I ended up doing exactly what you recommended. And it works great.
Although I did have a minor setback. I read somewhere to move your game folder into the git directory. Since renpy has a folder named "game" containing most of the content, that's what I moved. That doesn't work.
When I realized it needed the parent directory, everything works great.
I was also worried about setting the renpy directory as my game directory, which would cause future games to get land inside the first game's file structure. Others had run into that.
But choosing a folder upstream worked just fine.
Thank you for the reply!