I’ve been there! I put together a couple of interactions with sprites and working code, then stopped and realized that though I have a beginning and an end, I don’t have a middle???
The following is how I laid out the storyline for the Attuned. Following these three steps will help you start roughing out the story for your visual novel game as well!
Research World Events Related to Your Topic
Layout Your Timeline and Decide Where Your Story Starts
Put together a rough hero’s journey
Research World Events Related to Your Topic
Reference, reference, reference!!
Just like your drawings will look better if you gather references, your story will be stronger if you gather references for it! This doesn’t need to be real historical events, either. Find pieces of fiction with similar storylines to yours and research how their writers tackled their story.
For the Attuned, this manifested in hours of research of the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the American Civil War, the Haitian Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Toussaint Louverture.
I knew the story was going to be set during a civil war and I also knew I’m not a genius! There have been plenty of real life civil wars and I don’t need to try and come up with a believable one from scrap.
Crash Course on YouTube is an excellent source to expose you to a ton of information in a short amount of time and I highly recommend checking them out. A lot of the time, there’ll be really interesting pieces of information they present in their videos you can then do further research on to broaden your understanding and add to your story!
During the research phase, I took tons of notes as this not only helps the information stick better in our minds, but it also gives me something to reference back to when I’m fleshing out different parts of the story.
How do the people feel when the revolutionaries declare the dissolution of the higher rights of the first and second estate? Well, my bebe the French Revolution gonna help me out with that one 🙂
Now armed with a ton of notes related to your story, it’s time to…
Layout Your Timeline and Decide Where Your Story Starts
First things first, write down every major event that you currently know of (this doesn’t have to be everything and it can definitely change in the future). With all major events written down, you can then start rearranging them in a linear timeline that makes sense.
I used procreate to make my timeline, as I’m a very visual person and the art program allows me to move events around as needed without having to rewrite anything! Do whatever works best for you and keeps you from getting distracted while you layout your timeline.
With our timeline sussed out, we need to decide where the story starts!
“Wouldn’t we start the story at the start of the timeline?”
I hear you barking, big dog 😉
The problem with starting a story at the beginning is there’s a lot of extra extra we need to get through to get to the juicy part and readers (myself included) have no patience for that. We don’t want to watch a cheezeburger get made, we just want to eat it! Ring the dinner bell when dinner is ready, not when you’ve just slapped it on the grill 😉
With the Attuned, we have 3 major events we’re skipping over to get to our starting line. Not only does this let us get to the cheezeburger faster, but because we have events that happen before the story starts I know what the general feel/emotions of the characters should be. This’ll make the story/world feel more believable.
Let’s look at The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. There are tons of interesting events that happen before we step consciously into the world; a war happens, our protagonist is abandoned to a tree, that same tree gets infected by an evil curse, even the creation of the world is highlighted in a really interesting way, though we don’t get to play through any of this. We hop right in as the tree is deathly ill and an evil man is attempting to get his hands on a few magic triangles. We get right to the meat of things.
Why? What does this do for us, the player? Well, not only does it allow us to step right in as Link, but it gives us motivation and an understanding as to why we’re doing what we’re doing. Why it’s so important. We’re motivated to take down Ganondorf as he’s the reason we’ve lost both our parents (our mother and the Great Deku tree). He’s proven before the game starts how evil he is and that he needs to be stopped.
So, when picking a starting point on your timeline, I’d ask myself the following:
Where is the main event?
What event will serve both as a setting setter and as motivation to keep going for my player?
Is there something spicy right after this event?
Don’t save the big plot twist. Exploring the ramifications of the plot twist will bring up tons of interesting questions that will keep your players hooked, but saving a plot twist for “later” means there’s a whole lot of nothing to go through to get to that point and not many players (myself included) will be willing to wait for it.
In LOZ OOT we spend most of the time exploring the ramifications of the big plot twist by trying to undo Ganondorf getting his hands on the triforce.
Put together a rough hero’s journey
We’ve researched your story’s events and put them in a timeline. It’s time to take your player character and put them on their hero’s journey!
You can absolutely use a different model if you prefer, I used the hero’s journey because it best suited my needs. I recommend using some kind of template though, as it’ll help layout your story beats.
Start your journey from the starting point in your timeline and take some time to fill out each section. It’s alright if you have to skip around or if you’re not sure what certain parts of the hero’s journey are going to look like. The point here is to keep that pencil moving and get a cohesive rough draft.
What does the Hero’s Journey look like for LOZ OOT? Let’s take a look at it to help give us an example…
Tracy Culleton’s breakdown of the Hero’s Journey (along with the rest of her website) is extremely helpful:
For me, I was easily able to put down the start and the finish of the journey, but really struggled with the ¾ side like the Transformation stage. I’ve put something vague down for now and expect that as I continue to flesh things out that more ideas for the Transformation will come to me.
By this point, you should have a clear direction to run in with your story. If you don’t, that’s okay!! It’s important to keep moving your pencil and write until ideas start to come together.
Writing a visual novel game is hard, but you can absolutely do it. Stay focused, drink water, and make it work!