A program that helps me keep track of visual novel story.

[lekto]

In simple terms, visual novels are games where you have some text and then a choice to make. Each choice can change the story and the ending. Depending on choices, some games can give you tens or even hundreds of different versions of the same story, which makes tracking what you tried and what the outcome difficult.

I tried to keep track of it in a text file, but it wasn't readable after a while.
I tried to draw it as a flowchart in LibreOffice Draw and Dia, but each time I wanted to add a new branch, I had to move everything around, and it was easy to make a mistake or make it unreadable.

Are there better programs to make flowcharts or tree graphs? Or maybe there are completely different, but better solutions for this?

[pjp]

Depending on choices, some games can give you tens or even hundreds of different versions of the same story, which makes tracking what you tried and what the outcome difficult.

Rather than worry too much about potential problems, solve the one you have :)

Have you looked at any of the visual novel game engines? Renpy is the one I've heard of, but I've never used it. But I would start there.

If that doesn't have any support for organizing branches, I'd focus on scenes.

Write a story for a particular scene with one branch. Maybe it's the main branch, or maybe it's only the first branch you think of.

Within a scene, I'd use some sort of editorial note about a branching possibility. Scene 1, Branch 1 or whatever, indicating the primary path through the story, or simply the first path you wrote. Unless I had an active thought about any other branching (Sc1Br1.1, 1.2, etc) I'd continue the scene as if had no other branching.

Depending on your writing workflow, you could go back to branches within a scene and expand them, or simple continue with other scenes.

I'd prefer to focus on one primary path until I was finished with a rough draft. During that process, I'd certainly make notes about branches, but I wouldn't focus on them. I'd write whatever notes or ideas came to me in the moment to get them out of my head, but I'd mostly focus on the primary goal of finishing a first draft.

In that way, I'd have Act I Scene 1 - 5, etc. If in Scene 2 you have 3 branches, then simply have Act I, Sc. 1, Br 1; Br 2; Br 3. Physically I'd probably work in files that contained scenes and I would separate branches into their own files. And of course the "acts" as folders. To me that focuses on what I'm working on, organizes it, and minimize some of the mess you were referring to.

But I've never tried anything like that, it just seems like a natural flow (for me).

As for tracking the overview, I would expect to use something like a table of contents with brief descriptions of what happens in the different branches. It is not uncommon for authors to make mistakes of continuity or character inconsistencies, etc. And that's without branches.

Are there better programs to make flowcharts or tree graphs? Or maybe there are completely different, but better solutions for this?

I've not used it, but this reminds me of something I once came across but never used:
https://github.com/teriflix/scrite

This could actually be the same tool as I thought it had "scribe" in the name.

In the one I'm thinking of, it had "note card" style that could be visually linked together and that sort of thing. I decided it was a tool of avoidance rather than facilitation :). At least one very successful other used an old DOS application long after DOS was "dead." I forget who.

[Goverp]

lekto,

app-office/obsidian::guru seems to be popular at the moment, and IIUC can handle a mesh of linked files, which I guess is what you need. I've installed it, but yet to use it myself - not enough time to read the quick start guide

[pingtoo]

I wonder if this is a good use case for using AI. Especially using Google's NotebookLM. I been playing arouind it for a while now. I found it easy to help me track a subject and help me better organize the thoughts. I have tendency jumping from place to place without thinking specific but by putting the thoughts in to the notebook and let it generate a more organized output help me focus on the idea. Because one subject usually take me multiple days/weeks I tend to think differently from day to day and the AI generated output help me understand each of my idea relate to the subject.

[pa4wdh]

Not specific for your use case, but media-gfx/graphviz might come in handy, albeit with a steeper learning curve.
It allows you to write a text file to describe nodes (for example dots) and relations (for example lines) between them, optionally with some text remarks with them. The actual graph will then be generated for you, so there is no need to manually edit the graph.

This is the language use in the text files: https://graphviz.org/doc/info/lang.html

[penguinomicon]

It may help if you tell us about your implementation. I guess the typical way to make a game like this would be to have an engine for handling I/O and tracking state, along with some sort of way of defining the nodes and the links between them. These node definitions might be XML, json, a DSL, or a generic scripting language like Lua. Am I wrong?

So, similar to the graphviz idea, I suggest Doxygen could be the way to go. Whatever the scripting/markup is that you use for inducing the story-graph (nodes + links), it seems like it is possible to tell Doxygen how to extract that information. I found https://stackoverflow.com/questions/421 ... ension-ini which is ostensibly about INI files, but a couple of the answers appear to be generalizable to arbitrary formats.

[C5ace]

Database (B tree).

Code: Select all

Story Start 0 -> Chapter 01 -> Chapter 011 ....
                            -> Chapter 012 ....
              -> Chapter 02 -> Chapter 021 ....
                            -> Chapter 022 .... 

Can probably be created using LibreOffice Base or MySql