Uneven distribution of choices? And other qs

[Limabaen]

I hope this is in the right section
How do you feel about a VN that starts off giving the player many choices, then once the player is set for an ending the choices stop?

The reason I'm asking is because I'm currently working on a game with the following structure


It would mean that all the choices to determine an ending would be near the beginning of each route, then after passing the flag for the bad ending, there would be no need/reason for the player to make any choices at all.

So I guess my questions are:
1. Do you mind if the choices stop after a while? I can see that being frustrating, especially if there are many choices near the beginning.
2. If you do, would you prefer the choices along the post-bad end route to lead to different scenes/dialogue or an alternate "neutral ending"?
3. How do you feel about having to make the most important decision (aka picking which route to be on) as the very first decision?

Thanks for your opinions!

[Valhalla]

1. Do you mind if the choices stop after a while? I can see that being frustrating, especially if there are many choices near the beginning.
2. If you do, would you prefer the choices along the post-bad end route to lead to different scenes/dialogue or an alternate "neutral ending"?
3. How do you feel about having to make the most important decision (aka picking which route to be on) as the very first decision?

1. I find it more annoying if the choices take a long long time to show up, if you're involved in the story by the time there are no more choices I don't think it would really even be noticed. So on this front, if what's happening is interesting enough it wouldn't bother me.
2. At any point if there are choices I want them to mean something. Just picking for the sake of doing something doesn't seem necessary, and it would be better left out.
3. I don't mind making choices early on, even game changing ones, but if it affects the story in a way that I wouldn't have chosen if I had more information before making the choice it can be a little frustrating. How early is early in the game? Are the choices seemingly arbitrary or you can at least glean some information from the choices?

I think it can work the way you have it, in short, as long as you make the story compelling and the choices early in the game feel like they are actually important decisions.

[RotGtIE]

What you are describing is basically how Kanon works - a VN from 1999 whose model remains the standard for galge. There are a few reasons that this style of VN has endured for well over a decade.

The first is early route branching. This is very important for keeping your readers as close to equally engaged with the story in all of its routes as possible. The more text the reader has to retread, the more skipping they will do and the less in tune they will be with the story's intended pacing. You want to keep text skipping at a minimum, especially for this sort of reason. Apart from Key, Type-Moon also makes damned sure to minimize the amount of common text before a route split in their most famous works. Katawa Shoujo did this as well. Although this does place more burden on the writer as a larger overall amount of prose must be written, the result in terms of reader interest will be a greater return on the effort that was put in.

VN readers are not quite the same sort of audience as gamers. They want to see a story, or even multiple stories using the same setting and characters, and are unlikely to want to be faced with skill or knowledge-based challenges which prevent them from getting to the content they came to see. These are the kinds of people who tend to want to minimize the gameplay portions of story-based video games anyway, and this is what draws them to VNs. Even audience members who enjoy the gameplay of videogames are generally not seeking out a VN for that kind of experience. What a reader generally wants when presented with a choice is not a test of their knowledge or ability to make a good decision versus a bad one, but rather the ability to see what would happen in a story if a certain variable were to be changed. This style of decision making is most clear in Saya no Uta, where the reader makes a decision for the protagonist, and then makes a decision for his enemy. This is not a matter of the audience self-inserting into the roles of different characters, but rather choosing to see what would happen if character X were to take action Y. A choice in a VN is better described as an offering to the player as to what kind of story they want to see, not whether they think a choice would be a right or a wrong one for the character in question. Bad ends in Fate/Stay Night were notorious for containing such interesting content as to be deliberately sought out by the players as a result - they were considered to be more content rather than a mistake on part of the reader.

All of the above applies primarily if you are focused on delivering an entertaining story to your audience. If, however, your selling point is giving the reader a self-insert and the ability to make a large number of decisions which all individually have much smaller impacts on their outcomes, that is a very different style of VN and I would recommend you fully commit yourself to it. You can have early branching with a very small number of choices which each lead to significantly different and equally entertaining outcomes, or you can have a huge number of choices to make the reader feel like they are in the driver's seat of a character's brain, but whichever path you choose, I recommend you go all the way with your decision and don't waffle between the two models of route structure.

[Mammon]

I think the three main points of relevance on what defines a good (or bad) route system are not whether the choices appear early or late but:
1) Whether the choices actually (feel like) they matter. If you have a game with many choices that result in one or two paragraphs of alternative dialogue before going back to the same scene and they all result in the same ending or two barely different endings anyway, the game will still feel like a kinetic VN even with the choices. Telltales' games are a pretty good example of this: you decide the story, but you'll get the same ending either way. (The roleplaying questions are appreciated, though.)

2) Whether the player can actually understand the underlying system behind the choices. The well-known rule of thumb for most VN is: Spend as much time with a romanceable person to get on their route, and pick the (usually obvious) right choice to get their good ending. While the element of not knowing what consequences your actions will have can be very interesting, having to skip your way through the story various times and failing many times to get all the endings can be annoying instead.
A good example of both worlds at the same time would be Cupid. If you played the game, you'll know how amazing and unique the choices in that game are. If we're talking about exemplary choice systems, that would be my first pick. However, I had a real tough time finding the last few elusive endings because I didn't understand the choice system and eventually had to rely on a walkthrough.

