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I was thinking about a recent VN I was playing and tried to determine how they structured their story. After some thinking and trying different paths, I realized they had a “process of elimination” system going on. You were presented with opportunities to go down a path with a certain character and if you turned that option down (which wasn’t always so obvious) you closed off that path/story. This seemed a little more like real life to me. In the first structure that I posted your choices are evaluated to dispense a final outcome, here you’re choices lead you down different paths all together. Some are closed to you in a sort of “point of no return” setup depending on how you make your choices. Like real life, you often only get one shot to go down a certain road.

So I sketched out a diagram, as I seem to like to do, and below is the clean version of what I came up with.

In this structure you are essentially telling a story from multiple angles where some lead down different story outcomes. Like the first diagram, you have your main path that starts with an introduction and offers points for you to learn more about the characters as they are presented to you. The first couple threads don’t change the outcome as much as they help you to learn about the environment and story. A means of giving you information that you are interested about.

Then you have a PNR (Point of No Return) point. This is a choice that if you pick one way will lead you down a new path, if not you continue down on your way. If you pass each PNR point you basically have eliminated all your choices and end with nothing.

I thought, though, that even with an PNR system it would be nice to still have a second chance (SC). This would give you at least one more opportunity to “jump-ship” on the path you are on and go to another. To the reader (player) this would hopefully not be so obvious and it certainly takes some of the mystery away by showing a graph like this.

During one of the side paths you have some options that will eventually lead you to one of a couple endings.

The problem I was having with the first structure was trying to “weave” a couple different stories into one main path. This is a lot harder than it appeared, because if the player has too many options to jump around the different stories that are going on then there will be little sense of a complete story.

~nio

I just wanted to post an update here to start off the new year. After my last post about Visual Novel structure, I tried to pick up the Confession story and apply that structure idea to it. I changed a couple basics plot points, took out a couple characters and added some new ones. I quickly found out, even with my simplified structure, that it’s not so simple to put it down on paper.

When I was thinking about the characters, their motives and where they would be and how they would react, things started to get a little messy. So while that structure (graph) is a good place to get things rolling, when you get down to the dirty work it can start to unravel in front of you and you can find yourself stuck or going in circles.

I’m not out yet, though and hopefully I can start to really post some progress in the coming months.

Keep checking back.

~nio