Ren'Py vs TADS

Ren'Py is a free visual novel engine for making interactive stories and life simulation games with words, images, and sounds. Its script language handles visual-novel writing, while Python can be used for more complex game logic. Default games include menus, automatic saves, rollback, predictive image loading, and mouse, keyboard, or gamepad controls. Creators can customize screens and styles using the screen language and Python. The launcher builds Windows, Mac, and Linux games from any of those desktop systems. Ren'Py also supports Android export and can package games for WebAssembly browsers, though web support is beta and lacks networking and multithreading. It targets Windows 10 or later, macOS 10.10 or later, Linux x86_64 or Arm, Android 5.0 or later, and iOS 11 or later. Building for iOS requires a Mac and Xcode, and that support remains a work in progress. The engine is free for commercial and non-commercial use; most is MIT-licensed, with some LGPL components whose terms distributors must meet.

TADS is a free authoring system for creating interactive fiction. Its language resembles C, C++, Java and JavaScript, with runtime typing, closures, garbage collection and multiple inheritance. The Adv3 library supplies a game-world model, conversation system and parser with about 150 predefined verbs. TADS compiles games into portable byte code that runs on systems with a TADS interpreter.

Its multimedia interpreters support graphics, animation, music, sound effects, hyperlinks, proportional fonts and formatted text. Games built for Web Play can run in a browser using JavaScript, CSS, DOM, Ajax and HTML 5; the standard library also allows multiple players to join a Web game session. Command-line tools are available across platforms. Windows Workbench provides a graphical environment for editing, compiling, running and debugging, but that environment is only available on Windows. TADS lists Linux, macOS, web and Windows among its platforms. It is free software with published source code, and authors may distribute or sell games they make with it. The listed current release is version 3.1.3.