Helloooo!
Thank you for your thoughts and feedback about your user experience, comparing it with Ren'py!
@Wait times - Sorry about that! ^^V The wait times are there for a purpose, or rather, by the limitations and bugs I had encountered and fixed up from way before. :) I can look at this sometime down the road and see if there's a way to speed things up!
I had looked at Ren'py before when I was about to start working on this game and I've no doubt, it's very good software for this sort of thing!
But it wasn't just about putting out visual novels quickly that I needed to consider there were other things. At the time I was creating the game, I wanted a mobile version of the game, but I didn't have enough experience in developing this before, just the foresight, so I didn't know what will and what won't work - the technical traps were there but I couldn't see them clearly. I didn't have much time to figure things out.
Ren'py didn't exactly work with mobile phones outright, while I *think* I know there's a way to get it on the phone, there were multiple technical barriers for me to overcome - on top of learning Python, so I couldn't really figure it out on the get-go before.
Ren'py, coming in as a complete package was like WordPress for website development, seemed pretty easy and a great thing to get into, unfortunately, digging into Ren'py's technical stuff confused me (while I've read it's easy to get into, I didn't know how to use Python), so I decided to learn how to make something similar to learn how this stuff works - that works on the web. Fortunately (or unfortunately) for me, I had to do some work that's closer to re-inventing the wheel!
Ren'py also doesn't have the animations I wanted on the get go. While this wasn't exactly the case for what we're using now, I still had to make this work myself. I *think* I know there's a way to get those animations working in Ren'py, but unfortunately, there are again, multiple technical barriers that really prevents me from moving forward with this idea.
It's not that I don't like Ren'py, in fact, I think it's an amazing piece of software and PyTom really did a great job at making advanced Visual Novel development available for almost everyone. I just had other things to consider, on top of not knowing Python, that had me looking for other solutions.
There were a ton of bugs encountered, fixed, workarounds, and compromises to be made, and in the end, I was able to make it work :) it's not perfect, and I'm not a genius programmer myself. There are other advantages/disadvantages that I've come across, but at least this gives you an insight to what I went through. Given if I were a Python programmer, I would've picked up Ren'py without much hesitation!
I'll also give some thoughts on the Ren'py conveniences you mentioned. There are some things I may not be able to do like reverse playback, and stuff that aren't possible because of how I designed our VN engine.
To the players reading this, shout out to PyTom on Patreon!