Please Note: This web page contains the first 3 releases of Ren'Py, which are undocumented and (mostly) obsolete. The new release of Ren'Py will be coming to http://www.bishoujo.us when it's done. Email me for more details.
Ren'Py is an interpreter for visual novel games. It allows a game author to focus more on the story and art aspects of the game, and less on things like writing code to display graphics or manage the state of the program.
Ren'Py was written using Python and PyGame.
This is the current version of the Ren'Py code. This is what you should be using if you want to develop your own games with Ren'Py.
One can uncompress this and edit game/script.rpy to begin creating your own game. Running game.exe will run that script as a game that can be played.
You can download the 'RenPy Demo'. This features Blue Lemma's Miko teaching you how the engine works. It's not really much of a game in and of itself.
If you have Python and PyGame installed, you can run the demo.py file in the archive. Otherwise, if you're on Windows, you can run demo.exe, which should work by itself. Ren'Py was developed on Linux, tested on Windows, and should work on any platform that supports Python 2.3 and PyGame.
You can also download my aborted game project Onegai Nurse. This was originally intended as a game, but I decided to abandon it for a number of reasons. The primary one was that rotoscoping images failed to yield enough emotions to make a game.
I decided to post what I have on the web, including the source for the new Ren'Py engine. As it's not a complete game, I didn't bother packaging it up well. Users will probably want to be sure they've installed Python and PyGame on their system, and perhaps Numeric.
If you're interested in writing your own game, bug me and I'll explain how.
You can email the author at tom-renpy at onegeek.org, or post your questions to the LemmaSoft forum.