Working with Ren’Py:

• Part 1: Downloading and Configuring
• Part 2: Editing and Creating Characters
• Part 3: Scenes and Showing Images
• Part 4: Menus, Labels, and Jumps
• Part 5: Variables and Conditional Statements
• Part 6: Transitions
• Part 7: Building Distributions

Advanced Ren’Py:

• Part 1: Screen Language
• Part 2: Position Style Properties
• Part 3: Animation and Transformation Language
• Part 4: Text and Button
• Part 5: Bar and VBar
• Part 6: Textbutton and Imagebutton
• Part 7: Input, Key, and Mousearea

Customizing Ren’Py:

• Part 1: Editing options.rpy
• Part 2: Editing gui.rpy
• Part 3: Style Inspector and Overriding Styles
• Part 4: Special Screen Names and Overriding Screens
• Part 5: Replacing Default GUI Images

Ren’Py + Python:

• Part 1: Setting and Using Flags
• Part 2: Python Blocks
• Part 3: User-Defined Displayables
• Part 4: User-Defined Statements
• Part 5: Custom Text Tags

Ren’Py is a engine for creating visual novels. It comes with a suite of tools for taking code and transforming it into programs that can be run on Windows, Mac, Linux, and even, with a little more work, mobile platforms like Android and iOS.

Beyond the showing of text and images, Ren’Py can also be extended through introducing new user interface elements, changing its defaults images, and combining Python with its own code to create even more interactive projects.

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GUI Folder

Within any project, there is a “gui” folder that contains all of the graphic user interface backgrounds and images. Clicking on the “gui” option in the Open Directory listing in the Ren’Py Launcher will open this folder.

Organized by type, the folders “bar”, “button”, “slider”, and “scrollbar” contain the actions and types associated with those elements as named files.

While changing the definitions in the options.rpy file can help in changing some of these, replacing the files in this folder directly is the best way to override the presentation of user interface elements in a project.

 

Example of Replacing the Main Menu

Opening the “main_menu.png” file found in the “gui” folder in an image editor and changing its color, for example, will only change the background color.

As a screen, to change the layout of the options and colors of the main menu, its definition and style must be changed programmatically in connection with also changing the user interface images.