Point of View Switching

[Fuseblower]

Well, from a third omniscient person POV, it should be relatively easy. A good example is J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" (the book, not the movie). Tolkien sets the stage and describes the feelings of all the characters on that stage, Tolkien is the narrator who can look inside the heads of all the characters (Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, even Sauron at one point).

But a lot of VNs are from the first person POV and the graphics underline this by showing what the first person is seeing.

I don't know of any examples but what if the player is given the choice at certain points in the story to switch the first person?

The player will know the "I" because the player has chosen the "I".

Of course, the story should lend itself for this. It would be a good idea to not just make the switch merely a different point of view on the same events but to actually give the player the chance to develop the story in a direction that isn't possible with the other characters. So, it only makes sense to switch main character if this results in being given choices that aren't available with the other characters.

I do see some issues with this however.

1 - It's a lot more work because more story arcs are added.

2 - The characters should be developed strongly since now we can look inside each of their heads and there should be consistency in their actions independent of the POV that was chosen. For example : chosing Mary, we might learn that she's secretly in love with John. If we chose John next time then Mary should still react as being secretly in love with him.

3 - And what about the endings? We should be able to arrive at very different endings for each of the characters. There shouldn't really be a bad character choice (and there might be several switches in one run). After all : the player wants to explore a character and the creator shouldn't punish the player for that. There should be a good ending possible regardless of the switches that were made by the player.

4 - The choices that are given to the character (not the choice of the character) should also be developed with keeping in mind that the player might or might not have played other characters and might or might not have deep knowledge about those other characters.

5 - The story shouldn't be about stuff happening to a certain character. It should be about something that concerns all characters that can be chosen.

It seems like quite a hassle to be able to chose characters (from the creator's point of view). It also means the VN should offer quite a couple of choices for each of the characters to make the switch of main character significant.

[Mammon]

I think the best way to go about switching perspective would be to keep the narrative of all characters in 2nd or 3th person, unless your characters are well-defined enough to be separated from one another based upon their way of thinking. If the other character's PoV doesn't appear a lot you can also make them intentionally more deviant from the actual PoV by making their train of thought more rediculous.

However, the best solution should not be sought in writing but art and/or coding. As PyTom already said changing the color or font of anything in the textbox would work, and if you have the protagonist as a side-image you could switch them out with the new PoV. I changed the PoV twice in my own story and changed the text color or side image when I did this. Especially once you have multiple people monologuing their thoughts at the same time this will be a neccesity. The difference between the self-entitled perverted protagonist and the feministic heroine that replaced him should be clear enough from the change in tone and what she narrated, but it's best not to take any chances with these PoV tricks.