Screen language is the way you describe to Ren’Py what a screen should look like and how it should act. It’s a description of how the screen looks and acts – screens don’t execute code line-by-line like labels, but are read and run more like one big chunk. As such, screens aren’t a place where you will put game logic like $ ashwin_points += 1
. Rather, you can tie those sorts of things to occur on events, like when the player presses a button, or when a timer has finished counting down to 0.
Screen language is somewhat comparable to something like CSS, in that it’s designed almost entirely around assigning properties to various screen elements, like text, images, and buttons, in order to dictate things like how they look, where they are on-screen, and what they do when interacted with.
You can use screen language to modify the existing menu screens or make your own new ones, to add gameplay screens such as a route-select screen, or a free-roam map screen, and to add minigames like a puzzle screen or a point-and-click investigation section.
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