This is a game I was asked to join partway through. Originally designed to be a quick visual novel made in Ren'Py with a small dungeon-crawling aspect quickly grew out of scope. The developer they had for the dungeon-crawler aspect had no experience in Ren'Py, which is a completely different beast from PyGame. I had experience with both, so I was brought on to get the dungeon aspect finally working in the game. I was given two weeks.
After trying it out, I was hit with a game that simply could not work. It depended on a lot of PyGame functionality that just wasn't present in the Ren'Py engine, and there was no way to combine the two without gutting and rewriting either the game aspect or the visual novel aspect of the work. I decided to let Ren'Py do what it does best and started the dungeon portion over from scratch.
It took a lot of late nights, as well as two or three more rewrites as we all learned more about the Ren'Py framework and how to push it to its maximum, but in the end, we launched on time. There were some bugs still in the game (usually in the Visual Novel portion, such as missing a flag that caused the game to loop the same scene over and over), and a few engine quirks caused us to release a few patches same-day, but we finished it, and it's a fairly enjoyable product with some good production values.
It was a great experience working with the Bigsteps team, and I'm glad that in the end I was able to come through for them and finish. I'm not going to lie and say it wasn't a stressful mess of overworking and tons and tons of coffee, but in the end, I think it was a worthwhile endeavor. I've basically got a mastery of Ren'Py because of it, and my PyGame skills have improved since I've had to learn why the engine was breaking instead of just simply how to work around it.
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