The Challenge: Ren'Py and Web Browsers

Jan 2026 Update: We reduced the build size to under 150 MB. It should play smoothly in most web browsers now.

October 2025

We have published several Ren'Py games. There is a lot to like about the platform. And we're very happy to see that it now supports game builds for the web browser.

However, there are some challenges to make the great artwork from Open Worlds Play look great on your screen!

We want to avoid the "pixelating" of images that can occur when a game image is still loading. When this happens, Ren'Py delivers a low-res copy of the image briefly, until the full image has downloaded and then loaded by your browser. This results in a brief "pixelating" of the image.

There are a few ways to handle this but so far they have not worked well for us. For now, what seems to work best is to tell the system to load all of the game images into RAM. This works great because RAM is fast.

But, this means that the game includes a single, large file of images. This large file must be downloaded and retained in memory while playing the game.

This large image file for Open Worlds Play is around 400MB

(Update: the image file size has been reduced to 123MB.)

We hope you can play Open Worlds Play very soon.

(Update: You can play Open Worlds Play in your browser on most computers now.)

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