Ren'Py is described as 'A visual novel engine that helps you use words, images, and sounds to tell interactive stories that run on computers, mobile devices, and the web' and is a popular game development tool in the development category. There are more than 25 alternatives to Ren'Py for a variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, Mac, Web-based and Android apps. The best Ren'Py alternative is Twine, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like Ren'Py are Dream Novel, LÖVE, Inky by Inkle and Ink by Inkle.
This is one of two software I was deciding between and after working with both I decided to go with Ren'py, but I see myself using both in the future depending on situation
Dream Novel is an AI-powered visual novel platform where every story adapts to your choices. Create dynamic, branching narratives with evolving characters and immersive worlds - no two playthroughs are the same.
Dream Novel is way easier to use than Ren’Py since you don’t need any coding. You just write, and the AI helps you build everything right in your browser.
You don’t need to code or install anything, and the AI helps you build stories that actually react to your choices.
Hi there! LÖVE is an awesome framework you can use to make 2D games in Lua. It's free, open-source, and works on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android and iOS.
LOVE is a generic game engine. Ren'Py is specific to visual novels.
Love is more generic and does not naturally support text and picture story telling.
editor that uses the Ink narrative scripting language and allows you to play and test your interactive (game) narrative stories on the fly.
ink is a scripting language built around the idea of marking up pure-text with flow in order to produce interactive scripts.
Start making your own multi-platform video games right NOW, even if you know nothing about game programming or scripting! TyranoBuilder’s suite of intuitive drag-and-drop tools allows you to create high quality visual novels with speed and ease, and bring your creativity visions...
Drag and drop is nice idea, but it is too slow and too buggy. Documentation and add-ins are Japanese language based/need Google translate to try and make sense of them.
No coding or scripting, just drag what you want into the scene
Tuesday is a free open source engine for creating visual novels, interactive stories and text-based adventure games. Written in JavaScript without using any third party libraries. There is support for the Apache Cordova framework for building native mobile and desktop...
Very easy to use and understand. You can run the editor online on download to run on your machine. Since it's pure javascript, it's easy to run the editor, and the games, anywhere.
A revolutionary new tool for Visual Novel Creation aimed towards aspiring artists and writers to bring their stories to life.
Pixi’VN is a very versatile and powerful visual novel/2D game engine. It is based on JavaScript/TypeScript and uses the PixiJS library for rendering.
They are very similar. But pixivn gives the possibility to use javascript and also ink.
Much lighter and more complete than renpy
RenJS V2 is finally here! Coded from scratch in Typescript (thanks to RockDaFox!), RenJS V2 has better performance and a multitude of new features to make the Visual Novel of your dreams. There's also a new site where you can find the latest version of the library, as well...
Capsule VN Engine is a modern, web-based tool. Capsule handles the technical complexity so you can focus on creating.
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Not exactly a visual novel engine, but rather an interactive fiction engine.
Visual novel: usually has a ton of graphics, showing character in the screen. Interactive fiction: mainly text-based, image and visualization often not present.