Short answer: When you start a fresh project (rather than importing a Ren'Py one), you pick one of two starting templates. Blank gives you a single scene with one backdrop and one narration line - just enough to open and play. Basic sample gives you a short two-scene story with a character, background music, a sound effect, and a branching choice, so you can see the core pieces working together. Blank is the default selection. (A separate idea - booting every project with a title/main-menu scaffold - is planned but not yet built.)
The two starting templates
When you create a project from scratch, the new-project dialog asks you to "start with" one of two templates:
- Blank - a single scene titled "Start here" containing one placeholder backdrop and one narration line. There is no character, no music, and no choice. The narrator speaks one line so the project opens and runs immediately. This is best if you already know the structure you want and would rather build from nothing. Blank is the pre-selected default.
- Basic sample - a two-scene story ("Welcome" then "About this template"). It includes a character (Vee) with a sprite, a background music track, a one-shot sound-effect cue, and a single branching choice that sets a variable and changes Vee's reply. It exists to demonstrate narration, a character, audio, and a choice working together; everything in it is editable or deletable.
Both templates are intentionally lightweight starting points, not finished projects. Edit anything - the sample is just a walkthrough you can tear down.
What's inside each template
Blank
- One scene: "Start here"
- One placeholder backdrop
- One narrator line
Basic sample
- Two scenes: "Welcome" and "About this template"
- A character, Vee, shown with a sprite
- A background music track and a one-shot fanfare sound effect
- One branching choice that sets a
moodvariable, with a different reply per option
Importing instead of starting fresh
The same new-project flow also lets you import an existing Ren'Py project rather than picking a template. An import builds your starting scenes from the uploaded source instead of from one of these templates.
Planned: a default main-menu scaffold
A separate idea on the roadmap is to have every new project boot with a built-in title / main-menu scaffold (a Start / Continue / Settings screen) instead of opening straight into a scene. This is deferred and not built - new projects today start from the Blank or Basic sample template described above, not from a main menu. The scaffold is tracked for a future sprint once the quest/onboarding system has more data; the verbs it would need do not exist in Folio yet.