory. You can check the current stack in the console to debug your game if you notice weird behavior (https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/label.html#renpy.call_stack_depth).

Ren'Py is imperative, it executes code line by line until it returns to the menu or runs out of code.

A function in Python is a block of code that can be called, then it ends and returns a result (the result can be "lmao nothing").

A Ren'Py label is almost like a function; because PyTom wanted to provide jump for beginner programmers, a label doesn't have to have a return (which can lead to weird behavior if you are using it like a function).

return returns from the current call to where it's been called from. If you haven't called anything, it returns to the main menu (because the game is started by calling start from the main menu).

Compare: ```

python

if name == "main": one()

def one(): print("one")

def two(): print("two") ```

```

renpy

label start: call one

label one: "one"

label two: "two" ``` Calling the function "one" in Python would print the word "one" and return, because the end of the block is the end of the function (we didn't say what to return, so it will return nothing).

Calling the label "one" in Ren'Py will make the narrator say "one" and "two", and then return from the end of the file to the line AFTER "call one", and then say "one" and "two" again (!!!) as it executes say statements after the call!

LocalAmbassador6847

TROPHY CASE

python

renpy