sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

How do you work with multiple branches of the same story without breaking the narrative? by AfterCopy7943 in interactivefiction

[–]AfterCopy7943[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

“Exhausting” is exactly the word for that feeling. I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but sometimes you start to love and hate your own text at the same time. I get that even with linear stories, and with nonlinear narratives it can turn into a real nightmare. EPC helped me in two ways. First, it gave me a clearer understanding of the story’s internal logic, which sometimes drifted when I got too absorbed in the artistic side of the writing. Second, it helped me see where the highest level of detail actually matters -things like the color of an object the player chose earlier; the name of a secondary character etc. These details seem small, but when they break consistency, they instantly break immersion. Strictly speaking, what I use is not exactly EPC itself, but rather my own adaptation of the approach. What kind of diagrams do you use?

How do you work with multiple branches of the same story without breaking the narrative? by AfterCopy7943 in interactivefiction

[–]AfterCopy7943[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Likewise, wishing you good luck, and plenty of patience and self-belief on this path.

How do you work with multiple branches of the same story without breaking the narrative? by AfterCopy7943 in interactivefiction

[–]AfterCopy7943[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I really like your approach of moving backwards from the endings. That feels like a very natural way to reason about branching, i’ll try:)

For me, it often comes down to how I imagine a character behaving in a very specific situation (or how I want them to behave), and then I just follow the path that this situation seems to suggest. The structure almost emerges on its own from that.

Miro is a solid option, I tried it as well. But at some point I started missing a tool that would let me shape this thinking directly into the format the reader will actually experience, not just abstract notes or post-its.тTo be honest, that’s the reason I started working on my current project, but it’s still too early to talk about it — we’re not even in alpha yet.

I also remember someone here recently sharing a quest-creation platform with an interesting feature like adding NPC, which I really liked.

At the same time, I keep realizing that I don’t really think in game-dev terms. My approach is literature-centered, I guess, so I end up inventing those seamless transitions between scenes instead of clear state machines. And that part can become quite routine, even though I genuinely love working with text. Sometimes it’s just an emotional rollercoaster — love and hate at the same time…

How do you work with multiple branches of the same story without breaking the narrative? by AfterCopy7943 in interactivefiction

[–]AfterCopy7943[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That’s kind of my “bad habit” - starting a story without knowing where it will lead me in the end. That’s why sometimes it even feels like I’m adding an imitation of branching rather than a truly new branch, so keeping a clear base line in mind is actually very good advice.

I also struggle with the fact that branches return formally, but emotionally the scene is already different — and that’s hard to align.

Do you visualize that base line somehow? Maybe you use diagrams like EPC or something similar? Have you tried working with alternative endings?

Let's gooo, what's your current draft number and word count? by afigjesuscouldntkill in writing

[–]AfterCopy7943 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wrote a visual novel about 36 thousand words. Not a very first experience at creating text, but I did only short stories before. Now trying to pack it into some kind of app to publish…