Lemma Soft Forums

I've heard a lot about people playing them, but I'm curious if anyone here has actually tried to make one. If so, how did go about structuring the story? What were some of the challenges that you encountered? Did your POV characters interact with each other, and if so what was that like? I probably won't ever attempt to make something like this in the near future but I'm really curious what the experience is like. I'd love to hear some of your experiences!

In general, one thing I feel like needs to be kept in mind with any non-omniscient POV usage is "How important is it for the player to see this?" Basically, does it advance the plot or give interesting character development. With a static viewpoint, this means using time skips when nothing important is happening. With multiple characters, it's important to decide which characters will give the most interesting information relevant to the story.

For the multi-viewpoint stories I've written, most of them have been written as one continuous narrative where the most relevant character is the focus. So, structure-wise, it's not much different from any other story until it comes down to deciding which characters should narrate which scenes. Sometimes I try to weasel out some extra scenes for characters with limited time in focus or hide the thoughts of certain characters for a reveal, but overall I still need to track where everyone is no matter how many "cameras" are in play.

I think one of the few truly big challenges I recall having with such stories is in deciding who gets to be a narrator. Just because you might want a character to narrate a scene doesn't mean they'll give the player the information needed to understand the story, so unless scenes get repeated across viewpoints it's important to pick the right character. It's also sometimes difficult to decide how much to reveal about a narrator, especially when you have an antagonist as a viewpoint character before they are clearly the antagonist. If the narration seems to skip over details for no obvious reason, you can bet experienced readers/players will pick up on that. (You can't always pull the trick used in one of the Hercule Poirot novels that was narrated by the killer.)

As for characters interacting with each other, I don't see how a story wouldn't have viewpoint characters meet unless it was multiple stories in one overall collection. As mentioned above, the biggest challenge is knowing which viewpoint(s) are most important and deciding which to use for a scene, and whether to include any others as side content or flashbacks. In general, though, I'd recommend against having too many scenes told by multiple characters. Seeing the same scene from every viewpoint only really works if everyone has something special to say about it, or if it's a required scene in a game with unique selectable protagonists. (In one of my stories, I specifically had a scene play out differently based on an unrelated previous decision to avoid having two identical scenes narrated by different characters.)

I'm working on a VN right now with a detective and his footman at a royal palace and we split between the perspectives of the two. This works into the story because the detective has keen powers of perception and can interpret evidence and interviews one way, while the footman has a history at the palace and can put workers at ease during interviews, so he is able to uncover evidence the detective cannot. So the change in POV becomes part of the story and the puzzle, because the player is obligated to switch perspectives to progress.

This is more on the technical side of things than the writing side of things, but in a VN specifically you can use visual cues to demonstrate more clearly to your reader that the POV has shifted. For instance, the POV character could be represented as a side sprite (although this could get time-consuming/expensive as you would presumably need a full-body sprite and a side sprite for each POV character). A potentially cheaper way would be to change the color of the textbox for each POV character.

Of course, these visual cues don't mean that you can throw out the writing entirely. You still would want to try to differentiate the voice of each POV character from the others.

Yes, I did. (Tell a Demon)

It required a massive spreadsheet.

But it was a lot of fun to write, because protagonists can romance other protagonists (I was definitely snickering while writing some of these scenes...) But yeah... lots of spreadsheet organization required and story-bug-fixing after all is said and done.

I'm doing it a bit differently with my next project. Instead of changing perspectives on a scene or chapter basis, I'm writing from mostly the protagonist's perspective then showing little bits of other characters' stories. These other characters still have complete story arcs, just... most of their story is seen from the protagonist's perspective.

I think it's a technique more suited to long form stories. And whenever you want to give the feel of an epic story.

However, I think a lot of changes in perspective can be annoying. E.g., some writers end each scene on a cliffhanger then change perspective. Cliffhanger + change in protagonist should be done sparingly imho, because instead of making you want to read more, it's.... annoying because it can take you out the story thinking something like... "I saw what the writer did there! not cool!"

But if scenes don't have the more obvious and cheaper hallmarks of a cliffhanger, and then you switch perspectives... that's probably more acceptable.

When I was a kid, pretty much every time I read a book with multiple points of view, I'd skip the scenes written from the perspectives of characters I wasn't as interested in. So... there's a risk of alienating some readers who are interested in only one of the characters. Plus it's not as easy to skip chapters you don't want to read with a visual novel.

So... it depends. I can say one thing for certain, and that's that it is way more work.

I wrote Gloom and Doom to be a VN with two protagonists, who exist separately in the first act before banding together in the second act onwards.

The reason I did this was to examine the same theme (depression, lack of direction in life) from two different perspectives. One character has all the power in the world, but no drive and motivation, and another has the motivation but not the strength.

It was good for this story, because every scene will have an active character, and I'd be able to pick who would be the one making the tougher choices and taking a more active role in the scene.

To differentiate the two, I had different text boxes to show you who's the primary character in each scene, and I wrote one of them in 1st person and the other in 2nd person perspective. That, and one of them has the personality of a world-weary centuries-old wraith, and the other is an angry teenager. They were designed to be really quite different, so their speech patterns never quite overlap.