I woke up today and ported Tracks in Snow to Ren'Py 8 finally!
Buddy let me tell you, it was easy except for 1 major problem.
None of it was actually any of the ridiculous code I have written for this project, all of that is portable across python 2 and 3. No, the problem here was character encoding.
And if you're used to python, everything by default is utf-8. Ren'Py 7 has this mostly implicit, a few things won't be utf-8 but it handles most of that behind the scenes. Ren'Py 8 lets you have more control over encoding which is good, the issue is if you do what I did, that is, parse all your written text into Ren'Py using its file_open function.
The default encoding of this file is not text but rather bytes. I assume this was some standardization thing because I had run into problems before where I had to convert certain bits of text to unicode.
But anyways, I got to come with a problem no one had seen before and then solve it after some folks played rubberduck for me.
And I do actually like that you can tell Ren'Py which encoding to use.
Just, like with all software, figuring out the problem in the first place is the real work.