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.
Thank you! I love your point about haptic connection-- that really is a term I was looking for when writing this but couldn't quite put my finger on.
After I wrote this piece, I was talking to Doris about how I'm used to certain writing elements in prose. As an example, using a series of short, staggered sentences creates a tense staccato effect which can be really effective for fast-paced and/or disjointed scenes. I remember reading advice from an author I admire about how you can also deliberately use run-on sentences to leave the reader with an 'out of breath' feeling (although you should break the 'rules' of language and grammar on a case-by-case basis, I think), which is also great for very fast-paced scenes.
Figuring out how to replicate this in Breathless Winds, which as a VN, only has dialogue (and some first-person input from the 'narrator', Poppy's internal monologue), has been a bit of a challenge, but also really fun and fulfilling. Since the text box only displays a line at a time, I've learned can effectively control the pacing of a scene using the length of lines and pauses between displaying them. Of course, VNs have the advantage over prose that you can set the tone with music, sound effects, and visuals-- sometimes, it almost feels like I have more tools to work with than I know what to do with, haha.
Yes, you're completely right! I remember a piece of advice I read that, ideally, every line should be able to stand on its own-- it should give the player something interesting so they're willing to click and advance to the next line. I've been trying to drastically minimize the amount of lines that are just "Okay" or even "..." since I learned that (unless the scene is intentionally supposed to be terse, but still).
Like you said, clicking rewards the player with more of the story, and ideally it should also reward them with new things to look at. Sometimes, this can just be changes of sprites or the introduction of smaller images, but I've started to be conscious of when to most effectively incorporate CGs or change backgrounds.
Without spoiling too much, there was a certain scene in one of the routes that was a lot of exposition about the history of an island. As I mentioned in the post, it mostly was just Rue standing in one location and talking. Then Doris suggested, "what if she showed Poppy a ruin instead to illustrate the history?". I'm glad she came up with that idea, because it makes the scene a thousand times better-- not only is it more fun to look at, but it's more interesting narratively to explore a ruin than to listen to someone tell you something.
