Best way to implement action-adventure gameplay

[astrobread]

So there's the TileEngine, Renpygame, Jake's RPG Battle Engine, and then Ren'Py tools such as SpriteManager and creator-defined displayables. I guess I'm not hurting for options, but I'm also not sure what the best tool for the job is.

Which of these would make the most sense for implementing action-adventure style gameplay, similar to Link to the Past? Basically, a sprite with walking animation that you can freely move with mouse or keyboard to explore and interact with other objects on top-down style map.

At the moment I'm just planning a small minigame, so I'm all for not re-inventing the wheel. But if it's necessary to roll my own, what's the best approach?

[netravelr]

If you want that, I'd suggest something like RPGMaker or Flash. Ren'Py is primarily used to make just visual novels so you're going to have to create a lot of stuff from scratch to get what you're thinking to work as it will require a lot of custom coding; but like you said its not TOO difficult if you do PyGame, but it's more effort than I think it's worth for someone just starting out unless you are dead set on using Ren'Py.

[astrobread]

I suppose I should clarify that this would just be a brief minigame inside a larger VN. RPGMaker is better suited for this one capability, but recreating all the Ren'Py functionality I'd need in RPGMaker is probably more work. But I think you answered my main question: if I want it I'll have to roll my own.

So I spent the day working with SpriteManager and custom displayables to see if I could make some progress, or whether I should just abandon the idea altogether. After I got some character sprite sheets animated, I ran into this thread while searching about event parsing.

Something like WalkaboutScene sounds like the best answer so far. A single custom displayable that renders all the sprites, handles events, and deals with movement and collisions. I'm gonna give that a shot, but if anyone has a better suggestion I'm all ears.