RPG Battle Engine for Ren'Py
This project is intended as a drop-in battle engine for the Ren'Py visual novel engine. Several people have been making RPG-esque games in Ren'Py, and a lot more have been asking for help with adding battles to their games, and the purpose of this project is to provide an engine that is flexible and modular enough to be easily customisable to suit many different types of game.
As seen above, the engine can support isometric grid turn-based battles like those seen in many SRPGs; it can also support face-to-face battles such as those seen in many JRPGs, battles over custom-laid paths and hex-grid battles, either in a turn-based or 'active'-style system.
Visit the Releases page to download the latest version of the battle engine.
If you want to stay up-to-date with Battle Engine releases, you can subscribe to the newsletter. New releases and related information will be mailed out.
By default, the battle engine is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Releases
Alpha 7
Alpha 7.5 is the latest release of the battle engine; it requires Ren'Py 6.11.2 or higher.
Download Alpha 7.5: Win/Mac/Linux - 11.4MB ZIP
This release completes the tilemaps & elevation work which began in a7, adding map rotation; additionally there have been a fair number of fixes and cleaning-up to the rest of the code.
This release is just a copy of the game folder, rather than a deployed game in its own right, in order to keep down file sizes. To view the demo, unzip the download into your Ren'Py projects directory and then open the project with the Ren'Py Launcher.
Previous Releases:
(Alphas 5 and above require Ren'Py 6.11.2 or higher.)
Download Alpha 7: Win/Mac/Linux - 11.3MB ZIP
Download Alpha 6: Win/Mac/Linux - 9.9MB ZIP
Download Alpha 5: Win/Mac/Linux - 25MB ZIP
Download Alpha 4: Win/Mac/Linux - 27MB ZIP
Download Alpha 3: Win/Mac/Linux - 16MB ZIP
Download Alpha 2: Win/Mac/Linux - 21.8MB ZIP
Download Alpha 1: Win32 - 11.6MB ZIP
Screenshots & Videos
'Active' Battle
Facing Demo
Equipment Select
Panning Demo
Isometric
Hex Grid
Elevation TileMap Battles
Elevation TileMap Rotation
Equip Screen
Party Screen
Shop Screen
Battle Engine Newsletter
The Battle Engine newsletter is an irregular mailing list which I will use to let people know of new battle engine releases and other related developments. I'm not going to spam you with completely unrelated stuff, and I won't give your email address out to anyone - I can't even see it without poking around in the database directly. All newsletters will also be available in the archive linked to below, and will be posted to the front page of the site.
View previous newsletter posts.
Subscribe to the newsletter to be kept up to date with Battle Engine news.
Features
- Mix and match different battlefield types, turn mechanics, fighter skills and so on
- Highly Customisable for the programming-inclined, but little programming is necessary
- Several different battlefield types supported:
- Face-to-face (e.g. the earlier Final Fantasy games)
- Custom path
- Grid (e.g. as Advance Wars)
- Isometric Grid (e.g. Tactics Ogre; flat image or tilemap)
- Hex Grid (e.g. Panzer General)
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Several different battle mechanics:
- Turn-based
- 'Active' battle (e.g. earlier Final Fantasy games)
- Card-counter-style wargame
- Basic enemy AI
- State- and facing-aware animations
- Scenery
- Plug-in/pick-n-mix skills and magic
- Attribute system (for example, for making fire creatures weak to water magic)
- Equipment system, either based on slots, types of equipment or load
- Inventory system, either on a per-fighter or per-party basis or both
- Panning camera
- Experience and Levelling-up
- Customisable Condition/Result system to introduce battle events or more-complex win conditions
- RPG-oriented Ren'Py screens for equipping fighters, selecting your party members and shopping
Licensing
By default, the battle engine code is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. If you want to use the engine in a non-commercial project then you don't have to even ask - just make sure you attribute it properly in your game's credits.
(I would appreciate it if you did tell me about any game you make with the engine, but if it's a free game, it's not necessary at all.)
If you want to license the engine for a commercial work, however, then read on!
Commercial Licensing
I'm afraid the battle engine is not available for commercial licensing.