It's a better practice. For the author, writing without also trying to build all the screenplay directions puts you in the mindset of the novelist and forces you to be attentive to nothing but the storytelling. I find this extremely important when it comes to pacing the flow of a scene. The way I see it, I can always write something decent first and then mangle it beyond recognition with stage directions later, but trying to do it all at once rips me out of the writer's seat and puts me in the director's chair, which is not a great place to be when writing prose. For the audience, they're only going to see the end product anyway, and that largely consists of text supported by other assets. Focusing on making the text be able to stand on its own when first writing it ensures that at least the story will be written as well as it can be, and that's what the audience is going to be primarily engaging with, so they will notice very quickly if it is not as good as it should be, especially when compared to all the supporting assets.Fluxx wrote:RotGtIE - I'm curious is there a reason that you write in novel format first instead of a screenplay first?
Also, doing this sets you apart from the crowd. Lots of devs like to skip the novel-writing part of the visual novel and jump right into a screenplay. I find that this shortcut-taking approach shows up blatantly in the quality of a finished product. It doesn't lead to a good result - cutting corners generally doesn't.
I use the tag ADV to denote text displays which only cover the bottom quarter of the screen. I plan to use the NVL tag for text which covers the whole screen. I realize this is not exactly what is done with most ADV-style text (where the ADV block is usually labeled with the name of the character who is speaking) but I use the nomenclature this way because the whole script is written in the novel format and therefore doesn't use ADV speaker indicators, but rather conventional dialogue tags and other traditional dialogue writing methods. So in short, the only choice for me to make in the screenplay is NVL or short-bottom-screen-NVL, which I label as ADV for simplicity's sake.Fluxx wrote:Actually, you don't seem to label the characters at all. Which is weird since your sample is ADV. Unless you don't want people to see the names of characters?