Minimum Viable Product and Repeated Scenes

[verysunshine]

My current project has an event manager that chooses events based on priority. These can be sorted into two types, normal and special. The special events rely on players having certain items, skills, or favour with characters. These events will be played at specific times. When no special event is available, it plays a normal event. Those normal events should make sense at any time. Normal events should also allow the player to get skills or favour if they need to.

When I play these types of VNs, I hate seeing scenes repeated over and over. It feels gamy and lazy to me. My minimal viable product suggests I should only have one normal event. My perfect product would have at least 18, one for each possible use of the event in a play through. I don't want to look lazy, but I don't want to write all of those scenes. Is it okay if some scenes are repeated? What is the best way to handle this?

[Westeford]

Maybe you could have the scenes that play rotate. Like instead of writing 18 scenes, you write a third of that. After one of the scenes play.
Think of it like a revolver. The scenes are the bullets. After one scene is fired the next scene fires until all the scenes have been played. Then it reloads and restarts the cycle. You could have the scenes be picked at random or in a set order.

[IronForPistons]

Hm, interesting question. I agree that outright repeating events can seem unprofessional. Of course, the absolutely ideal solution is to, indeed, write 18 separate scenes - but that's not always practical. Instead, you may want to consider how to either adapt a scene to a different but similar scenario, or include choices that allow the player to branch off in several directions within the same scene. Either of these options would still have some variation, without forcing you to write 18 separate scenes.

Another thing to consider is that you can base some dialog, plot, etc on things that the player already "knows"... for example, if the player has already seen scene A, scene B makes a reference to something that happens in scene A. Otherwise, the reference is omitted or replaced with some other interesting tidbit.

[verysunshine]

Maybe you could have the scenes that play rotate. Like instead of writing 18 scenes, you write a third of that. After one of the scenes play.
Think of it like a revolver. The scenes are the bullets. After one scene is fired the next scene fires until all the scenes have been played. Then it reloads and restarts the cycle. You could have the scenes be picked at random or in a set order.

That is interesting, but the revolver system might still end up with players thinking they've seen this thing before while they're still in their first playthrough.

Hm, interesting question. I agree that outright repeating events can seem unprofessional. Of course, the absolutely ideal solution is to, indeed, write 18 separate scenes - but that's not always practical. Instead, you may want to consider how to either adapt a scene to a different but similar scenario, or include choices that allow the player to branch off in several directions within the same scene. Either of these options would still have some variation, without forcing you to write 18 separate scenes.

Another thing to consider is that you can base some dialog, plot, etc on things that the player already "knows"... for example, if the player has already seen scene A, scene B makes a reference to something that happens in scene A. Otherwise, the reference is omitted or replaced with some other interesting tidbit.

The branching paths might work, especially if the choices are near the beginning of the scene.