Interacting with RenPy

Scrivener
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I’ve been researching a side project to take a story of mine and turn it into a visual novel using the RenPy visual novel engine.

RenPy is designed to start with a screenplay style dialog to parse. There is coding involved as well, but it really wants screenplay style copy. In fact it is intended to be as non-programmer friendly as it can be, allowing for WYSIWYG in-engine editing and importing of dialog without a lot of the typical print systems in most programing languages (though you do have to escape some characters).

My first thought was to re-write the manuscript into a screenplay in Scrivener and writing the code in something that is suitable for Python with code linting and other programmer features, cross posting the the bits and pieces where needed. I’m not sure I’m seeing a better way eithout coding in Scrivener or Writing in a programming IDE, both of which are rather dubious in value.

So, my questions to the collective wisdom here are: Has anyone done anything like this before? If so, what can you share about the process? I’ve never even played with the screenwriting schema within Scrivener (or anything else for that matter) so any help there would be welcome as well.

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I haven’t done this, but if I were you: Scrivener can spit out Fountain (or FDX) files, so at least you don’t have to invent this wheel again and can find out faster if your approach works.

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I found using Scrivener’s Scriptwriting mode to at least punch out a first draft helps with revising dialogue before needing to touch the Ren’Py project file. It is all done manually, however. Which means I need to also manually flag lines for code-specific tags (ie. technical directions and similar) for Ren’Py.

Originally I used a the screenplay script with custom elements and modifications, but just recently switched to Stage Play (UK) with a customized element I’m currently trying to figure out for conditional dialogue.