a-certain-autumn-evening

A certain autumn evening.

A short halloween-themed visual novel with light horror vibes. Written both as a celebration for Kate's autumn release and to serve as a demo for publishing Ren'Py games in Kate.

If you want to play this game you should rather look at the Itch.io page: https://qteatime.itch.io/a-certain-autumn-evening

Building

You'll need Ren'Py 8.1 or more recent. The build requires manual steps and cannot be fully automated currently.

1. Copy this folder to your Ren'Py projects folder and set your current project to a-certain-autumn-evening.

2. In the Ren'Py launcher, select Web (beta) under Actions. Then click Build Web Application. This will generate an autumn-1.0-dists folder at the same level a-certain-autumn-evening is at.

3. Copy kate.json, kate-autumn-thumbnail.png, and LICENCE.txt from this folder to autumn-1.0-dists/autumn-1.0-web; the Ren'Py launcher does not copy these files automatically for web builds.

4. Build a Kate cartridge with Kart by running the following in the command line, while in the autumn-1.0-dists folder:

   $ kart kate.json --output autumn-1.0.kart

   Note that Windows has restricted security rules for unsigned PowerShell scripts.. The $ is not part of the command, it's just there to indicate you should not run the command as an administrator user.

Optional: optimising startup time

Because Ren'Py 8 uses a different Python version in the web runtime and the native runtime, games generated by the launcher will need to be recompiled every time they're started. The Ren'Py documentation recommends manually adding the web-based bytecode file to your game.

You'll need to re-compile the web build and generate the cartridge again after doing this.

Optional: generating a Kate-based web distribution

If you're not uploading the Ren'Py web build directly to a web server or hosting platform, like Itch.io, you can still make your cartridge playable on a regular web browser by packaging it with the Kate emulator --- all additional Kate features, such as configurable controls, video recording, and save data management will work in that case.

To generate such web distribution you can run the following command from the command line, in the same folder where your KART file is:

$ kate-dist autumn-1.0.kart --type web

This will create a dist folder containing all necessary files. You can then zip the contents of this folder and upload to any service that accepts static HTML files, like Itch.io.

Licence

Code is released under the MIT licence. Included thumbnail and images are released under a Creative Commons 4.0 licence.