Game engines have largely become synonymous with the production of certain game genres, and creating games outside those genres is at the least cumbersome if not outright impossible to do. This study demonstrates how the affordances and constraints of particular engines, working in consort with the creative community around a particular engine, shape both game engine use as well as the game engine thinking that determines what is and is not possible. It does so by looking at a game project developed using the Ren’py engine. Using Fiadotau and Bogost as conceptual springboards, we focus on our decision to use Ren’py and how that decision shaped the game and our production processes. In addition to discussing the engine itself, we also look at how the practices and discourse of the Ren’py community—most notably represented on the engine’s official forums—also shaped our work.

游戏引擎在很大程度上已经成为某些游戏类型的代名词，并且在这些类型之外创建游戏至少是繁琐的，即使不是绝对不可能做到的。这项研究表明，特定引擎的承受能力和约束条件如何与特定引擎周围的创意社区合作，塑造了游戏引擎的使用以及决定什么是可能和不可能的游戏引擎的思维。通过查看使用Ren'py引擎开发的游戏项目来做到这一点。使用Fiadotau和Bogost作为概念性的跳板，我们专注于使用Ren'py的决策以及该决策如何影响游戏和生产过程。除了讨论引擎本身之外，