Writting VN vs writting book
I had this very interesting question on twitter, and I wanted to give a developped answer so here it is !
Because VN is helped by the illustrations, CGs, character sprites, etc, is it correct that writing for VN easier than writing for books? Is there any difficulty for VN writing that is different from books specifically?
I actually think it’s harder to write for VN than for a book.
More seriously here is why :
Visual references
Having visual references help when you struggle with description, but it’s also a VERY BIG tie. Because you will have to work hard (or pay a lot) for all of those assets, they necessarily need to be limited. In a book you are completely free to just let your imagination go where you want, but in VN you have to think « dang this scene is so cool but I definitely can’t afford a new background just for this ». and tweak it or just completely drop it. Same goes with NPC (according to your level of perfectionism though, a lot of people don’t care if there is nothing or just shadows).
Also, I guess I am bias because I am writter and director, but I spend a lot of time gathering references and writting description for the art assets beforehand, so in the end drawn or not, I still have to think about them anyway, maybe even more since when I was writting for novel, I only thought about characters and stay vague about landscape lol.
Finally, I believe the style for VN is a bit different, since it often involves more dialogue it’s not simpler or harder, but when you are used to one it can be difficult to change. I, for example, always feel the need to repeat what is on the screen. I show the character bow but I also said « he bows », some people think it’s redundant and I kinda agree, but I can’t help it. So it’s not even like if the visual aspect helps to cut some narration lol.
Linear VS choices
It depends if the VN is kinetic or not, and if not if there are a lot of choices or only a few. But creating meaningful choices (like I want to do in Anoldor) with a real impact on a game is also very hard. You have to write a lot of variations of the same scene, sometimes entire new scenes according to the choice you made. It can be tedious and a bit overwhelming sometimes to remember all the previous choices and their consequences to give them a real impact on the game. You also have to make sure that the important information is always said etc. when writing a book, you don’t have this kind of problem since the story is linear.
Being a writer is never that easy, and book have their own struggle (I guess being part of a team also help staying motivated for example), but no, I really don’t think that writing for VN is more easy :p