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!

Visual Novels Or Nonlinear Storytelling Pt. 1

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.

Writing for games

In a thread at a new forum I spent time in (The Diving Bell Adventure Pub), someone mentioned it might be a good idea to let would-be novel writers create the stories for casual games. I don’t think that would be a good idea and here is why. And it’s here, because it is about writing rather than about gaming.

As a would-be novel writer (and I’ve no problem with that label – I’m not published yet, so I do not consider myself a ‘true’ novelist), I see a couple of problems with that idea. I have, quite some years ago, tried to write and program my own text adventure (I don’t have the necessary graphic skills to create sprites, animations and backgrounds). Even writing the story did not work out well – let alone the programming part.

Adventures and RPGs need very flexible stories that can be pushed and pulled in various directions and still stay in shape. You can do a lot of things differently or at different times in a chapter (or the whole game), so the story has to ‘play along’ with it and allow the game to put in cut scenes in different order (because you first finished chain two instead of chain one, each adventure contains a certain number of intermingling puzzle chains that need to be finished in order to move on to the next chapter – the same is even more true for RPGs with their side quests). A novelist (or a would-be novel writer) on the other hand fights very hard to find the perfect order for all the scenes in a story.

HOGs get a story to motivate the player to go on. You can actually have a HOG without a big story, if it’s a straight HOG (no IHOG, a HOG with adventure elements). But most HOGs tell a story and they do so in dialogues between the levels. That’s not a lot of storytelling, even with the odd cut scene here or there. Unlike adventures, HOGs do not contain puzzle chains that are intermingling, so you don’t have to care about a flexible story that much. But if you dare to put in more than just a few lines of dialogue between levels, half of the players will say ‘that’s a bad game, I don’t like it’, because they don’t like reading that much. (For instance, the game “The Mysterious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” was bashed for containing actual pages to read that continued the story between levels – I found the game and the storytelling great, most people didn’t.) But you can’t tell a very difficult story with lots of plot changes and intrigues in just a few lines of dialogue. So, not a place for a would-be novel writer (or professional novelist), either.

Other casual games (TMs, Match 3 and so on) put even less emphasize on a story. It’s just something that connects the levels in most of them. People want to beat those games, to get an expert score or beat the clock, that’s why they play – not because of the great story.

The only kind of ‘game’ that you need a very good story for – albeit one with a lot of dialogue, but dialogue is good in a story – is the Visual Novel I’ve written about before. It’s a novel you play (and even they need a branching story – a story with different paths towards the end or even different endings depending on the player’s choices), but it’s above all a novel.

In addition, most casual games are made with an option for a sequel, provided the game does well. You can’t really ‘finish’ the story – although there should be some sort of closure – and have to give the player the little ‘this isn’t over yet’ scene in the end. This is something a novelist could work with, but it doesn’t make telling a complicated story any easier.

You can write a novel based on a game, you can make a game based on a novel (such as “The Great Gatsby” which I might cover over in my main blog soon), but you can’t apply the rules for writing a novel to writing the story for a game. Therefore you can’t just take a novelist (or a would-be novel writer) to create a story that works with a game.

Apollo Justice

[Apollo Justice] As an addition to the posts about visual novels (see “visual novel” and “visual novel 2”), here’s a post about a special kind of visual novel that might be better known outside Japan than the rest.

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About half a year or so ago, I bought “Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney” quite cheap. Then I had not even heard about visual novels, so I simply saw it as some kind of computer game I could not really place into a normal genre.

Now, replaying and finishing it after I had started to take an interest in visual novels, it was quite obvious that I was dealing with a sub-genre of this kind of game.

“Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney” is the fourth game in a series (if I get the number right). The first three (that is the first three I could find on amazon) have another main character, though: Phoenix Wright. He turns up in this game, too, first as defendant in a murder process (the first of four cases), later on as the head of the Wright Talent Agency which has two talents so far: Phoenix (no longer an attorney, instead a pianist and poker player) and his daughter Trucy (a stage magician).

As Apollo manages to clear Phoenix in the first case, but at the same time sends his own boss, Kristoph Gavin, to jail, he later on becomes another member of the Agency.

I liked the graphics from the very first time I played the game, as I’m a big fan of manga and anime and thus of that kind of graphics.

But I also liked the game-play a lot. There’s two main parts to every case (except for the first): investigation and trial. During the investigation, Apollo and Trucy (who usually calls him ‘Polly’) visit various places connected to the crime, gather evidence and talk to people. Later on, there’s the trial where Apollo has to find the loops and lies in the witnesses statements and prove it. If he gets it right, he can win the case. One really interesting thing about the trials of case 2 to 4 is the fact that the persecutor is always Klavier (in the German version his first name is Kantilen) Gavin, the younger brother and spitting image of Apollo’s former boss. That’s giving the third and fourth case a lot more action, because Klavier (or his band, the Gavinners) are involved with the case. In case no. 3 they are involved, because the murder happened during a concert, in case no. 4 the victim and defendant are part of an old case – the one during which Phoenix lost his attorney badge and the first Klavier ever had.

During the last case, the player goes back in time seven years. Because the only way to understand what happened in the present, it is important to understand what happened seven years ago. This also gives the reason why Kristoph Gavin murdered a traveller (who, seven years ago, was the defendant in the same process and is the real father of Trucy Wright) and how it could take seven years for a trap to finally be sprung. Needless to say the seemingly simple case for a new jury system in reality is the most difficult of all four cases. But then, it should be, as it is the last one…

The cases are quite interesting and feature a lot of twists and turns. They are, despite four murdered people, also quite amusing, mainly because of the strange characters. And the cases are almost all entwined (except for case 2) and based on what happened seven years (or a bit longer) before.

So, if you own a Nintendo DS and like to get a look at a visual novel and buying a game that will, at least, take about 10 to 15 hours to solve, take a closer look at “Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney” and his vocal cords of steel.