Look at similar games and what engine they used.
Most of the stuff you mention is in renpy, but not the 2d thingy. Assuming you mean actual 2d engine capabilites with objects and lighting and bells and whistles. You can make images appear and move a bit and if you are skilled you can do mini games and of course a point and click game. But it is optimised for visual novels that look like visual novels.
Thanks for the feedback! The most similar game I could find was:
https://cosmicvoid.itch.io/devils-hideout
…and I think it’s made in ren’py? That’s what made me consider it.
While you can make renpy do those things if you bend and twist it, this game does not look like renpy. And at 13 MB the demo of this game sure is not renpy. The options file in the demo makes me believe, this is c++ with libraries or something and not one of the common game engines.
The benefits of renpy are qol like roll back and save games. And configuration for text speed, auto play, skip already read text and so on.
A non exhaustive list of engines is here https://itch.io/game-development/engines
Godot point & click
https://itch.io/games/made-with-godot/tag-point-and-click
Compare to Renpy point & click games
https://itch.io/games/made-with-renpy/tag-point-and-click
And many games do not tell in the metainfo what engine they use.
Hmm. I wonder why this seems so. I can come up with two points that might contribute to this impression.
Bending and twisting renpy to do things needed for a point & click are possible but quality might suffer, because the engine is optimised for other things. Also the tag point and click might be misapplied, because technically you point and click in most games that can be played with a mouse.
And renpy is used by many hobby developers with less experience in coding. So the average level of professionalism might be lower, which might be also visible in the usage of assets and "quality".
Overall I would assume that godot is more suited for a general purpose 2d game. The vast majority of the point and click renpy games do tag visual novel as well...
I see... that does make since. So that might also make ren'py good for a large project when you don't want to waste time, but the game might run slower. So that of course brings in the triangle of development: Time or money or quality, and you can only you can only optomize two.
Godot saves quality and money, but might take time. Ren'py saves time and money, but could suffer in quality. I just need to figure out what I value more...
My main point is, renpy is optimised for visual novels. A point & click game is not a visual novel. If you use an engine optimised for one thing to do another thing, this might show somehow, or make certain tasks extra difficult.
But this goes in the other direction as well. Visual novels made in other engines often lack a lot of the quality of life basic features one expects from a visual novel. Like rollback - scrolling back to previous text. Or configurable text speed. I curse every time I play one of those and the dev did not put any thought into making text speed configurable.
For a point & click a thing like rollback is usually not needed at all. You do not even have an interface with those text boxes. Many point & click also have an avatar running around on screen. I do not think I ever saw a renpy game re-creating that feature. If you want to see renpy games that "break" with visual novel mechanics, see some sandbox and management games. Maybe adventure too. And of course the point & click ones that are not tagged visual novel.