3) Whether your choices actually feel like they belong. If you're adding a bad end only because the choices you made would lead to a bad end, and the ending itself isn't made with the same enthousiasm as the rest of the game, those choices will seem pointless or even annoyingly unneccesary. An example would be The lady's choice. I loved that game and their choice system was superb, with the exception of the singular bad ending choice because it felt like it was just tagged on. I was not surprised to find out that this was indeed the case: the bad ending was added by popular request but wasn't actually part of the creator's vision of the game.

[Limabaen]

@

How early is early in the game? Are the choices seemingly arbitrary or you can at least glean some information from the choices?

My common route is mobile otome style, aka brief intro of characters, pick a route out of a menu, and go. In other words, quite early.
The choices will all be personality based aka "Be an asshole" vs "Don't be an asshole".
Do you think this would be too obvious/boring?

All of the above applies primarily if you are focused on delivering an entertaining story to your audience. If, however, your selling point is giving the reader a self-insert and the ability to make a large number of decisions which all individually have much smaller impacts on their outcomes, that is a very different style of VN and I would recommend you fully commit yourself to it.

My concern lies in the fact my vn's story isn't particularly deep or fantastical. It's just a generic high school/slice of life. I feel this genre is famous for its self-insert protagonists.
Even though I do have a defined protagonist and plot, wouldn't an audience expect at least some more interactivity than what I've got?
I read this thread viewtopic.php?f=4&t=38352 and it seems some people get bored if they can't make choices every so often. Do you think that would be exacerbated with the sort of setting I have?

If you're adding a bad end only because the choices you made would lead to a bad end, and the ending itself isn't made with the same enthousiasm as the rest of the game, those choices will seem pointless or even annoyingly unneccesary.

Yeah, the bad endings in my vn happen rather early on, and they're just a single split scene from the main route. I really hope it doesn't make the choices that lead there seem pointless.
I'd rather scrap the bad endings altogether than make something people think is half-assed.
I haven't written the bad ends yet, so maybe I should get rid of them. But that would remove any last vestiges of interactivity and turn my vn into a linear vn, and I don't want that. What do

[Mammon]

My common route is mobile otome style, aka brief intro of characters, pick a route out of a menu, and go. In other words, quite early.
The choices will all be personality based aka "Be an asshole" vs "Don't be an asshole".
Do you think this would be too obvious/boring?

With a mobile otome generic slice of life story as you described it, that system would be for the best. There's no need for the reader to really have to think about the questions if it's just to pick a route. In fact, I personally can get rather annoyed at a highschool romance VN when I don't get onto the route of the girl I wanted to play on my first play-through because the choice system is more complicated than I thought. A more unique system of choice lends itself better for endings, and question-related plot twists (Like the choice of the protagonist interferring turning out to be a bad thing where it seemed like a good thing at first.)

My concern lies in the fact my vn's story isn't particularly deep or fantastical. It's just a generic high school/slice of life. I feel this genre is famous for its self-insert protagonists.
Even though I do have a defined protagonist and plot, wouldn't an audience expect at least some more interactivity than what I've got?
I read this thread viewtopic.php?f=4&t=38352 and it seems some people get bored if they can't make choices every so often. Do you think that would be exacerbated with the sort of setting I have?

I hope not. I honestly hope not, or I made a big mistake by not giving the reader any choices until several hours into my game.

I think this applies most if the story feels like it should have choices. If you feel like you should be able to pick whether to go with romance A or romance B, but the story forces you to go with romance A without giving you any choice, it can cause annoyance. It doesn't mean that kinetic VN's are bad, it means that the writer should have either prevented that feeling or given a choice after all. It's actually quite easy to prevent giving people that feeling if you keep it in mind while writing. But if you cannot deliver upon your choices, it's better not to give them at all. (Damn you Liberation day, you turned Chigara into worst girl by forcing me onto her route. Why even bother importing the choices from the previous game when they'll be useless anyways?)

Yeah, the bad endings in my vn happen rather early on, and they're just a single split scene from the main route. I really hope it doesn't make the choices that lead there seem pointless.
I'd rather scrap the bad endings altogether than make something people think is half-assed.
I haven't written the bad ends yet, so maybe I should get rid of them. But that would remove any last vestiges of interactivity and turn my vn into a linear vn, and I don't want that. What do

Oh, that's not what I meant at all. If it's a scene on it's own it can still be good. Some games like Corpse party are beloved for their (very detailed) bad endings and they add situations and lore into the bad endings that they couldn't fit into the main story line. And I personally think that a good ending is more appreciated if you know how bad the alternative is. Don't scrap a bad ending if it actually entails something worth reading, and if it's not just add something unique to it that wasn't in the main story line. With half-assed, I mean something like this:

...Bla bla build up to Yandere story that is moderately good, yandere just revealed to be a sociopath and is looking at you with murder eyes.

Choice: Run away (obvious bad choice) or Say that you'll stay (obvious good choice)

'I'll have to run away, this chick is crazy!' you think. You quickly turn around and bolt towards the door.

Suddenly, you feel a sting in your back and stop. You slump to the ground as <yandere> pulls the knife out of your spine.

y 'You shouldn't have done that, Sempai.'

Bad end screen


With the exception of the ...bla bla part, I've actually seen bad endings this rushed. I've seen VN's with several rushed bad ends like these that gave me the feeling 'Don't bother with the bad ends, play only the obvious good route.' The writer literally just threw the minimal amount of effort into them to make the VN 'interactive'. That's the kind of half-assed that I meant.