Tom Rothamel

Tom Rothamel, known online as PyTom, is the original author and lead developer of Ren'Py, the open source visual novel engine first released in 2004. IFWiki lists him as the developer of the engine, which it describes as a free, cross-platform authoring system for visual novels that uses a custom scripting language with room for Python code. In an October 2015 interview for the Podcast.__init__ series he described himself as an embedded systems engineer who spends his free time working on Ren'Py, a long-running project written in Python that lets authors build interactive fiction for desktop and mobile platforms. The engine is released under the MIT license, and IFWiki notes that it is still widely used and in active development, with games such as Doki Doki Literature Club and Slay the Princess built on it.