I've seen RenPy get mentioned independently several times over the past few months so, as a professional Python developer, I figured I had to learn it. Then someone mentioned this Jam at work and I saw my opportunity.

Arise Ye Old One is a visual novel where you take on the role of a mysterious creature that has awakened in an eldritch temple under the waves. Could you be The One? The True Great Elder God who will bring true and lasting chaos to the world? It is time to find out via your cult of worshippers. Unfortunately, as is the case for all Elder Gods, a group of investigators who don't value their lives too well have taken up the case and are exploring your temple. Kill the investigators so that no one can stop your ascent, but be careful. Your mysterious nature is what gives you power and anything you do that defines a part of you saps that power. Losing all of your Mythos Power will reveal you to be just an ordinary sort of animal, not the face melting horror you truly are.

The basic flow of the game is a narrative race between losing Mythos Power and killing the team of investigators. You are essentially a horror movie monster jumping out at the investigators and picking them off one by one. Different selections of powers lock out other choices. Some choices will cost more or less mythos power based on your previous selections. (At the start, Electricity powers cost a lot but Gills cost less, for example.) To that end, you'll be exploring the narrative space and determining what combination of powers let you kill the most investigators. In my early tests this gives it a sort of narrative rogue-like experience, or maybe like a horror movie version of "Guess Who?" Each time you lose all of your Mythos Power but aren't banished by the investigators, you will learn some of the runes in the name of the True Great Elder God. Figuring out the True Great Elder God's True Name unlocks the final secret of the game.

I streamed the start of the project on twitch where I set up the basic flow of the game. There, I set up the basic class to store the player's state, qualities they've defines about themselves and what is known to the investigators. All said and done, one loop of the game was playable end-to-end during that stream with barebones placeholder text and the stock images from Ren Py.

In the meantime since that stream I've added story content for each of the encounters with the cult or the investigators and built out a much easier way for me to add new animals that you could become. (The more animals with dissimilar qualities, the less Mythos Power each decision costs thanks to how those two systems interact.) I also added the process by which you reach the true ending of the game via the Great Old One's True Name (and two Easter egg endings based on past projects... all secured, of course, you'll have to reverse engineer some Python if you want to learn the True Name).

My big task now is figuring out how animations/transforms/etc. work in RenPy so that I can build those in on my next dev stream. (1PM EST on Saturday.)

Update from the dev today: Pushed up against and experimented with a bunch of options for transformations on renpy. I've literally taught linear algebra and multivariate calc, so fighting with matrix transforms is pretty embarrassing. Saving face a little... however... is that it was just the syntax, not the math. With transforms generally in place, the last step is getting all of the visual and audio elements in place and running final checks.

Renpy has some weird parsing a formatting designed around making it friendly for writers and artists that just rub me the wrong way as a developer. The smart searching of image names, for example, is interesting but makes me generally nervous from a data reference perspective. Of course, I know that a lot of the work here was about dancing around Python syntax and making sure the renpy specific functions don't conflict with Python functions. This is apparent with the lack of f-strings in renpy. It likely won't make it into the jam submission, but I did learn about persistent data in renpy and multigame persistent data. It is an interesting solution to make the concept readily available to non devs. If the feature makes it in, I'll probably end up writing a good-old json file instead of using the persistent data.