Contents
What is a linear visual novel?
A type of Visual Novel which averts the long-standing tradition of Multiple Endings. Instead of branching plots which can end in multiple ways, a novel of this type has only one ending and one story to tell. A variation of this is having an obvious true ending and multiple bad endings when certain conditions are met.
How are visual novels structured?
Character-based visual novels have simpler branching structure and longer common route. Player is presented with choices that build up his personality and skills, which determines the branching and type of ending. Many adventure VNs, quests and stories where player is exploring a new world are set in this structure.
How many characters are in a visual novel?
The particulars will of course depend on your project, but for the majority of VN projects, the upper limit on line length will likely be somewhere around 300-400 characters. That’s usually enough to fit more than one sentence, but also too short to contain what we would consider an entire paragraph in most cases.
What is a branching story?
A branching story structure is a story graph – a directed graph of nodes connected by arcs that represent user choices. Every possible path through the graph represents a story that can be told to the user.
How long is a visual novel?
Visual novels can be anywhere from millions of words to a few thousand depending on the show, adaptation, or language. In comparison, there are novels that were written, such as Mahabharata (1.8 million words) and The Odyssey (129, 443 words).
What makes a good visual?
Each visual should be relevant to your message, convey an important point, be clearly understandable, and be visible by your entire audience. Visuals should be used to make concepts easier to understand and to reinforce your message. They should illustrate important points that are otherwise hard to understand.
How long is a good visual novel?
Visual novel scripts can be anywhere between 1,000-100,000 lines (so up to about 4 megabytes of text, including the code for the scripts, which is really an insubstantial part most of the time). Again, the play time can be anywhere between 2-50+ hours.
Which is an example of a plot based visual novel?
Plot-based and character-based. Plot-based visual novels are usually otome/bishojo games where player’s actions determine the outcome. For example, in Doki Doki Literature club, player joins high school literary club and meets three different girls. If his poems are dark and moody, he will hook up with Yuri.
How to plan the structure of your visual novel?
Common route is what players will read in every run of your game. It’s the part of the story before it starts branching and is used for introduction, exposition and buildup. Introduction has to be short and informative.
What are the conventions of a visual novel?
The visual novel, as a genre, has a lot of conventions (like being massively overwritten) but really the main thing is just that the writing is structured around a choices, which you can think of as the game mechanics if you’re into that sort of thing.
What makes a story a plot based story?
Plot-based stories have short common route often with complex branching. In a plot-based stories, main character’s personality is fixed. Episodes serve to determine what kind of branch will the story diverge into. So the common route is short and primarily revolves around player’s actions and reactions.