Are There Plans to Make Ren'Py More User-Friendly?

[HiddenCreature]

I'm noticing every 1-2 days, there's a new question on how to do something in Ren'Py. It usually sounds pretty simple in theory. I guess the issue usually isn't how to do something, but where to actually begin.

While you don't have to be tech savvy to know the very basics (like dialogue and showing sprites), it can get intimating at worst, confusing at best if you wanna make something like a day planner, or customize an in-game menu.

Is it always going to be like this, or will it be easier to use in the future? For example: instead of having to define all your images, you could simply select them from a gallery, like a drag-and-drop, or point-and-click.

Yes, I know there are other engines out there, but they're either not free, or in very early stages of development.

I ask this purely out of curiosity, not as a complaint.

[PyTom]

I think the question is - are the questions people asking the sort of questions that a gui tool would be able to answer?

I'm looking at the top threads in this Q/A forum, and they don't seem to be ones that a gui creator would really help with. They tend to mostly be about UI stuff or game logic. Those are both areas that the drag-and-drop tools neglect - it's hard to think of how a gui tool would make a day planner without it becoming an insane mix of graphical and textual code.

I'm not opposed to a Ren'Py GUI - a visual director is something I'm mulling over. Some sort of interface builder might also be plausible - but I'd have to convince myself I can do it well, rather than making something that gets in the way of creators that want to create games that are more than moderately complicated.

Just realize that Ren'Py tends to lean towards productivity for people making medium-to-large games, rather than absolute ease of learning. (My feeling is that games with ~500 dialogue blocks easily cross into the medium size range, and that's a lot of games.) While it might be easy to drag a sprite into place the first time you use it, once you have dozens of scenes, having to drag to reposition the sprite if you decide to change its location seems like it could be very hard. (An interactive transform editor might be the best of both worlds.)

[HiddenCreature]

Understandable. It's good to know the idea is at least on the table.

Thanks for the swift response.

[trooper6]

I don't think Ren'py needs to be made more user friendly. Rather, I think an educational VN that is made for people who don't know how to do anything would be more useful. Something that explains everything in great detail...that rather than giving new users a fish, it teaches them how to fish.

Maybe some time in the future I'd give it a shot...but I feel like one of the people who are more expert than I would be a better candidate to make the game.

[HiddenCreature]

I don't think Ren'py needs to be made more user friendly. Rather, I think an educational VN that is made for people who don't know how to do anything would be more useful. Something that explains everything in great detail...that rather than giving new users a fish, it teaches them how to fish.

Maybe some time in the future I'd give it a shot...but I feel like one of the people who are more expert than I would be a better candidate to make the game.

That's actually not a bad idea. The tutorial only covers the most basic of things: music, transitions, etc. If you want to learn something more complex, you have to consult the manual.

Ren'Py is well known enough that if PyTom asked around, I'm sure he could find some decent volunteers. I'd find it much harder to believe if he couldn't find anyone.

[Onishion]

As someone relatively new to Renpy and Python, I've found it to be very user-friendly, but there is a learning curve to it for people who are not programmers by nature.

One thing I would kind of appreciate though is if some of the gurus around here would go through the official documentation and add in more examples for each element, because as someone who is more of an artist than a coder, I find the raw syntax documentation to be very hard to decipher, but can usually pick up a good example very quickly. Also, anything involving classes and python functions tend to throw me, I'm much more comfortable with the native Renpy expression stuff.

Now, as for a drag and drop GUI, here's a suggestion that might be a decent middleground, have a "debug mode" drag and drop option in the games themselves. Make it so that you can load up a game in progress, open up the debug menu, and select any item visible on the screen (either by directly clicking on it, or perhaps tab-cycling through options, or a menu, something like that). Then it would instantly display the position data for that item. Then you could drag the item to a new location, and it would give the new position data. It would not actually code anything for you, you would have to take that data and work it into your own code, but it would allow you to visualize where the item is on the screen, rather than having to guess how many digits you need to add or subtract from your ypos.

Now, I have no idea how much work that would be or whether it would be worth it, I can live with trial and error just fine, but it might be something helpful.

[noeinan]

I don't think Ren'py needs to be made more user friendly. Rather, I think an educational VN that is made for people who don't know how to do anything would be more useful. Something that explains everything in great detail...that rather than giving new users a fish, it teaches them how to fish.

Maybe some time in the future I'd give it a shot...but I feel like one of the people who are more expert than I would be a better candidate to make the game.

I started a tutorial for my quick start guide here: http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... 51&t=22393

Just covering the basics of how the scheduler works and teaching some concepts and vocab I remember from my computer science courses in college.

The tutorial isn't finished, I'll need to update it and my quick start with the latest build, but hopefully a start.

[trooper6]

One thing I would kind of appreciate though is if some of the gurus around here would go through the official documentation and add in more examples for each element, because as someone who is more of an artist than a coder, I find the raw syntax documentation to be very hard to decipher, but can usually pick up a good example very quickly. Also, anything involving classes and python functions tend to throw me, I'm much more comfortable with the native Renpy expression stuff.

I think more detailed examples in the documentation would also be a great idea.
Side note: if you want to know more about classes and functions, I recommend the CodeAcademy beginners Python course.

