When you begin to create such media, there are things that you don’t necessarily care about.
You have a concept, a great idea, a unique theme, something that you want to present, the urge to throw lines of narrative content to the audience.
You imagine the joy of discovery and begin to play with what you think might become the epitome of an artist’s fantasy.
Then you immediately enter production mode, but then as you progress in the making of your little chef-d’oeuvre, you realize that everything becomes slower and finally, you wonder if you’re able to finish the whole damn project before it becomes a vaporware.
When it doesn’t come to completely halting it because of carelessness in the game design itself.

For the aspiring game makers, to prevent these states of uncertainty, there are techniques and means in order to create further beyond this point.
As artists or writers, there are little rules to follow so that you don’t lose your sight while you’re creating huge parts of universes.
They’re simple, really, but sometimes life is so that you wouldn’t always know them in advance.

I’m an artist!

First, you have to ask yourself if your creation is interesting. I know this might be a strange question to ask oneself.
You’re the one creating the thing, so why wouldn’t it be interesting? Sure, it IS! Well, it’s time to realize it might not be so.
To caricature this I’d like to ask this: is a media talking about the mating of Polynesian seashells interesting? Well it might be not.

When I mentionned interesting, I meant this: Is your creation interesting for the audience you’re focusing on?
Actually, it’s a very important question. Sometimes, you don’t take your time to think straight about this.
The media you’re about to create might already have an available audience. In that case, you should focus on the good recipes that will make your media a success. But in the case your media is a new genre, you will have to convince people to get to like it.

For example, in Japan, the readers of manga have lots of differences. That’s why there are “shounen”, “shoujo”, “seinen” and other themed titles. “Shounen” is aimed at majoritarily young males, who like sports, battles, romance, fantasy, comedy, sometimes mysteries and sometimes technology, whereas “Seinen” includes psychology, real life society themes, and often include lots of gore themes.

So you should probably think about who you’re talking to in your visual novel. It’s great to talk about the Shrödinger theories for instance, but for younger generations, or people who dislike philosophy (or other reasons), it’s just plainly boring.
So don’t assume your creation is interesting by essence.

The second thing you have to take care of is about your characters.
This should become your motto: is my character credible?
This is not only a matter of point of view because one would act this way and another would do it another way, but also a matter of character limitation. One wouldn’t act this way because of his background.
A character is never alone (but it depends on what you aim, if you want to create a monologue based story, why not?) so there is bound to be character relationships.

This is another aspect that is very important because in fictions, you tend to create consistent characters who have come through experiences, and these influence your character. Events between characters are an important element that will stimulate the emotional part, which is what makes us humans in the end. Yes, you now realize. You’re writing a story about human values.

You might even create small figures that litterally represent them so you know about their relationships.
For example, a french writer by the name of Honoré de Balzac wrote an awfully gigantic compendium of texts where armies of characters were used (la Comédie humaine). To find his way between all the relationships, he made small figurines of paper so that he wouldn’t forget who was with who at the time.
Nowadays, nobody would make such complex characters, but the idea of keeping his characters relationships under his eyes was quite smart.

It’s essential to grasp a concept that will be interesting. If you intend to use a light tone of narration, it’s best to keep simple characters. This is for entertainment, not for bringing up brainaches. That way, you’ll have categorized characters.

In manga again, you have several categories, such as meganekko (girl who wears glasses -megane- and who fits for serious roles) or the now popular tsundere (actually originally a male type character, transposed into a girl) which describes a girl who’s very bad at having a relationship with anyone but is actually very passionate.
Complex characters are more used in mature stories or stories that aim at being long stories, or in light novels. For example, self-destructive characters are mainly used in novels. Sometimes, a simple character becomes a complex character, just like when you patch a mmo game to update the contents.

It’s visual, man

The visual aspect is also very important. You’re doing a Visual Novel, so it relies heavily on visual elements, which include the character design. Ideally, you are a great graphist and have great colouring skills.
A common technique used even by pros is to draw them to study their facial emotions, their body postures. Sometimes their habits, their surroundings.

Creating a character is very draining because you will have to consider the atmosphere of your story, the character traits, their environment. You might even include their relationship (lovers sometimes like to wear the same style clothes) in the creation phase.

There are many ways to precess all of this. One way is to continue the ideas of another creator. I don’t mean to copy him/her, I mean that it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel. There are story bases that work and have proven that they work well.
For example, the introduction phase where the hero is woken up by: a childhood friend, a fairy, a litle sister, a panda, a disaster…
Don’t hesitate to document on this, to read and gather lots of elements from a series that worked. I’d say, this phase is just like when you begin to draw comics. You must have a favourite artist who has put lots of winning themes into his work recipe.

Take Bleach for example: you have school life, parallel worlds, mystery, fantasy, battles, evoluting characters, comedy, drama and so on. If you look at how this work is constructed, you will realize that the recipe is simple at first, then becomes more elaborate past some point.

One other way is when your work is definitively too unique. You’ll have to invent a recipe that works. It’s not an easy task, you’ll have to go out of known boundaries and sometimes it’s fatal since it’s out of people habits.

For example, Blame, an entirely visual manga, with extremely low dialogues, relying on visual rather than anything else. There are also independant gaming studios (Introversion, Digipen, universities sometimes…) that innovate to get out of the FPS, RPG, RTS orgy that pullulate the market.

I’m a player… Right?

Maybe in your game design, you intend to put a mini-game in order to make it more interesting. To be true, in the Visual Novel sector, mini-games tend to be rare. They’re here if they have a meaning to the VN. For example, there is a maid simulation, where you are to set the maids schedules, which will lead them to have, erm, intimate relationships with you, because you get to know them better. It’s not impossible so it’s credible.
In lots of simulations I’ve seen on the net, there are lots of “supermarket relationships” where you litterally win a girl as soon as you have the correct stats. It’s true that you will get more chances to cross a beauty if you are well fit, have the correct intellect and money, but the contrary is also true. It’s not automatic! So the mini-game that makes you manage your stats is only an excuse for the smut. But where’s the narration? Only when you meet your mate? You will have to seriously consider this if you don’t want your game to be too plain.
There are other games where you will play sports simulation, tour based strategy games and so on.
Please remember that these games are mostly for the fans and they will cost you more than they’ll reward you. Even if you’re skilled at programming, it’s no use if your story does not advance. Plus, it tends to take all your creativity energy away.
If you’re not a one man team, and if you’re not the main programmer, then it’s okay, but if you’re a one man team it’s of no interest.

Remember that pure games and I mean not the hybrid type, take lots of time to be developped. Sometimes for the best ones, it takes more than three years of development. You’re going to create a Visual novel, so stick to it and don’t go too much out of your league. The focus is characters and relationships. Sometimes it will be nothing but descriptive, sometimes the story will take a fork based on the reader’s choice.

For text-based games, it’s pretty hard to make the reader feel that the game is interesting. For example, CAPCOM, with its ace attorney series, placed lots of character animation, in the facials, the sprites and the audio effects. Because after about ten minutes of reading, one will begin to lose focus. You will also have to consider this.