Game Development with Ren'Py: Introduction to Visual Novel Games Using Ren'Py, TyranoBuilder, and Twine

Fantastic, informative book with a good mixture of technical tutorials, narrative tools and fascinating history. A must for anyone considering developing visual novels.

Instant refund on this. Far from being helpful. Just pages of ads for games .. not to learn vn makers.. its like click bait.

I'm developing dojin-games as my hobby by renpy, so I bought this book as a reference. Honestly the contents of this book is difficult to understand for me because I'm a newbee of the theory of visual novels. But source codes of renpy putting on some pages are very useful.

There were things I liked about this book as well as things I didn't particularly care for. Likes: 1. Reading through the history of interactive story telling was a trip down memory lane for me. I had played many of the older games (I first played the original "Adventure" on a CDC mainframe in college in the early 1980s) and it was fun to remember those experiences. 2. All of the Ren'Py information - that's what I was really looking for. 3. Concrete examples that I could use to easily get started. 4. The technical content that was presented was concise and easy to follow. Dislikes: 1. The history thing is a double-edged sword - I enjoyed it, but there was perhaps a bit too much of it. If you're not as old as I am, you might have found wading through this part of the book rather tedious. Of course, you could always skip that if not interested, but knowing what came before is something that any aspiring developer could learn from. 2. I haven't used nor do I plan to use any of the tools he covers other than Ren'Py, so I skipped over all of that content - maybe 20% of the book. 3. When it comes to the Ren'Py stuff, it was very rudimentary. I have been writing in Ren'Py for about a year, so there wasn't a whole lot here that I hadn't already learned on my own. In summary, if you're thinking that the burgeoning field of Visual Novels (VNs) is something you might like to get into but have no idea where to start, this is probably the book for you. If you are an intermediate or advanced VN developer, don't bother. With that said, if this author were to come out with an "Advanced Game Development with Ren'Py" book that included some useful examples, including but not limited to designing Python classes to allow for more complex VNs, I would buy it in a heartbeat.

Could be more in depth on programming with renpy lib in itself.