Animation and Transformation Language, commonly abbreviated as ATL, is what Ren’Py calls the way it lets you script transformations and animations to use in your game. The most common thing referred to when people mention ATL is the transform statement, which allows you to declare an animation or position of some kind and then show images, text, or other screen elements at that transform so they animate or display in a particular position.
It can be used for all sorts of things, from moving your characters around on-screen, to combining several frames together with timing to create an animation, to creating moving backgrounds, or animating UI jiggles and size changes when buttons are hovered, to name a few examples.
The Ren’Py documentation on ATL can be found here: https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/atl.html
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