Developing with Ren'Py

This is an ongoing effort to document what I've personally discovered building visual novels with the Ren'Py engine. Some of it describes the pitfalls I've encountered, other parts offer advice and examples.
See: Wikipedia: Visual Novel 

While you could read all this from beginning to end, and the page navigation is set up to allow you to do that, it's probably more useful to dip in and out of sections that are of interest.

These pages are built using responsive technologies, and can be viewed on many kinds of device. However, the code samples are out of necessity wider than some small screens can handle. These are best viewed on a laptop or desktop where you can also cut and paste them into your own scripts.

Before you begin

This section covers things to consider before you start writing your dialogue, building your world, developing your characters, working on art, or crafting a line of code. I feel this material doesn't get talked about enough, and without it development can go down a dead-end before it has even begun.

The basics

To get you started this covers the fundamentals of developing a visual novel with Ren'Py.

Intermediate techniques

Building on the basics introduced so far this section offers more advanced techniques to simplify your development.

There's a GitHub repository  with the code used in these samples if you wish, or you can cut-n-paste code from these pages.