renpy-mcp

A toolkit for making visual novels — by hand, with a browser-based editor, or with help from an AI assistant.

Ren’Py is the engine that runs visual novels like Doki Doki Literature Club and Slay the Princess. It’s free and open source, but its scripting language is intimidating if you’ve never written code. This project exists so you don’t have to.

There are three ways you can use it:

1. Just the editor. A browser-based GUI with a Story Map, Choice View, Scene Inspector, and visual Composers for screens, stages, and menus. Click around; edit dialogue; preview the game in Ren’Py. No AI, no command line.
2. The editor + an AI helper. Run the editor in one window, run an AI assistant (Claude Code, Cursor, hermes-agent) in another, both pointed at the same project. Tell the AI what scene you want; watch the GUI update as it edits.
3. Pure AI assistant. Skip the GUI; let the AI do everything in the terminal. Fastest path from “I have an idea for a visual novel” to “there’s a runnable game I can play.”

If options 2 or 3 sound foreign, see QUICKSTART.md — it walks through “I’ve never used any of this” to “I can preview my own VN” in about 15 minutes.

For the under-the-hood story (80 MCP tools, four tiers, a single guarded write pipeline that keeps every edit lint-clean), keep reading.

What it looks like

Story Map — every label in your project as a draggable card. Kind badges (start / scene / choice / ending), drag-to-connect ports for new edges, persisted positions. Built on native pointer events; no React-Flow.

Scene Inspector — opens when you click any node. Renders the label’s ordered event stream (scene, play, show, say, pause, set, jump, …) as typed cards, each with the source line number. The forms at the top edit background / music / dialogue; the Insert event button at the bottom drops in pause / setvar / show / with / flash events.

Choice View — derived player perspective. Every top-level menu: becomes a card listing its choices as pills with if-guard badges. Click a target to jump back to its label in the Story Map.

Library — one tabbed surface for the project’s reusable pieces: Characters (cast cards with display name + accent colour), Assets (backgrounds, sprites, audio), Variables (default values), Screens (screen blocks + imagemaps), and Mini-Games (screen scaffolds). Each tab edits via the matching Tier 3 tool; agents call the same tools directly.

Localization — per-language translation coverage from game/tl//. Click a row to load its stale-string list; the “+ Scaffold” button runs renpy.sh translate to bootstrap a new language.