Hi! Hope everything is well :). I have some questions about your game development process, if you don't mind.
How do you go about getting started on your new games?
At the beginning, how solid of an idea is the overall story to you, and how do you approach outlining it at first?
What kind of trial and error usually happens? How do you first explore character personalities and interactions, etc?
How much experimentation with the writing does it usually take you until you get the text that ends up in the game?
I hope those weren't too many questions, feel free to skip any. My New Year's resolution for this year is to finally get started on the VN I've wanted to make for years, so I'm going around asking some of my favorite creators for tips! I always find that the hardest part of any project is initiating it, so I'm a bit lost at the moment. Thank you for your patience! :D
This is such a hard set of questions because there is SO much to the process. I'm writing out this response in word and wondering if it's even going to fit into a tumblr post. It'll just appear as this never-ending post on people's dash and they'll be scrolling for ten minutes wondering when then heck I'm going to just SHUT UP. LoL
So…sorry to everyone? This is a long post.
On the hardest part of a new project being initiating:
I definitely think this was truer for me 10 years ago than it is now. And my process for Changeling was very different than my process now.
But here's the really critical truth. My process for initiating Changeling was *exactly what it needed to be at the time.*
And that's one of the pitfalls of asking someone like me about my process. It is not a "first time VN" process necessarily. It's a "forged over the last 10 years, over 5 visual novels and 2.6 million words of writing" process.
It may not be a good process for you to use on your first VN.
If I attempted to implement my current process when I started Changeling…
Changeling might have failed
The journey to get to this current process was an important one that I could not have skipped.
For ME, that journey included Changeling being a chaotic, unplanned, crazy thing when I began writing it in late 2015. By the time that game released in 2019, I was way more organised, I planned better, wrote better, had better habits…because I learned them over the course of that project.
That journey was so important to my ability to complete the project and the ones that have come after it.
I jumped into drafting Changeling with very little planning. I had a concept, a premise, some very loose world building. And started drafting the common route with just that much. I wrote about 2/3 of a page of basic summary for Corvin's route and jumped straight into writing it. (Then did the same with the others). This led to a ton of issues including my having to re-write Elliot. Twice. Having to do major revisions when I realised the story timeline was too short and I needed to add an extra week into everything.
At that time I was a pantser to the core. I considered this my default state of being and 'how I worked best.' I hated planning. I got stuck on planning.
Defaults can be changed. And that was not how I worked best at all.
But if I had attempted to do the style of planning I do now, I would not have started that project or finished it. The trial and error process of learning how to plan and organise was necessary for me to learn what worked and how to make it work for me.
I learn by doing. I am not naturally organised or a natural planner. I learned to be organised and I learned how to plan effectively for the way my brain works. And I had to go through that process.
So the best way to start your first project may actually be to just start it and learn as you go, not attempt a strategy from the start.
And that may also not be the best way to go about it.
You just have to be willing to learn about yourself, examine yourself, ask yourself questions, and be real with yourself about what is or isn't working to help you achieve your goals. Sometimes you just jump in with both feet and start running and solve problems as you go.
AND THAT IS OKAY. THAT IS HOW SOME PROJECTS GET OFF THE GROUND.
It isn't sustainable, though.
And you have to learn and improve your process as you move through that journey. If your process is as chaotic painful at the midpoint or end as it was at the start then I'd argue you maybe didn't learn anything. You should know yourself better and have better skills and habits as time progresses.
But sometimes it is okay to just start typing. So keep that in mind as you read this. Because sometimes we want to bypass learning processes and sometimes as experienced writers we think we can tell other people how to succeed by dropping our strategy on them and forgetting that part of our success was the painful journey of learning that process.
If you try any part of this strategy and it doesn't work for you (or anyone reading this!), that just means you need a process and that's totally okay. This isn't the best way - it's just my personal method.
How do you go about getting started on your new games?
I now start by planning properly.
The first step of that is writing down everything in my head regarding a project. Typically in Obsidian because I find the way you can cross-link and organise very helpful for planning and world building and keeping track of random notes.
I just type everything out.
Character info, random world building bits, as well as general plot ideas. If my idea is "X might happen in the plot" then I just write that down - this is a process that naturally grows because if I have the idea of, say, Virtuosos in When Stars Collide, this leads to other connected concepts. Is that the only form of travel? How do people who don't have Virtuosos travel? Who regulates the Virtuosos? Etc etc.
I write it all down as I go.
When I reach a point where the ideas that sort of naturally bubble up without effort stop, that's when I start using more traditional brainstorming and planning. So let's say I have 5 cohesive love interest concepts with some gaps in their planning. I start looking at them as a set and hammering out details. What is the age range, what are their backstories - and here is where I start making changes to my initial concepts so I can ensure there's a reasonable range of ages and personalities and concepts instead of overlap or obvious gaps I start really thinking about the plot and using things like mind maps to conceptualise the plot for each route.
I don't try to have the setting fully mapped out before I start actually doing the plot summaries because I'm more of a plantser (pantser + planner) than a full planner. I like leaving gaps for spontaneous developments and I still get stuck if I try to get too granular in my planning so I don't try to make myself do that.
