Assignment

Write a short Ren'Py visual novel and the image-prompt manifest for its art. It must run unchanged in a fresh project.

Premise

It is one evening in 2045 in the life of the world's richest man. During it, an ordinary thing from before his fortune returns with the emotional force that Citizen Kane gives its central object—without borrowing its plot or imagery.

Invent the man, the source of his wealth, the setting, the evening, and what surfaces. Avoid the obvious penthouse or high-rise-office version of this premise.

Write in your own voice. Keep individual dialogue or narration strings readable in a three-line text box; escape internal quotation marks or use typographic quotes.

Legibility

Assume the viewer knows nothing and cannot rewind. They see one text box at a time, in order, advancing by click. You have a dozen or so panels to land an entire world, so explain it. Plain narration that tells the viewer where they are and who is speaking is not a failure of craft here; it is the floor the rest of the film stands on. Be atmospheric after the viewer is oriented, not instead.

• # PANEL 1 carries no dialogue. Establish the place, the date and the situation in narration before anyone speaks.
• Say plainly, in narration and early, how he made his money. A metaphor for the fortune can follow, but it cannot be the first the viewer hears of it.
• Every character who speaks is identified — who they are, and what they are to him — in the panel where they first speak. A named voice the viewer cannot place is a viewer who has stopped following.
• Name at most three invented things: companies, products, systems, places. Explain each in the sentence that introduces it.
• No two things in the film share a name.

By panel 3, the viewer must know who he is, when and roughly where this is, and what he is doing. By the end, they must understand what resurfaced and why it matters.

Branching and art

• Use 2 or 3 menu: blocks and create 3 or 4 endings. Every menu option jumps to a defined label, and every ending terminates the game. The endings must differ in meaning, not merely wording. A twist is optional.
• The visual style is fixed: hand-penciled monochrome line art made with pencil and paper. State this in the manifest style and keep every asset prompt consistent with it.
• The protagonist appears in most panels. Explain in the ledger whether and how you use visual references between assets to keep him consistent.

Technical specification

Create game/script.rpy for Ren'Py 8.x, Python 3, 1920×1080.

• 12–18 panels, each marked # PANEL 1, # PANEL 2, and so on without gaps.
• At least three named transform blocks, all used; at least two transitions, including one other than dissolve or fade; and one line displayed while something continues moving.
• 8–16 images total.
• One file: declarations, characters, transforms, and labels all belong in script.rpy.
• Image names must be single tokens and exactly match the manifest id and images/<id>.png filename.
• PNGs under images/ only. No audio, external paths, network access, renpy.file, or assets absent from the manifest.

Do not use the word "Rosebud", a sled, a snow globe, a deathbed framing, or a twist in which he is dead, simulated, or a copy.

Output

Respond with exactly these sections.

The pitch

Two lines: the film and its choices.

The script

One fenced renpy block containing the complete script.rpy.

The art manifest

One fenced json block:

{
  "style": "One paragraph appended to every prompt: hand-penciled monochrome treatment plus the choices that hold the film together.",
  "assets": [
    { "id": "bg_terrace", "kind": "bg", "aspect": "16:9", "prompt": "What to draw." },
    { "id": "man_still", "kind": "sprite", "aspect": "9:16", "ref": "man_neutral", "prompt": "What to draw." }
  ]
}

Every declared image appears exactly once in assets, and every asset is declared. kind is bg, sprite, or cg; aspect is one of 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 3:2, 2:3, 4:3, 3:4; a ref must point to an earlier asset with no ref of its own. The JSON block contains no prose or comments.

The ledger

• Panels: number of # PANEL markers.
• Images: number of assets.
• Transforms: defined and used.
• What he lost: one sentence on the resurfacing thing and why it outweighs the fortune.
• Consistency plan: one sentence.

The technique

One paragraph on the structural choice that makes this a film rather than a slideshow.

Both the script and manifest are run through their respective pipelines.