A splash screen is an image or movie that appears when the game is starting up and before it goes to the menu. Usually these are logos or intro videos. The "splashscreen" label automatically plays before the main menu. However, the same code applies to a splashscreen located anywhere in your game under a different label.
To add a textual splashscreen to your game, insert code like the below anywhere in your script files (as long as it is not itself in a block):
label splashscreen:
scene black
with Pause(1)
show text "American Bishoujo Presents..." with dissolve
with Pause(2)
hide text with dissolve
with Pause(1)
return
Here's another example of a splashscreen, this time using an image and sound:
image splash = "splash.png"
label splashscreen:
scene black
with Pause(1)
play sound "ping.ogg"
show splash with dissolve
with Pause(2)
scene black with dissolve
with Pause(1)
return
And finally, with a movie file:
label splashscreen:
$ renpy.movie_cutscene('movie.ogv')
return
A presplash is an image shown while Ren'py is reading the scripts and launching the game. To show such and image while the engine is starting up, create an image file named presplash.png (or presplash.jpg), and save it into the game directory.
Instead of a static image, it is also possible to show a progress bar indicating the progress until the engine has loaded. This replaces the regular presplash image and will automatically take precedence if both are supplied.
The progress bar is themeable and requires you to supply two files in either PNG or JPG format:
The way this works is that Ren'Py will first show presplash_background.png and subsequently will render presplash_foreground.png on top, revealing it from left to right as the loading progresses.
The theming of the bar is completely up to you, but you can find two examples of how things could look below: