Assignment

Write a short visual novel in Ren'Py — one script file, plus a manifest of the image prompts that will be used to draw its art later. It has to run the first time.

Premise

An evening in the life of the richest man in the world, in 2045.

Over the course of that evening he experiences a moment in the sense that Citizen Kane means: something small and ordinary from before the money surfaces. Reimagined for a hypermodern future rather than borrowed from the film.

Use that setup as a springboard for your imagination, and a full self-contained story that intrigues and delights the viewer. Who he is, where he is, how he got rich, what the evening consists of, what surfaces and how, what happens next, and whether there is a twist at the end (or not) are all for you to decide. Think outside the box — go for the kind of ideas that true artists with a unique vision would come up with.

Uniqueness is rewarded in the final grade. A penthouse or a high-rise office might be the first thing you think of when you hear "richest man in the world," but it will make your story feel clichéd next to something more surprising.

Branching

More than one choice.

• 2 or 3 menu: blocks.
• 3 or 4 distinct endings.

Legibility

Assume the viewer knows nothing and cannot rewind. They see one text box at a time, in order, advancing by click.

By the end of panel 3 a first-time viewer should be able to say who he is, roughly when and where this is, and what he is doing this evening. By the end they should be able to say what surfaced and why it mattered to him.

Write in your own voice. Do not reuse this brief's phrasing in your script.

Be creative, artistic. Show, don't tell.

On the page

A dialogue or narration line is a Ren'Py string, so a quotation mark inside it ends the string early. Escape it as " or use typographic quotes — "She types \"you up.\" She holds the backspace." renders correctly and so does "She types “you up.” ...". Dropping the quotation marks instead, or substituting dashes for them, makes the sentence read as a typo on screen. Quoted speech inside narration should look like quoted speech.

{i}...{/i} italicizes and {w=0.5} pauses mid-line. The text box is a fixed panel roughly three lines deep at this resolution; past about two hundred characters a line runs out of box. Break it into two.

The art

The style is fixed and not yours to choose: hand-penciled, monochrome, traditional line art created entirely with pencil and paper. Every image in the film is that. Your style paragraph must specify it, and every individual prompt has to be consistent with it.

Everything else about the look — what is drawn, framing, how heavy the line is, how much white is left — is yours.

The image model has no seed: two calls with the same prompt produce different pictures, and he appears in most panels. The manifest lets an asset name another asset as a visual reference; generate the reference first, then pass it along with the new prompt. Use it or don't, and say which in the ledger.

Technical specification

One file, game/script.rpy, targeting Ren'Py 8.x, Python 3, 1920x1080. Dropped into a fresh project, it runs start to finish without modifications to options.rpy or gui.rpy.

Structure

• 12 to 18 panels. A panel is one beat — a scene or character change plus the lines that play over it. Mark each with a comment on its own line: # PANEL 1, # PANEL 2, numbered from 1 with no gaps. These are counted mechanically.
• 2 or 3 menu: blocks, 3 or 4 endings. Every menu option jumps to a label. Every ending terminates the game.
• Motion. At least three named transform blocks, all of them used. At least two distinct transitions, at least one of which is neither dissolve nor fade. At least once, something continues moving while a line is on screen.
• 8 to 16 images total. Branching costs images; budget for it.

House rules

• One file. Characters, transforms, image declarations and labels all live in script.rpy.
• Image names are single tokens: image man_tired = "images/man_tired.png". No multi-part names, no attribute syntax. The image name, the filename and the manifest id must be the same string, because a downstream program matches them without guessing.
• PNG files under images/ only. No audio — no sound files exist and none will be added.
• No external paths, no network access, no renpy.file, no assets absent from your manifest.

Exclusions

Direct lifts from the source. Using them counts against the result:

• The word "Rosebud".
• A sled.
• A snow globe.
• Opening or closing on his deathbed, his dying breath, or his last words.
• The twist is that he is dead already, or in a simulation, or a copy of himself.

Output format

Respond with exactly these five sections, using these headings.

The pitch

Two lines: what the film is, and what the choices are.

The script

Exactly one fenced renpy block containing the whole of script.rpy and nothing else.

The art manifest

Exactly one fenced json block, matching this shape exactly:

{
  "style": "One paragraph, appended to every prompt below. It must specify the hand-penciled monochrome treatment, and whatever else holds the images together as one work.",
  "assets": [
    {
      "id": "bg_terrace",
      "kind": "bg",
      "aspect": "16:9",
      "prompt": "What to draw. Written for an image model."
    },
    {
      "id": "man_still",
      "kind": "sprite",
      "aspect": "9:16",
      "ref": "man_neutral",
      "prompt": "..."
    }
  ]
}

• id — matches an image declaration in the script exactly. Every declared image appears here once; every entry here is declared in the script. The two lists must be identical.
• kind — bg, sprite or cg.
• aspect — one of 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, 3:2, 2:3, 4:3, 3:4.
• ref — optional; the id of another asset to supply as a visual reference. It must appear earlier in the array than the asset using it, and a referenced asset cannot itself have a ref.

No prose or comments inside the block. It is parsed.

The ledger

• Panels: the number of # PANEL markers in your script.
• Images: the number of assets in your manifest.
• Transforms: how many you defined, and how many you used.
• What he lost: one sentence naming the thing that surfaces and why it outweighs the fortune.
• Consistency plan: one sentence on how the manifest keeps his appearance stable across panels.

The technique

One paragraph on the single structural Ren'Py decision that makes this play as a film rather than a slideshow.

Both halves are run

Your script will be run through Ren'Py, and your manifest through an image generation pipeline. Both fail loudly.