Fuck Yeah Ren'Py

Getting Ren'Py to run on the Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is an awesome little computer that costs $35 and can do a lot of things. Mine, for example, hosts a Minecraft server, but people do much more interesting things with their Pi’s. One of the possible usages of a Pi is using it as a regular desktop computer — after all, you can browse the web, use office suites and so on. The problem comes when you look at the games. There aren’t a whole lot of games that are going to run on a Raspberry Pi, and it’s not surprising since it’s a very low-end machine. Many people have successfully emulated things like the NES on the Raspberry Pi though, and that makes perfect sense — that doesn’t need a lot of resources. So I was thinking, what other games don’t need a lot of resources? And a thought popped into my mind - why, visual novels, of course! And we have just the tool for that! Ren’Py, that is. After following these instructions, you’ll be able to run most games made with Ren’Py on the Raspberry Pi, and you will be able to make your own games as well. I have to point out, though, that the “Build Distributions” tool of the launcher is broken, so you can only run those games you made yourself on another computer only if you have Ren’Py installed there. That is, however, a minor issue, since it’s possible to simply transfer the project folder of the game to another machine that runs a full version of Ren’Py, capable of building the game. Also, the “update” button will be missing from the launcher, quite obviously — it can’t update if we build it ourselves since it won’t have the appropriate binaries.
First, we will need to fetch dependencies of Ren’Py. This is actually pretty simple since all of them are in the Raspbian repositories, so just run the following command:
sudo apt-get install python-dev python-pygame libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libavresample-dev libfreetype6-dev libglew1.6-dev libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libfribidi-dev libswscale-dev libesd0-dev libpulse-dev
Next, we have to install Cython. Unfortunately, Cython is missing from the Raspbian repositories, so we’ll have to build it manually. This step is perhaps the longest one in terms of the amount of time it takes. To build and install Cython, run the following commands:
sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install -U cython
This will take a long time to complete, so you can safely leave it to do its work and do something else yourself. Once that’s done, we can actually start building and installing Ren’Py itself. First, we need to fetch the latest “Source Code” download Ren’Py provides — you can usually find it on their download page near the very bottom. As of this writing, the latest version is 6.18.3. Download it with your browser and extract it, or simply issue the following commands:
wget http://www.renpy.org/dl/6.18.3/renpy-6.18.3-source.tar.bz2
tar xf renpy-6.18.3-source.tar.bz2
rm renpy-6.18.3-source.tar.bz2
Now you should end up with a directory called renpy-6.18.3-source. Rename it to something less confusing, move it to whereever you want, and then change to the “module” directory within:
mv renpy-6.18.3-source renpy
cd renpy/module
And then there’s just one final step left!
export RENPY_DEPS_INSTALL=/usr::/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/
export RENPY_CYTHON=cython
sudo -E python setup.py install
When this finishes, Ren’Py is ready to go! Now, to run the Launcher, use python -O renpy.py and to run a Ren’Py game (that is outside your project directory), use python -O renpy.py /path/to/your/game. For example, to run the example game that comes with Ren’Py, you can do:
python -O renpy.py the_question