Why Flowcharts?
Why am I so obsessed with flowcharts, one might wonder?
I wanted to add them into Changeling, I did add them in GS, I've added them in WSC and I'll be putting them in Thornewood...so WHY?
It's a lot of extra work and is it really worth it?
The truth is I'm really interested in the part of game development that has us communicating to the player about the story and choices - whether it's ways to better communicate what the choices are doing so players can better analyse the story content and make informed choices that will lead to their desired outcome. Or if it's communicating about how you're navigating through the story and what else exists that you aren't seeing.
Flowcharts are just one way of showing people what their choices are doing and where they're heading.
There was an incident I remember while watching a Changeling Let's Play where someone made a choice where Nora had to answer a question. And someone signalled to Nora that she was about to say the wrong thing - and what the correct answer was. So the changed the answer she said from what the player chose. The player took it as a sort of fake out option but what was really happening behind the scenes was that she chose an answer that could have led to some bad endings - but the game did a check against her cumulative score and because she'd been choosing desirable answers overall, it shifted her away from the bad endings and allowed her to continue the story.
That incident really struck in my and head and I've always thought since then..."If there was just a flowchart, she'd have known what happened there."
I think they're a useful communication device about the shape of the story and the path you're travelling when you go through it.
In the Chapter 7 flowchart for When Stars Collide, you can see that there are only four scenes shared between all the characters. The red lines show Asher's path through the story and you can see how that stacks up to other characters as well as just the sheer amount of story there is to replay for the other characters. The purple boxes are the scenes for the "No LI off ramp", which isn't a full path of course.
You can compare it to the Chapter 6 flowchart which is much less bulky because it has a lot more "shared" content between the routes and is, overall, a much shorter chapter (literally less than half the size of Chapter 7).
I don't think that flowcharts are a perfect communication method (that's why I have other features in WSC too) but I still really like them in visual novels and other branching story games.
As someone who is quite visually oriented, I like being able to "see" the story as a shape so that is why I like including them.
The flowcharts in WSC have been an adventure because they are SO HUGE. Every chapter is essentially the content for 6 different characters all crammed into a single chapter. It just makes the flowcharts these huge chonks.
But they're still really fun to see once they are put together.
Anyway, that's all for this little developer interlude. Hope everyone has a nice week as I continue to pull this chapter together. We're at about 70 % and are down to art and then things like the remaining bits of flowchart as well as glossary articles and things like that.
Exciting! It's a huge chapter with a lot of action.
