Balancing narration and speech in visual novels

[Fawkes - Feathered Melody]

I'm working on the story for a second visual novel project. How should one best balance dialogue and the main character's narration for a [linear] visual novel? Are there any tips for breaking up long, but important conversations?

[DaFool]

Well, I notice in many first-person VNs, there really isn't 'narration' per se, more like stream of thought processes. So it's just a difference between a dialogue box with a name label on it and one without. If you want to see the balance played out well, see Binary Hearts...the narration is NVL, the dialogue is interspersed.

[Fawkes - Feathered Melody]

Thanks. I think I'll check Binary Hearts out soon. I currently have half a page of just dialogue between two characters in one block, so I think I'll add some my character's thoughts interspersed in there.

[Recca Phoenix]

I wrote my main chara's thoughts/narration in italics in DtY, but I tried to use as much speech as was possible.
In HONEYCOMB, I am using < brackets > to convey thoughts, because I am using a typewriter font to give an analoggy computery feel.

[lordcloudx]

well... since dafool mentioned binary hearts, I wrote it the same way I write all my other stories. Pen and paper first for the rough draft (you can type it into a word processor program if that's what you're comfortable with.) and write it as you would a short-story or a novel as the case may be.

My tip/tips would be to make the dialogue between the characters as long as you please in your first draft and cut out whatever seems redundant or uneccesary after you finish the chapter or the entire story when you begin editing. Never rely on mere conversations to tell the story (unless you're going for the ambiguous anime-style conversations that go something like: "Ah! The wind." then another person says "... Will carry me... certainly...surely...someday...), this is best left to the narration whether you use first-person or third-person. Using first-person gives you the advantage of letting the reader look into the narrator's innermost thoughts but this also means you have to worry about making the story progress while maintaining the character's unique personality. It's also a good idea to make the narrator react to another character's dialogue at times. (Think of how kyon interrupts everyone's dialogue with his sarcastic narratives every now and then)

[Fawkes - Feathered Melody]

Just played through Binary Hearts this morning. I can see very well how you managed to balance the two. ^_^

I've been planning writing the whole thing as a story, edit for continuity and other problems, and then begin the process of converting it to Ren'py. It's first person as I'm writing right now. As far as the part I'm working on now, it's mainly a character explaining a lot of stuff about her... people and carrying out a conversation with the main character. I'll go through and see if I can cut out some of it and add some Kyonisms in.

Thanks for the advice.

[mrsulu]

Although the best advice is to be very sparing about your expoisition, another possiblity is to do like LucasArts games like Monkey Island and allow players to choose from a list of relevant smartass comments. It's very clear it doesn't matter which one you pick, but they're there to give the player something to do as they go along.

Knights of the Old Republic has stuff like that, too, and various responses actually do matter, a tiny bit, since they push you towards or away from the Dark Side.

It's a way to break up long exposition and have the player do something to keep their eyes from glazing over.

Depends on the tone of your story, though.