2. At the beginning, how solid of an idea is the overall story to you, and how do you approach outlining it at first?
When I am starting out with a new project, I typically have a concept of a setting, a basic premise, and concepts of some characters (an MC, some love interests). Story-wise I often don't have as much. This is especially true in games like GS or Thornewood where the routes are all different. There's no way I have 6-9 solid plots in my head. That is purely brainstorming sessions to come up with plot ideas. Sometimes these ideas flow naturally out of the character concepts and sometimes they do not. Sometimes I brainstorm and mind map in a very technical, organised way because the ideas are not flowing forth from the muse.
When I sit down to actually outline the routes…
Typically I start with a short summary of what I want to happen or generally see happen - like literally 100 words.
Morgan ends up at Endgame but finds herself at odds with the council who is wary of her unexpected abilities. She gets more involved with Magnus after finding some common ground with him due to both feeling a little alienated because of their status. As her relationship with the council degrades, she finds herself wondering more and more if Endgame is the place for her. But when the council moves against her, she realises she may be part of a larger plot by Magnus to change the organisation forever.
So something like this is my initial plot concept. It's like a "back-of-the-book" blurb.
And I just start expanding it, adding more detail and more explanation. I sort of view it as if I'm explaining the plot to someone. Instead of "finds herself at odds with the council who is wary of her unexpected abilities"...
I'd expand it to "While Morgan is in the medical ward at the start, she ends up displaying uncommon abilities for a queen rank, such as mimicking Ari's teleportation - which leads to a delirious escape attempt - or even mimicking Magnus's king rank abilities, something queens aren't usually able to do. This makes the council wary of her as they realise that as an F-class queen, she may be more difficult to control."
Bit by bit, I expand this summary, getting more and more detailed with specific events and plot points until it's long enough I can look at it and divide it into acts, for example. Expanding it to the point I can sub-divide actually lets me say things like "Okay, well if this is the first act, then these are the plot elements I need to have happen so that the first act feels fleshed out." That helps me further expand while keeping track of the overall flow of the story. And I just keep doing that - expand, get more specific, more detailed. Then sub-divide. Expand the sub-divisions, add more detail and maybe sub-divide again.
I typically end up with about a 10,000 word summary with rough chapter and sometimes rough scene divisions. This is a detailed roadmap of the route, sometimes with specific scenes or dialogue pre-planned but mostly with enough openness for me to develop the characters and dialogue as I go. I may know there's a scene where Valerian falls and bruises their knee so Ivailo is helping them treat their knee with a healing potion. But that entire scene may get described in like…four sentences. So there's a lot of space for exploring dialogue, banter, spontaneous world building, and plot development.
It's still ultimately just a detailed summary, not a full line by line plan.
This means sometimes I get halfway into a route and realise the summary had some really bit plot gaps and plot holes in it that I'm going to have to fix on the fly. This is why I still feel this is more of a "plantser" strategy because despite being quite detailed it is also very, very open.
3. What kind of trial and error usually happens? How do you first explore character personalities and interactions, etc?
4. How much experimentation with the writing does it usually take you until you get the text that ends up in the game?
I don’t really consider this process to be trial and error or experimentation. It's just normal drafting and revising in my opinion.
I try to use the common route to learn the character personalities as much as possible, but often it's just an exploration as I go.
I do not attempt to get that stuff down perfectly in the first draft.
My first drafts (the potato draft, as I call it) are rough. They are not that funny, they do not have a lot of description necessarily or the best of the best banter I write.
I do view this first draft as me telling the story details to myself. As much planning as you have, you will never know the exact details of the plot and story and characters until you write them. Writing is an active creation process so. There can be and SHOULD be things that surprise you as you draft because your brain generated it on the spot as you were writing. Whether it's a quippy line or a world building element.
For me, the first draft is for that. To find those details, to untie those plot tangles. To get to know the characters, to learn the parts of the story I didn't know in advance or plan in advance.
The revision process is to refine that and smooth it out and to fix the problems and make it consistent so that others can enjoy the story too. Revision is really important to the way I write. How extensively I revise just depends on how well the first draft flowed. Some routes come out very easily. Some do not.
But I don't fuss over the first draft. I draft it efficiently and ruthlessly. Because I have to draft so much so fast, it is incredibly important that I do not try to get it perfect on the first try. When writing a 700,000 word game I cannot afford to write 150 words a day because I'm trying to get the words perfect. Or to fiddle with one scene to perfect it for 2 weeks. I have no intention to spend 13 years writing each game. So my strategy is very oriented towards drafting quickly, fixing later.
By the time I finish my first draft, I have a really good idea who these people are. That makes revising particularly fun because I can add in so much more life and colour and description and introspection and it's really when the story comes alive.
Some routes flow easily so I do one major revision and then a smaller clean up and done.
Others get two major revisions and then a smaller clean up. It just depends. Draft, Revise, Revise, Clean up, Done. That is kind of my strategy.
The fiddling with the text, funnily enough, tends to happen after it's coded and scripted into Ren'py because as I do things like code in sprite expressions I'll notice banter that can be improved, choice options I didn't consider previously, etc. And that's when a lot of that smaller tweaking happens.
So yeah, I hope that answered the questions. As with everything I have a lot of thoughts about writing and I know that not everyone agrees with them.
Hopefully this helps and I wish you the best of luck with your visual novel!
