Make Visual Novels! RenPy Text Effects & Shader Pack!

Make Visual Novels! Ren'Py Text Effects & Shader Pack!

Stylize your text in your visual novel with this pack of special text effects and shaders! This pack was designed to help give your text an extra bite. These effects can be used anywhere text can be displayed and tagged inside of Ren'Py, whether it a title screen, chapter card, any part of your UI, or even your character's dialogue boxes. It also comes with a font gallery to help you quickly test fonts, their styles, and any text shaders you have in your game files.  It also comes packaged with over 50  fonts that are free to use, even for commercial projects!

Consider donating!  Proceeds from this pack will be used to fund future packs and events for the community!

An appeal from Stella, the creator of this pack:

Make Visual Novels exists to push visual novel creators to new heights.   We rely heavily on our sponsors and contributors to afford the events, competitions, and resoruces we make and maintain for the community. Your contributions to this shader pack will be used to support the community's events, like the DevTalks speaker events and new packs!    Lets make awesome visual novels together!

Instructions

Just drop the included files into your RenPy project folder next to the rest of your scripts.  Once added, press Alt + F to bring up the font gallery to browse the fonts in your game's fonts folder with no additional set up required!  

What's in it?

1. 20 Preset effects in the form of shaders that you can just slap on any body of text without worrying about parameters. (Inside MVNTSV1.rpy)  Simply use the {shader}{/shader} tag around the text you want to stylize!
2. A font gallery to text styles, fonts and shaders that adds new fonts, styles, and shaders as they're added to your project, just make sure your shader declarations happen before this one gets loaded in.
3. Spaghetti code, which I'll clean up, eventually. (Pretty much everywhere)
4. 50 something (idk like 59?) different fonts, some of which having multiple styles, each of which has a license file so that you (and I, tbh) stay compliant with the license terms when you use them. 
5. Visual Novel Propaganda is in the video some time, hidden in plain sight.

What makes it awesome?

1. The glow effect makes text give off either a little, or a lot of glow!
2. The gradient effect allows your text to adopt a gradient to your specifications!  Great for distinguishing character text!
3. The gradientglow effect combines the above two, and the glow has a gradient too!  Whoa!
4. The hollowglow effect is the EVIL version of gradient glow, hollowed out from all the years of living in its sibling's shadow.
5. The colorsweep effect makes a ray of color pass through your text.  Great for shiny flair!
6. The goldsweep effect creates a large gold and yellow shimmer through your text.  Great for gaudy flair!
7. The prey effect causes a large red 'something' to pass under the text. Whatever it is, it's on the hunt.
8. It found you!  Use the redalert effect to pulse a WARNING effect in your text.
9. The reverse effect and flip effect prints your text backwards and upside down!
10. The cthonic effect creates a cryptic array of glyphs using the characters given to it. 
11. Burn the evidence away with the burn line of effects.  BurningForBigText, BurningForSmallText, BlueBurnBig and BlueBurnSmall to produce fire effects on your text.
12. The GhostWriter effect creates a spooky alter-image of your text, similar to popular horror film and show text.
13. The AdjustableBurnDemo effect is the effect I used to create that rainbow color fire.  With the right know how, you can customize any of these shaders to change their style!
14. textshadow and 3Dtext gives your text visual features common in most art programs and engines.
15. The static effect makes your text have a choppy haze of static, because someone will ask for it if I don't put it in.  You know who you are.
16. The RedactedSimple effect washes out any text its applied to with a solid color, great for building intrique with censored words and letters.

(Update 2/18): There's now also:

• RedactedGlitch, a jittery, glitchy and unreadable censor shader.
• CthonicJitter and CthonicGlitch, the cthonic shader, with movement.
• CthonicGlitchColor, a pretty cool variation of the above that overlays the normal text overtop of colored glitches of the same text.
• Each of these shaders has a number of knobs you can adjust to tweak the aesthetic and animation.

(Update 2/25): Download and include MVNTextShaderTags.rpy for these changes.

• All shaders included here can now be called via tags using their default settings. E.g {ghostwrite]Boo!{/ghostwrite}
• Sharply reduces script bloating via shader customization. (turns "{shader=BurningForBigText:u__end_color=#660066FF:u__glow_color=#440044FF:u__glow_radius=1.0} into {purple}, making your script easier to read and edit.
• There are two included example templates to allow you to easily customize and reuse the customized effects as tags.  {blackout} uses RedactedSimple to censor words with a black bar instead of a red bar.  {purple} creates a purple flame effect.

(Update 3/15) Download MVNTSV1 and MVNTextShaderTags.rpy to get the update:

• Added HightlightSimple.  Throws a highlight effect behind your text without altering the original. Includes a default tag of {hl]{/hl} to use.
• Added HighlightRecolor.  Throws a highlight effect behind your text and allows you to adjust the color of the text without needing multiple effects or tags.  Includes the default tag of {hlrc}{/hlrc} to use.

This is the Make Visual Novel Assets! jam initial release of this pack.  Future editions will standardize the naming convention(I got sloppy), supply documentation, clean up some redundancies, and make altering variables in the shaders easier, and may or may not expand on the font gallery feature.

Terms of Use:

You may use any part of this pack for commercial or non-commercial purposes in relation to creating an entertainment experience(e.g, game, visual novel, interactive fiction, etc), but you may NOT redistribute MVNFontPack.rpy or MVNTSV1.rpy individually or together, alone or within a bundle or collection of asset, in whole or in part, modified or unmodified without explicit written permission.

Note:

Each font included with this package has its own license agreement contained in the folder with the font files, all of which permit redistribution of the associated fonts, commercial use and non-commercial use.  Be sure to read the full license for the fonts you wish to use!

Consider donating!  Proceeds from this pack will be used to fund more packs and resources!