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.
When writing the script for my visual novel HERO, I created a spreadsheet template to, quoting myself:
For the script itself, I created a template with some built in conditional formatting tools to ease the process. One detects what type of line it is—ordinary dialogue, internal thought, written & sent electronically through chat software, and narrative prose—and applies formatting automatically. That will keep those types straight for when they get coded, as each will have visual changes to the GUI—colors, fonts, etc—to indicate to players that they are different methods of communication. The other tool is a character count. Making sure there aren't too many words in a line or too many lines in a screen is important for a game where the primary interaction comes through reading. My research shows that optimal line length is about 50-60 characters, including spaces, with three lines maximum, to result in about 150 characters per screen of dialogue. I've budgeted for one additional line in case there's need of overflow for a hard stop of 200 characters. The template warns me by turning red if I exceed this limit. There's also space in the script allotted for asset management, indicating what sprite variations are needed for each line, to be filled in when coding occurs.
I made the actual cell size in the spreadsheet the size of what the textbox will be in game so I could see all the linebreaks while writing. Every line also has metadata for how the visual art is implemented. The idea is to export the spreadsheet data and run it through some automation code to apply the correct script formatting.
More info on the development blog.
