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Setting up Variables in Ren’Py

Hello Folks,

Today I’m going to take you through how to set up Variables in Ren’Py and what they would be used for in Interactive Fiction or Visual Novel games.

What is a variable?

A variable is basically just a way to store information or value as it is called in coding.

Some examples of that are Player Names, Pronouns, Stats, Health, Inventory. Honestly the list is endless and is only limited by your imagination.

You want a counter for every time you player sees a puppy. You can do that haha.

There are 3 main types of Variables I’ve found that come up the most in coding IF games. 

Boolean Values

Number Values

String Values

Things that are super important to remember. Variables have to be unique. This is because if you use the same variable name twice it will overwrite the input data to the new data. This works great if you want to add increases in Stat’s or decreases in health as it updates it but not for things like the Player Name for example. Steps

1. Create the Variable

You can set this up at the top of you main script.rpy Page or a separate variables.rpy 

My IF Template will come with a varaibales.rpy included for you to edit. 

Formula for True/False (Boolean) variable_name = False

Word Variables (String) You can set up Word Variables as None if you prefer it’s up to you. I always do false simply to save time when I writing a bunch of new variables some people prefer None so they can tell the difference between the 2 variables at a glance. variable_name = None or variable_name = False

Formula for Number Variables variable_name = 0

This is because Ren’Py will give you an error when it tries to run if it can’t find a variable. So it must be created first. You don’t have to type in init python: if you are listing the variables in the main script file as it already has it at the top. But if you create a new file for variables (like I have in the template) you need to type this at the top so Ren’Py can recognise it. 

2. Make the menu for the variable

If you want to see how to make a menu in Ren’Py please take a look at my Coding Choice Examples Post. I will be looking at doing a more in-depth post on Ren’Py in the future as well as having a few example menus in the template.

3. Set the variable in the menu. This is done by writing $ variable_name = “value”

And that’s it Voila! Your Variable is created and set, when the player chooses this menu choice it will set the string_name variable to words.

Want to display your variable? Simply type

[variable_name] 

So if we wrote

“Tell me the [string_name].”

The player would see the 

Tell me the words. I will show you different ways to display your variable soon.

Wait whats the difference between the Variables?

I will be going into more detail in a future post about variables but at the moment you can take a quick look at the top picture for a brief explanation. 

Variables are super important to Interactive Fiction so it’s great that Ren’Py makes it so easy to code. 

Hopefully this post made sense and gave you a basic idea about Setting Up Variables in Ren’Py. If you are an IF Dev and have been inspired to use Ren’Py for you IF Game let me know. I’m trying to put together some examples of games so people can see how versatile Ren’Py is. Thanks for reading till the end. :) 

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