Automatic flowchart for RenPy story scrips

[Alessio]

Hello everyone,

To support the writing of my branching stories, I wrote a Python tool (see attachment) to create a flowchart of the story line. The tool parses the RenPy story files (.rpy) in the game directory for label and jump commands and creates a .graphml file that can then be opened with yEd (free graph editor). The flow chart allows direct jumps to the correct line of an .rpy file in the Atom editor. Hopefully this is helpful, feel free to edit/improve it! I use it in Windows, the code might need some adapting to work in Apple/Linux environments (folder paths probably).

There is a short demo video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dfGgJRAEZY.

Short instructions:

• Create a new folder inside RenPy's "game" directory, copy the VNavigator.py file into it and execute it.
• Non-story files gui.rpy, options.rpy, and screens.rpy are skipped.
• Comments (#) behind label and jump commands are copied to the flowchart.
• After opening the .graphml file with yEd, select Layout > Hierarchical to optimize the flowchart.
• To prevent labels from being taken into account, start their comment with a "-".

[_ticlock_]

I recommend posting this tool in RenPy Cookbook.

[Ocelot]

Looks good. Can it understand screen-based navigation (For example, answering a phone message in a certain way can immediately jump to another label) or show conditional choices (if certain conditions are true jump to label1 otherwise proceed to label2)?

You can also check similar tool made before:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=61517

[Alessio]

I recommend posting this tool in RenPy Cookbook.

I thought about that initially, but this is not a RenPy code how-to recipe, it's an external Python program. Hmm, maybe splitting hairs. But double-posting at this stage probably makes no sense.

[Alessio]

Looks good. Can it understand screen-based navigation (For example, answering a phone message in a certain way can immediately jump to another label) or show conditional choices (if certain conditions are true jump to label1 otherwise proceed to label2)?

You can also check similar tool made before:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=61517

Can't believe I missed the "Routes analyser" tool, thanks for the link! I thought I'd searched everywhere and made my tool since I couldn't find anything similar. :-/

My tool is fairly simple and hunts down any label and jump statement. Jumps contained in a menu with multiple choices should be recognized. When there are conditions/multiple choices, I recommend adding a comment behind the jump statement so the text shows up on the flow chart's arrow.

The tool is not interpreting any logic though, so it won't recognize jumps that are impossible to reach, jumps to dynamic labels (when a label is a variable determined during runtime), implicit jumps (pass, continuing to the next label) etc. Also, for the purpose of visualizing the actual story flow, I did not add recognition of call/return statements.