Limited Choices?

[ElectricEuphonium]

I'm currently working on my first real attempt at any sort of VN, a romance. I'm not very experienced with Ren'Py, so for this one, I'd probably rather have it be sort of a kinetic novel, where you pick one of the romance options early on and that sets you off on an entirely different route. Is there anything inherently wrong with these sort of options? Any suggestions?

[Impulse]

I think that's a great way to start off if you're unsure. Just be sure to make sure the people reading your novel knows it's kinetic/limited choices.

[YonYonYon]

Choosing the LI after the prologue is a well-known practice in the mobile games industry. So there's nothing wrong with this approach.

But if after that there are no choices, then it would be good to know beforehand.

[SugarScares]

I'm in a similar place as you. With the story I'm working on, it was originally just going to be choose your love interest, and choose which direction the ending goes. This appealed to me because I wanted to make sure I didn't have choices for the sake of choices. Eventually I added a few minor choices throughout the story to flesh it out a bit.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with only having one choice at the beginning, but it is probably for the best you advertise that fact. However, if you want to add on some level of interactivity you can do it in smaller ways maybe? For example, in my game, there's a pet character that the player gets to name. There's also a part where you can choose which character you want to talk about your romantic interest with.

Little things like this can go a long way. You can do something as simple as letting the player choose to have a date at the mall or the park. It can be a simple scene that's easy to code and you never have to mention which location you went to again, but it should help the game feel like less of a kinetic novel.

Overall though, there's really no right or wrong way to go about making a visual novel. However you go about it, you should enjoy what you're doing. Good luck on your first visual novel!

[RotGtIE]

When I think of VNs with early route branching decisions, I think of Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night. When I think of kinetics, I think of Planetarian. And when I think of VNs with very few choices, I think of Saya no Uta. Suffice to say that you could make poorer decisions than to follow in the footsteps of titles like these. There's certainly no need to feel as though you would be doing less than what is expected by VN audiences by placing less of an emphasis on choice-making than what you might think would be standard fare for the medium.

The advantages to kinetic writing are as obvious as the shortcomings. Though it can be difficult to excite a VN audience about a kinetic, going in that direction grants you the ability to dedicate all of your efforts into maximizing the quality of one strong route, rather than having to split your resources among several. You only have to come up with one story, and thus you only have to track the continuity of one timeline of events. It becomes much easier to canonize the "true route" of a story if you find that you would later like to expand upon it, and in any case, there's nothing stopping you from revisiting the story and adding alternate routes or sequels and prequels after the initial release. Going kinetic is an excellent choice if you've got one story or one message you want to get across to the audience strongly and without dividing your energy. This is especially important as an amateur developer, as with limited resources, you most likely cannot compete with commercial projects backed by well-known studios, and so must make efficient use of what's available to you if you want to deliver a similar experience to what the reader would get out of playing a commercial VN.

Early route branching has obvious advantages and disadvantages, and again, the more famous Type-Moon titles do an excellent job demonstrating what these are. The biggest advantage to an early branching story is the impact on the reader, as you are essentially delivering multiple stories to them using the same setting and characters, rather than delivering one story with a few different events and outcomes placed within it. The reader does not have to patiently re-read or impatiently skip through already-seen material, and that can make a huge difference in how they experience each story. If the lead-in to at least two routes is the same and you are doing your job as a writer of pacing your story properly, the reader will probably not be in the correct mindset for the second route they play from the same root events, which can cause them to experience these routes very differently than you had intended. With early branching, you can avoid some of this effect by minimizing the amount of scenes that each route has in common and thus the amount of retreading the reader must do to experience each route. In addition, early branching done in the Type-Moon style of requiring the routes to be played in a specific order can grant you the opportunity to use one route to acquaint the reader with the setting, and later routes to expand upon it in a way that exploits the reader's guaranteed familiarity with it. Of course, the disadvantages are obvious: you are basically writing almost entirely different stories for each route, and if you don't use the Type-Moon method, then you have to ensure the reader is properly exposed to all the elements of the setting they need to know about in each route you build, and given how early branching works, that may mean you as the writer will have to retread the task of exposition in a sort of groundhog-day fashion, familiarizing your reader with the setting multiple times in slightly different ways. It's a significant increase in workload for the writer to operate this way, which is why Katawa Shoujo divided the workload among multiple writers to handle each of the routes from its early-branching story - and that still took five years to develop. Continuity is a pretty big deal, and with this approach to making a VN, you will need to pay more attention to your worldbuilding than with a kinetic, as you need to be keeping track of events which take place in your entire setting regardless of whether the reader will be directly encountering them during the course of a single route.

