Hello everyone,
I’m plotting an IF game, making copious notes and keeping them all in Scrivener (what I use for the traditional novels I write). The recent post that talked about the strengths of each engine was very helpful, but even after reading it I was still left with an overwhelming abundance of options.
The gist of it is that the game has the player be presented with text that describes the scene and dialogue. Once in a while a choice comes up. The choice leads to (a) a different dialogue tree and (b) a change in variables, such as Courage or relationship to other characters.
One scene could split off into six different ones. These six then become three, which then go back to sharing the same scene afterwards.
What my game needs:
- Persistent variable tracking
- Easy way to update variables (like the Pythonic courage += 1)
- Have a way for the player to save their state in the game and come back to it later.
- Have a way to have players input their name at the beginning of the game “out of the box”
I am moderately familiar with Ren’Py and I know it has a way to do all of this. That said, I am not making a visual novel so I do not want to use Ren’Py.
I’m open to listening to suggestions!
I mention Python because it’s the only programming language I am familiar enough to use for a project (I use it daily for data science). I would be OK paying to host the game on my own website.
Thank you for your time