Today’s blog post is
dedicated to a less regular form of storytelling: the nonlinear kind. Usually,
a story begins at one point, runs its course, and ends at another. There might
be a bit of going backward and forward, to bring in action immediately and explain
how it came to that later one, but there’s one story and every time you read
the book or watch the movie, it’s going to be the same story. Then the ‘Choose
Your Own Adventure’ and ‘Fighting Fantasy’ books happened. Then computers
happened and the Japanese started making Visual Novels. In doing so, they all
were bringing in a nonlinear way of telling stories.
No matter whether you
make use of a programming-language-based system like Ren’Py or the Choice
of Games engine or an outright software like the Visual
Novel Maker or the TyranoBuilder
Visual Novel Studio, you will always have to design your story differently
to deal with the mechanics of the kind of story you’ve agreed to tell. Unless
you’re making a Kinetic Novel, there will be at least one choice within the
game and thus at least two different paths the story can take. The Choice of
Games engine is specifically designed for a lot of choices and gameplay closer
to the traditional FF books, right down to keeping an eye on stats or money.
Choices should always
matter, too, just having two different lines after a player made the choice
usually makes them rather unhappy with you, because you do not deliver on the
promise of them having an impact on how the story plays out. Two lines do not
an impact make. Because choices should always matter, you can’t just write a
linear story and put in a few choices where nothing really changes the course
of the story. You need to design your story as something nonlinear from the
very beginning. Actually, that makes a modern Visual Novel even harder to
design than the good old FF or CYOA books. Usually, those only have one good
ending and several bad (in the FF books even deadly) ones. A good Visual Novel
has several good endings - but also a few bad ones, because the player is
allowed to screw up, be it by accident or by choice.
Personally, I have
more experience with the FF books, because I grew up in 1980s Germany and they
came over from England, whereas the CYOA books were produced and sold in the US
and found their way to the German market much later. The FF series also is
older and was, apparently, created in an effort to show a journalist how
role-playing games worked. At any rate, “The Warlock of Firetop Mountain” was,
which later on became the first FF book.
As a matter of fact,
the FF books are less nonlinear than modern Visual Novels. They are made up of
a row of clusters, each of which is, essentially, a chapter of the story. You
can move around a lot in one chapter and the chance to die is always high
(especially since RPG-type fights also feature in the books), but there are
core scenes you will have to hit in order to advance to the next cluster. And
there’s always only one good ending (where you win), not several, as is
standard for Visual Novels. There are several bad endings, though.
Visual Novels are
characterized, apart from being novels, through being a visual medium. There is
text, a lot of it in some of them, but there’s also a lot of graphics going
into one Visual Novel. Characters, backgrounds, CGs (specific character
graphics which are a full picture and often available in a gallery after
unlocking), sometimes also objects or special effects. There’s also music and
sound effects and, in high-quality Visual Novels, also voice acting and,
sometimes, animated movies.
And, as mentioned,
there’s choices. Those are what sets a Visual Novel apart from a graphics novel
(even though most Visual Novels have a decidedly anime-oriented look, it’s not
a necessity). During the course of playing/reading the Visual Novel, the player
makes choices which in turn influence the way the story develops. Depending on
the kind of novel, the choices can be more or less frequent and the
consequences can be more or less severe. There’s otome Visual Novels, often
called dating sims, because the goal is for the main character to date
different love interests and end up with them - so there is a good ending for
each love interest and often also a bad ending for all or, at any rate, a bad
ending for winding up alone. There’s life sims, where the player also has to
keep up their main character’s general life with learning skills and earning
money. And there’s other Visual Novels which might include RPG elements or
mystery solving or other things.
In an otome Visual
Novel or a life sim, choices are very frequent, so the player has a chance to
add to their stats (relationships, skills, money, etc.). Usually, a player has
to plot out their week in a life sim regularly, deciding what to do on which
day (usually 2-3 things a day), which will then influence them (stress is a
regular factor for those who work too much, but skills can only be raised
through work and money is often needed as well). The art of getting through a
life sim is to balance out the different actions and (mostly) focusing on one love
interest early on. In an otome, the player usually gets a lot of interaction
with all possible love interests and, since relationships can only change through
interaction, has to make a lot of decisions there, often during conversations
or regular situations, such as dates.
It is possible to make
a Visual Novel with only one or two choices overall, but those usually aren’t
popular with the players. Players like to have a lot of different endings and a
lot of different endings demand a lot of choices. Those come naturally with
simulations, where the player is supposed to make a lot of decisions, but can
also very well come with the regular story. They demand, however, a very
different kind of plotting. Freeplane is a very
good tool for that (and it’s free), Scriver and Campfire can be helpful, if
you’re ready to pay money.
More about the
plotting in part two - stay tuned!
For this first part, let’s say
that it can be very interesting to read a Visual Novel, if it’s well-made, but
making it is a lot harder and takes a lot more work than writing a regular one.
No comments:
Post a Comment