Going for a small number of choices, especially big-impact choices, is certainly a fine way to approach VN development. Early branching stories tend to have very few important choices for obvious reasons, and most readers won't have a problem with this unless there is inconsistency in the number of choices one route has when compared with another in the same VN. You can always pad a relatively linear route with some unimportant choices, though this is usually limited to light-hearted events which can't have a significant impact on the story but can offer the reader a specific kind of treat to lighten the mood from a heavy plotline if they should want it. This happens in Fate/Stay night, especially during the Fate route wherein the player can cause Shirou to do a pretty significant number of silly things that won't impact the main plotline unless you actually choose the comical decision at every single opportunity. G-Senjou no Maou has this as well, both before its major route splits and after, mostly involving whether you want to see certain characters get thrown under the bus for minor misdeeds. And of course, in Tsukihime, there's an early unimportant choice disguised as an important one wherein the player can choose how to have Shiki attempt to hide his secret activities from his sister, with one of those choices being to simply tell the whole far-fetched truth so plainly that she accuses him of making fun of her. All that said, there is a bit of a subtle advantage to limiting the number of choices the player can make, and this is demonstrated well in Saya no Uta, which only has two decision points leading to a total of three possible outcomes for the story. In this arrangement, a VN makes it clear to the reader that although there won't be many decisions to make, every one of them will matter greatly and the player will not need to worry about the potentiality of missing small but enjoyable scenes because they made an unimportant decision and didn't have the tenacity to save and select each option right away to see them all. It's a bit easier for readers to make choices when they have a better idea as to which ones matter and which ones really don't, and eliminating the ones which don't matter completely is an easy way to accomplish this.

First-timers are usually advised to work on a short project in order to be able to complete something before they move on to bigger projects. However, this is somewhat unappealing to the ambitious developer, since people who are interested in this medium enough to want to make their own product within it are unlikely to want to produce a small, obscure story with little impact on the community, and that is perfectly understandable. For this reason, I would recommend not quite that the beginner should go short, but rather more specifically that the beginner should recognize the limitations of the resources available to them. A beginner who may be capable of building a VN with five routes at about an hour of reading time per route probably has the resources to instead make a single kinetic story lasting five hours or more. The advice to limit the duration of your story is all good and well as it is, but it's based on the more general principle, I think, to reduce your workload to within manageable parameters. I don't think that necessarily has to be reflected in duration so much as your overall capacity for resource expenditure. You might, for example, have a day job and thus a limited window of opportunity for VN development on a daily basis, but consequently have access to a source of income which you can use to fund its production and no real time limitation on completion. This is obviously a very different set of circumstances from someone who has much more free time available to them but no money and a deadline of one month from the start of production, as happens here in March, and so the expectations you can have of yourself as a developer should be adjusted based on the circumstances at hand. As long as you're able to be realistic about your capabilities and limitations, you should be able to allocate your resources appropriately to meet your goals. That may mean writing a few short stories within the same setting instead of a single long story, or it might mean writing your story in a limited environment to reduce the number of assets needed overall. As long as you understand the results associated with your development decisions, you should be able to keep things doable, and, if you're attentive, good enough that people won't think of the result as "good for a first try" but simply "good."

[Gaming4Hearts]

I think it's a good idea. Especially for a first-time VN or KN creator. It's good to limit yourself and to want to tell your stories. Personally I think there's nothing wrong with a kinetic novel, or with a VN with just two options. Though it can be quite overwhelming to almost make 2 KN's, but that's up to you.