Make a visual novel game with Python

Most people look for a compelling story in modern videogames, and those that don’t have one are appearing less and less. A great

way to tell a pure story is through the genre of visual novels, and you can make one fairly simply in Python. These interactive novels are an extremely popular form of entertainment in Japan, and usually work by having the player click through a story and make decisions as they go along in order to experience different plot points and endings.

QChange scenes to add more depth to the story, and allow the game to have decisions and routes

In Python, this is a relatively simple project to create, but with the addition of the Pygame module we can make it easier still, and even more expandable for the future. Pygame adds better support for positioning the images and text, creating display windows and using mouse and keyboard inputs, thereby simplifying the coding process.

We’ll be coding this in standard Python 2, so make sure to run it in IDLE 2 and not IDLE 3 while you are writing, testing and coding.

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Next we need to download the code for Pygame direct from the source. Still in the terminal, you can do this by typing in:

$ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/pygame/ pygame

Which will download it to the folder ‘pygame’. Move to that using CD pygame in the terminal so we can continue building it.

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To install it, we need to do it in two steps. First we need to prepare the code to install using the terminal with:

$ python setup.py build

Once that’s fi nished you can then actually install it with:

$ sudo python setup.py install This won’t take too long.

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If the above doesn’t work (or is a bit daunting) you can check the website for binary and executable fi les that will work on other operating systems and Linux distros. Head to http://pygame.org/download.shtml to get the fi les you need for your specifi c system, including Windows and OS X. The rest of the tutorial will work in any OS.

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The best way to install Pygame for your system is to compile it. To do this you need to fi rst install the right dependencies. Open up the terminal and install the following packages, which in Ubuntu looks like:

$ sudo apt-get install mercurial python-dev python-numpy libav-tools libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2- dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev libsmpeg- dev libsdl1.2-dev libportmidi-dev libswscale-dev libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev

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We’ve uploaded the code to FileSilo, and here we’re going to walk you through what we’ve done to make it work. Download the fi les for the visual novel and unzip them. The two fi les we care about for the moment are the visualnovel.py and script.py python fi les – this is where all the important code is.

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For the moment the script fi le is small and literally just holds the script for the game. It’s made up of events for the visual novel to move between, line by line, by splitting it up into scenes. This includes the location of each line, the character, the actual line itself and information on how the game fl ows. These are matrices with the information in, and are completely customisable.

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We add a mixture of information to run the novel. Defi ne the size of the display (1000 pixels wide, 563 high), along with RGB colours for the code to use. We’re also telling Pygame what font to use and how large for certain sections and also loading images for the game.

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Create a display for the game. Pygame works by constantly updating the display with new information. To show how this works, the menu function adds elements to the display (which we’ve titled screen), such as fi lling it with colour, adding shapes and using blit to add images or in this case text. Once you’ve created a buffer of changes to the screen, you update it with the fl ip() function.

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Our start_game function is called when the mouse clicks the right position and we prepare the game, getting the characters, locations and progression through the game script. The rest of this function uses this info to pull in data from the script to make the game fl ow properly.

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In our game, the code pulls in elements from the script fi le as it goes. We'll explain how that works later, but this also allows us to implement decisions later on to change which direction the game might take you in.

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We don’t need many modules for the current state of the visual novel. Here we’ve imported the new Pygame module, our script as a module and the time module for aesthetic reasons – we’re going to have the code pause in bits rather than just instantly change scenes to the next line. We also initialise Pygame with a

simple pygame.init()

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First screen

The fi rst screen is handled differently, and acts to get every element up on the interface before we continue – it makes the code take a little less time to process as we

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As we’ve created the button as a rectangle and now an image on the menu, we need to recognise when the mouse is hovering over it to know when the button is clicked. First

we have to use event.get() to see the mouse in general, then we look for the position with get_pos(). After that, we wait for it to click, see where it clicked (using the co-ordinates of the rectangle) and make a decision after that.

“The code pulls in elements from the