TALK / Susan Shu Chang / Narrative-focused video games development with Ren'Py an open source engine

The game engine, Ren'Py, is an open source engine used to make countless interactive fiction games, also known as visual novels (VNs). These include commercial hits with VN elements such as Persona 5, to viral works such as Doki Doki Literature Club (2mil+ downloads as of Jan 2018). I learned to program in Python using this engine, and have released my commercial game with it after working for a few years on it during weekends, selling 6K+ copies in less than half a year. In the daytime, I work as a principal data scientist in fintech. Anyhow, the talk will dig into the source code of the engine, https://github.com/renpy/renpy, such as: How it takes care of OS level stuff for game developers, memory optimization, cross platform game saves, and all that cool stuff. Outcome: The audience will understand the independent gaming industry and how they can use Python to break into the industry, as I share my journey. There will also be components of source code walkthrough, but will be more of an overview than a step by step tutorial due to the scope of the talk.