IF Seal: Should I make a mostly linear IF and how could I include lots of choices?
dear if seal,
my heart leaps for joy with every post you make. while i've been able to pick up some advice here and there, i'm afraid that it is i now stuck in a dilemma of my own.
i've taken a break from writing if (thankfully before anything got too big!) due to burn out and inexperience, but i was able to use that time to finish a first draft for a novel! however, the vn/if enthusiast in me still thinks it would shine better in an interactive format, even with a semi-set protagonist (in name and in personality) and one (optional) love interest. i'm still on the fence of whether i should push through with this adaptation, so i'd like to hear your thoughts on it. maybe even share a few tips on giving the player a lot of choices to make despite being a mostly linear story?
thankies a million! <3
Dear Recovering Friend,
O, I am so grateful for your lovely comments! And I'm so very pleased that your burnout break has proven to be helpful to you. A huge congratulations to you for drafting your novel!
This is a subject which has made me wonder too, in various directions, and I confess I've not quite come up with an answer that I feel fully satisfied with.
The closest I've come is that where an interactive story shines is showing possibilities of different paths, endings, and varied development for the PC... but then of course some visual novels and certainly kinetic novels do not have that sort of variation, and are excellent in their own right.
I suppose what I am wondering for your context is: what sort of choices would you be looking at for your scenes? You've mentioned things being semi-set and linear, so I am envisioning something with only one ending, for example. And that's perfectly fine, many games only have one possible ending...
But that leads me to thinking about the choices you might like to give players on a smaller scale. Those might be self-expressive or self-reflective choices, or they might be smaller-scale actions that make small branches but then return to rejoin the core story in a branch-and-bottleneck structure.
I think it's worth thinking about how much impact you'd want your players to have on the story.
If your character is in a swimming competition, do you want the player's actions to be able to affect whether the MC wins or loses? Or would you prefer only to allow them to decide which race they swim in (and therefore who they're waiting with and talk to in the lead-up to the race), and they win or lose no matter what?
Either approach is OK if you've set up the expectations that you want to! It would be a pity if it wasn't so clear to players and they felt aggravated that their actions didn't feel as impactful as they hoped. So my suggestion is to take some time to figure out what you would like from an interactive version of your story, perhaps try writing a scene or two in the interactive format and see how it feels, and go from there.
Thank you for your question, Recovering Friend, and I hope you have fun!