Hello, Amelia here, the writer for Breathless Winds. It's been 250,000+ words, countless revisions, and three years since this game entered development, and I wanted to talk about what I've learned leading up to release.
The concept for Breathless Winds was actually sort of a joke between friends. I was talking with Doris about how there should be a dating game where you play as a trans woman and your dating options revolve around certain ‘tropes’ we’d both seen in trans fiction-- the totally accepting cishet guy who falls in love with the trans heroine before she even knows she’s a woman, the cool trans woman who the heroine doesn’t know if she wants to date or wants to be, and so on.
Doris wound up suggesting we make this game ourselves. We both like visual novels and want to tell LGBT stories. Still half-jokingly and half-seriously, we started fleshing out what the romance options would be and coming up with a setting-- and soon, we were fully committed to making this game real.
I enjoyed various aspects of this reflection, but in particular the report on the experience of writing. I’ve suspected for a while that, if push comes to shove, the writing in visual novels isn’t really prose. From the reader’s point of view the haptic connnection’s different, and for the writer the text-box adds a formal constraint—even if your ‘text-box’ is the whole screen.
Prose broken up into constrained electronic units through which readers must click/press/swipe does exist, of course: you can read a novel on a screen or an e-reader. But (leaving aside the absence of images) those divisions and constraints are abritrarily imposed in transmission, like a typesetter’s pagination choices in a printed book.
i agree visual novel writing (and interactive fiction and electronic literature as a whole) isn't what we usually consider prose. i often think of the writing as one of the components of a narrative system.
in working with interactive fiction and visual novels, i've come to realize that the components need to harmonize into a whole. we can look at this in the micro level: a book can rely on paragraph to punctuate the pacing, but a visual novel uses the click of a button to advance a line or two. this means that the density and content of each click matter. you need to make the player reflect on what they just read and keep clicking. i like to compare it to incremental/clicker games like Cookie Clicker except instead of getting more cookies, we need to get more interesting text and audiovisual feedback that reveal the worldbuilding even more.
on a more macro level, we also need to see how text resonates with the visuals, the UI, the music, the sfx, and other aspects. i've read a few japanese visual novels where the text describes someone wearing a different shirt from what is visualized (usually because the visual novel was rushed in production) and it broke my concentration. you probably want to doublecheck the text and audio-visuals for that. in 31st March, Midnight, we changed some of the text to reflect the backgrounds made because it's such an easy fix. also, you can actually turn the other audiovisual elements into "subtext". music is especially great since you can create a dissonant soundscape with the text to alienate the player if that's what you want.
(i wouldn't encourage it uncritically though. people already have a difficult time making out audio and visuals without tooltips that work as reader-friendly boxes. i often write the "intent" of the usage in these boxes, so people with difficulty hearing or visualizing can at least understand what they're supposed to be interacting with.)
the tldr is that i think visual novels are less novels and more interactive fiction. and this includes the linear "kinetic" novels where the player simply clicks till they reach the credits roll. you can always try this experiment: copy the entire script of a visual novel and try reading it on a document. you'll find the pacing off from the way sentences are cut and there is a lack of audiovisual feedback. visual novels are in a pretty interesting space because of that and i'm glad to have read this devlog too since it's pretty interesting.
