I'm thinking about another possible Ren'Py experiment in game design. (That's the same engine that the Pha'Ret thing is in.) It looks like there's a market for interactive stories in this "visual novel" format, but with a division between (1) basically pure text, (2) three or more busty anime babes, and (3) remarkably detailed RPG statistics. I wouldn't want to make some excruciatingly complex RPG and shoehorn that into a format meant mainly for conversation trees. On the other paw, I want to see meaningful decisions in a game rather than a story where you read through page after page of text and the only interactivity is that you can request tea versus coffee. And obviously I'm a writer and not a visual artist.

For a second test, I want a scenario with a little conversation in it. I've been thinking in terms of a battle system and a wasteland scavenger scenario (like I built in Twine once). But a "recover from being turned into a centaur by banging around a magic school" scenario might help practice with conversation too.

I've also thought about using Unity for this but that has its own advantages and drawbacks. If what I want is primarily a story then Unity is probably overkill -- but it does allow for some greater flexibility. Ren'Py assumes that the entire game is basically one conversation that might be broken into scenes, rather than a game that has conversations in it.

My goal for this line of thinking is to try using Ren'Py to make a game slightly more complex than "Pha'Ret", featuring conversation, and testing out an unusual type of conversation tree. Probably similar to  skiesofsilver's "First Light Hotel".