[SeventhStranger]

A series of official YouTube tutorials could also really help out beginners.
I myself am a visual learner, so seeing someone performing the actions is way easier for me than reading a document. Also it seems less intimidating to watch a series of 20 minute videos than to look at a wall of text and code and get scared away.
That being said, once I did read through that wall of text, ren'py is pretty user friendly. It's just the starting out hurdle that can sometimes be hard to get over.

[SinnyROM]

One thing I would kind of appreciate though is if some of the gurus around here would go through the official documentation and add in more examples for each element, because as someone who is more of an artist than a coder, I find the raw syntax documentation to be very hard to decipher, but can usually pick up a good example very quickly. Also, anything involving classes and python functions tend to throw me, I'm much more comfortable with the native Renpy expression stuff.

I can't agree more. Recently I found that the text history code on the old documentation wiki was still being updated, which had nicer code than the one I found after searching through the forums. One would've assumed the opposite: deprecated code in the old documentation and newer code in the relatively recent forum threads.

I would like to see the wiki style editing return for the documentation so it can be easier for more knowledgeable programmers to share what they find and beginners to learn without having to dig through threads with possibly inefficient code.

Edit: forgot all about what I was going to post originally. I like how Renpy is at the moment in terms of its user interface/experience. I prefer being able to choose and customize my programming environment, especially when each programmer has a favourite text editor. Having an additional GUI seems like bloat to me when simple scripting and compiling does the job. My main concern is the documentation, but otherwise my experience with Ren'Py has been the smoothest so far.

[trooper6]

I would like to see the wiki style editing return for the documentation so it can be easier for more knowledgeable programmers to share what they find and beginners to learn without having to dig through threads with possibly inefficient code.

One worry I have is that some helpful people post code that is...not best practice. I've seen this in the cookbook section where a helpful person posts some helpful code that is not well put together, uses ui code rather than the preferred screen language, is inefficient, poorly indented, etc. Such things are not even always caught in the cookbook section, I could imagine going back to a wikistyle would result in a lot of questionable code making it through and not being corrected. Which could result in teaching people bad coding habits. I imagine it would take up a lot of PyTom's time to try and fix questionable code in the wiki...which would take him away from making updates to Ren'py itself.

I think it is a bit of a conundrum.

[Onishion]

Side note: if you want to know more about classes and functions, I recommend the CodeAcademy beginners Python course.

Yeah, I've learned a bit about them, but I still find them confusing as hell to wrap my brain around. So far my python training comes from the Renpy documentation, this page, and also I read through the Python.org tutorials. I might take the full course though.

[xavimat]

I think there are two types of users here:
- Who doesn't know how to code, but wants to tell a story can do it with the basic Ren'Py. The learning curve in the beginning is not steep.
- Who wants to create a complex game, on the contrary, needs to know more coding... or look for a partner who can do it.
Working with Ren'Py is code-based because it can do too much things to simplify them in a GUI or something similar.

That said, there are indeed constantly improvements that make Ren'Py more user friendly; here your example:

For example: instead of having to define all your images, you could simply select them from a gallery, like a drag-and-drop, or point-and-click.

And you have the answer in the last version: 6.99.4 doesn't need to define the images if the game doesn't need complex image-compositions. (http://renpy.org/doc/html/displaying_im ... -directory) (maybe is not the same as "drag and drop" but is an improvement).

Looking at the github repository issues there are some other proposals (like movable speech bubbles: https://github.com/renpy/renpy/issues/263). And every version has its improvements, some of them in usability.

For my experience (and the developer subforum shows it), specific suggestions for Ren'Py are always welcome.

Btw, there is a project that help to position images on the screen and to write text in-game that generate .rpy files with the correct positions. http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... 51&t=24108

[HiddenCreature]

I appreciate you offering the links, but I didn't need them. That was just an example I gave. I was asking this question out of curiosity, not out of a complaint on how Ren'Py works.

[SinnyROM]

One worry I have is that some helpful people post code that is...not best practice. I've seen this in the cookbook section where a helpful person posts some helpful code that is not well put together, uses ui code rather than the preferred screen language, is inefficient, poorly indented, etc. Such things are not even always caught in the cookbook section, I could imagine going back to a wikistyle would result in a lot of questionable code making it through and not being corrected. Which could result in teaching people bad coding habits. I imagine it would take up a lot of PyTom's time to try and fix questionable code in the wiki...which would take him away from making updates to Ren'py itself.

I think it is a bit of a conundrum.

True, that's a risk for every wiki unfortunately. If it's moderated well and often enough, it can be an extremely useful tool, but only if these moderators are available often enough and the percentage of the public community has more good intentions than bad.

I guess instead of the documentation being completely editable, maybe a good middle ground is having a page like the wiki cookbook be editable and have potential for multiple links to code and references for each feature.

Code: Select all

Ren'Py Cookbook References

Diary/journal system
- link to a cookbook forum thread
- another link to a forum thread
- link to Github repo

Point-and-click
- link
- link

...

This page is to be the first point of reference after the documentation, for instance a stickied topic at the top of the Ren'Py subforums. It can be publicly editable (to some extent) so that others can add their contributions. That way, only one page needs to be moderated for vandalism. If users can't find what they need there, they can move on to making threads with their questions. The page may become a little bloated and some kind of indexing will be needed along the way, but it's definitely more feasible than bringing back the entire wiki.