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While it's generally true that you could develop any kind of game in any kind of medium, different forms of story games have their own strengths and weaknesses. I have a few ideas that I'm trying to decide how to proceed with, so working out some idea of what kind of games are best served by the Visual Novel format is a good start.

As far as I've observed, Visual Novels work best in games that are:

• Visual (obviously; having strong art assets)

• Dialog heavy

• ...

That's it, that's all I've got so far. I could use help figuring it out. Do you think that certain types of stories are more suited to VNs? Different story lengths? Structures? Types of branching?

To allow for comparison I'm going to compare them to two other medium of the same general strata - choice based games (Twine, Choice of, CYOA, etc) and RPGs (RPGMaker, etc)

Largely textual story games seem best suited to stories closer to prose -

• dealing with the internal life of the character

• larger passages

• perhaps twistier choice-structures

And RPGs

• Games where exploration of a physical space is key

• Games with, well, combat and leveling

• Certain sorts of visual puzzle

Though I suppose more traditional parser interactive fiction is similar to the RPG's strengths; passages aren't units of story so much as physical spaces, though of course that's not binding.

So again, any thoughts on the matter are welcome - and I'm not after what's possible so much as what tools are best put to which use. What the strengths are.

Thanks!

Here is my take:

If you are primarily a writer who wants to enrich their story with a few visuals here and there, and add some branching, then in my opinion VNs are by far the most fitting use of the medium. I think this is a very common case - it certainly is mine, and I'd even say most of the prolific VN makers are writers at their core.

If you are primarily a musician and would like to use your tracks to form a basis of a narrative, then VNs are also a great option - since the main mechanic is reading, it's naturally a slower experience, and will also fit complete tracks on loop without the need of dynamic music and transitions. But cases like this - VNs produced by musicians - are very rare.

If you are primarily an artist who wants to tell a story with their images, VNs are an option. Here is the thing though - I think the strength of VNs is not in the visuals, even though they are called "visual". An image-heavy VN is great, but it's not playing to the strengths of the medium - here comics, or even animation would be a more effective use of your primary creative focus.

Lastly, if you are primarily a gameplay designer / programmer (meaning someone whose primary area of expression is creating working mechanics), I think you are on the "not very effective" end of the spectrum, meaning if you want to create an action story with lots of fighting, or other dynamic elements (including moving puzzles) then VNs will only take you so far - you will be more effective expressing yourself with a 2D RPG, or a platformer.

mikey wrote: ↑Mon Feb 17, 2020 8:24 am If you are primarily an artist who wants to tell a story with their images, VNs are an option. Here is the thing though - I think the strength of VNs is not in the visuals, even though they are called "visual". An image-heavy VN is great, but it's not playing to the strengths of the medium - here comics, or even animation would be a more effective use of your primary creative focus.

This comment is well-put, and I totally agree. While there are definitely some VNs with lots of beautiful fancy art, I think the medium actually lends itself especially well to more limited visuals. The standard style of having character sprites with a few different facial expressions on top of static backgrounds is great for adding a bit of art to support the writing on a limited budget. And personally, when I'm choosing a VN to read, I'm a lot more concerned with the story. Pretty art is great and can help catch my eye and get me interested in seeing what else there is, but I'd rather read something that's well-written with only a little bit of okay art than something that looks gorgeous but has less depth to the story.

Specifically compared to something like Twine or ChoiceScript - when would you go with a VN and when would you go with something more purely text?

mcoorlim wrote: ↑Sat Feb 15, 2020 11:10 pm Do you think that certain types of stories are more suited to VNs?

Absolutely. Visual novels often have multiple endings. So if you come up with a story where you have multiple ideas on how the story can end, making the game as a visual novel can be a good decision.

Visual novels also combine a lot of different mediums together. VNs are narrative-heavy, like books. But, they also have a save and load mechanic, like other video games. It's this aspect that made the VN Save the Date so clever: Because of this, I can't picture Save the Date translating well in another storytelling medium.

VNs like the one Katy133 mentioned that make use of a visual novels mechanics in order to tell the story are usually the ones that impress me the most.

You've probably already heard of Doki Doki Literature Club, but just in case you haven't: I also really liked ebi-hime's VN Empty Horizons:

Those are some really cool implementations.