Visual Novels Or Nonlinear Storytelling Pt. 2

Last week, we had a blog post about Visual Novels and nonlinear storytelling already and this week, we will go into more detail as far as plotting and mechanics are concerned. After all, there’s more to a Visual Novel than just one, always repeating story.

Nonlinear plots don’t mean that you branch out completely with every decision and are left with a tree of ten or twenty different stories in the end. You can very well pull several threads made by decisions together again at some point (this is most evident when it comes to relationship changes in an otome, those are about earning or losing points, they don’t make a huge difference each), but they must feel and read differently for the player. If the only difference is two lines and there’s no relationship status or suchlike coming with it, players will be disappointed. What you will want to write, is a story with several different endings, some good and some bad, and with several branches which can (and most likely will) come together again. Unlike the classic ‘Fighting Fantasy’ gameplay, though, there isn’t just one way to really get through (the shortest route without ambling along), but there’s several routes which the player can and, most likely, will take. Most players who buy and play a Visual Novel expect several reads through the novel, because they want to take all routes, find all endings, and unlock all pictures for the gallery. This usually reflects on the price of the Visual Novel as well - a lot of high-quality content (CGs, voice-acting, etc.) and a lot of routes and endings will come at a much higher price. That doesn’t mean, however, that a cheap or even free Visual Novel with well-made routes and choices can’t be a lot of fun to read and reread a lot. It’s just that a cheap one will get more leeway when it comes to things like the number and impact of choices.

Nonlinear plotting doesn’t just come in when you are working on a Visual Novel. Fighting-Fantasy-type and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-type books have seen a revival in recent years, with software which makes it easy to turn them into e-books for more sales and easier self-publishing. Then there’s the whole gaming industry where stories, if featured at all, have to be nonlinear to allow for players’ choices. So there’s a lot of uses for nonlinear stories - including the classic pen-and-paper tabletop role-playing games. Let’s have a look at the mechanics of those books/games.

Starting off with the classic FF approach, there’s one thing which makes the books differ from regular novels from the beginning and it’s not the choosing-the-next-section part. It’s that they come with stats, which you have to decide on and prepare before jumping into the whole story. Those are, of course, something which came over from the role-playing games which gave birth to the FF series and its contemporaries. There’s the regular strength-agility-luck-money-health group which you will find in the classic FF books. They allow for skill checks and fights and, thus, give the books a little more randomness (luck at fighting or managing a skill check is bound to vary, so not every time you play the game you will be equally lucky on your way through it). Some of the books, like “House of Fear,” have additional stats (in case of the aforementioned book, it’s Fear).

There’s often an inventory, too, in which there can be food or health potions to regain health, torches for dark areas, and other tools or even weapons. Specific objects can fill the inventory as well (“City of Thieves,” the first FF book I even read, has three specific reagents the player has to gather to have a chance against the Big Bad).

The Choice of Games engine is best-suited for stat-heavy work, simply because it has a lot of routines build in which handle stats and suchlike well. One big danger when working with stats, though, is to make too many of them. I once looked into an erotic FF-type book on Amazon and found several pages listing specific skills and other traits for the character you were supposed to choose from. While it’s amazing that they managed to handle that many stats at once, it’s nigh-impossible for a regular reader/player to get through that without help and without being disappointed with their first few forays into the book, because there’s no way to tell which skills/traits are useful and which ones make sense together. You can’t take them all and there’s no help with choosing them.

The lesson from this should be to trim down your stats. Yes, depending on the kind of story you make (FF/CYOA, Visual Novel, Life Sim, Dating Sim), you will need quite some stats. What you should avoid, is making too many. Always ask yourself whether or not you will really make good use of that specific one in the game and whether you can do without. Of course, you need to track relationships in an otome. Of course, you need to track money-making skills in a life sim. Of course, you need to track health and fighting skills in a FF-type story. But try minimizing the amount of numbers the player and the software have to deal with.

Another big part of making a nonlinear stories is to keep your scenes and chapters working. As mentioned above, ‘nonlinear’ doesn’t necessarily mean to make a new story with every choice, but there should be a little branch after each choice. A conversation should take a different direction after a choice is made. A situation should not play out the same way with different choices. The player should be able to tell that this is a different route than the one they’ve taken before. There will still be quite a bit of the story which plays out the same way, a main line which the player will always see. That is why the auto-play function exists in most Visual Novels - you can ‘fast-forward’ to the next choice and will only have to ‘play’ through parts you’ve not seen before. For a considerable part of the novel, you will have the same text every time, but there’s also a good portion which you will only see on a specific route.

Where Visual Novels differ from FF-type stories is when it comes to the ending. For FF-type stories, there’s only hit or miss. Either you finish the story with the only good ending, defeat the enemy, save the populace, become a hero, etc., or you have a bad ending, end up dead, incarcerated forever, cursed, etc.. This means that most players will only look for one ending. They may even cheat (as I did, too, when reading those books) by checking the next scene and then making another choice, if the next scene is a bad one. In a Visual Novel, the players look forward to having several endings, mostly the good ones, but often also the bad ones.

That’s because there’s one more specific mechanic in a Visual Novel: the gallery. Most Visual Novels (especially the high-price ones) include very beautifully-drawn, screen-filling CGs (Character Graphics) within the story. Once the player has unlocked them by reaching them (they are endings and, often, also key points of the story), they are available in the gallery off the main menu to look at again. Players often want to fill the gallery completely, unlock every CG, which is why they will play through all the routes and try all the choices possible. It might also play a role that a ‘bad ending’ in a Visual Novel often is not a deadly bad ending, but more of a ‘doesn’t get their love interest’ or ‘fails at the task’ bad ending.

Overall, the most important thing for a nonlinear story is that you plan it out beforehand. I listed a few possible pieces of software to help with that in the first post, but there’s also simple ways like using a big piece of paper or a cork board, tacks, and thread. What you use is very much up to you. Don’t get too caught up in all the skills and traits and other stats you could put into the story and try to make every choice count, especially if there’s few choices. A dating sim or life sim will have less impact per choice than your regular Visual Novel. FF-type stories also have little impact per choice for most choices, but a big impact every now and then (when it comes to reaching one of the endings).

Also be prepared to write a lot more text than you would for a regular novel - since there’s a good portion of text only going into one specific route and you still will want to make a suitably long story. More text is very important there. Try your hands at nonlinear writing - even if you’re not doing well with it, it might actually help you with writing your regular stories!