Size does it matter!

tofuyawn
In the picture above, my cat Tofu is exhausted by the heat

Regarding the blog post title, I am not referring to what you think! I am talking of course about a game’s size 😉

From time to time, I get asked the usual question “when game XYZ will be out”. It’s because of that if I made a thread in my forums where I TRY (more or less sucessfully!) to keep track of the status of my various projects: http://winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=3128

The main thing is, that I think I went a bit overboard with some projects. I won’t make names, but projects which have over 6 love interests… and maybe aren’t even normal dating sim, but RPGs!

I often ask for advice and feedback from users. Many times, it is very useful. Sometimes, not. A classic situation is this: I announce a new game, and a list of romances. Inevitably, someone is unhappy and writes the infamous “aww why I can’t romance character X!? sigh sob”. And too many times I changed my plan, to make everyone’s happy. But it was a bad move 🙂

Of course, it’s all my fault. It’s not like the users know what’s behind making a game or anything. They just look at what they will get, and of course they want more, or they want what they like (a specific character, a romance combo, etc).

Anyway, the thing is simple: you can’t think to have a game of over 100,000 words, or with a crazy amount of romances (8 characters or more) and hope to have it done in a year or so. I mean, it’s possible: look at PSCD! Writer made everything in about a year, over 200k words, 16 romances. Or Queen Of Thieves, under 6 months to write 150k words and 12 romances. But those are exceptions, not the rule 🙂

For example, Roommates took about 2 years to write (2 playable characters and 6 romances), Heirs & Graces too (4 romanceable characters, all yaoi), and so on. It’s very rare that a complex game is written in around a year.

The process itself

I’ll try to explain how it works, “behind the scenes”:

  1. I want to write game XYZ. Sometimes I post in forums/social media, other times people come to me with ideas, etc. Anyway, decision is made to start working on game XYZ.
  2. unless the idea was submitted by a writer, I need to look at the various writers submissions/portfolios before deciding who will write it. Once I decide, I can do on step 3.
  3. writer starts to write game XYZ
  4. writer sends me updates as he/she writes. I read it and give feedback. Usually, all it’s OK though
  5. if all goes well: repeat steps 3-4 until the game script it’s done. Might take a long time, since writing is not like coding, you need to gather inspiration, etc. But usually it’s done.
  6. if something goes wrong: here comes the troubles! It can be any reason. Health issues, daily job, etc. Anything, but there’s something that prevents writer from going on. In this case, I need to repeat step 2, until I find a suitable replacement writer.

Step 6 though can be much harder than it seems. Maybe the new writer is OK with what the other/previous writer did. Or maybe not, so he/she wants to rewrite it from scratch, because is faster, or because the style is too different, etc.

We all know the infamous legend of THE CURSED GAME (which shall not be named). In practice, for that game I repeated the first 4 steps, and then the 6th, for THREE TIMES already. For three times the story was started and then abandoned. And the new writer(s) decided to start from scratch every time… And if steps 1-4 could take 3-4 months each, you can see how it’s easy to “waste” already one year, without making any real progress!

What’s the solution?

Recently I started to think about a way to avoid this. Because it’s becoming a real problem, especially for some bigger games. And I think I got a possible solution: go back to make storyboards myself.

In the past, I used to spend quite some time making a sort of storyboard/draft of the story. In practice a sort of guideline of what happens in each scene. They would look something like this (remember this is my bad writing!):

##SCENE 02 ##
#Time: morning, ice cream shop. Amy is helping Lawrence since she can’t find inspiration to write poetry, besides today seems a very busy day. They’re working, when a customer behaves badly. It can be anything, either he refuses to pay pretending the ice cream is bad, or something else. Should be a petty excuse for not paying. Amy starts arguing with him saying that he must pay, when the man wants to leave, and pushes Amy out of the way. She almost falls down, and is furious. Lawrence runs there, and apologizes for Amy’s behavior and tells the guy that he can go now. The man leaves with a grin.
#CHOICES

 (yes it’s an excerpt from Never Forget Me storyboard!).

With a clear storyboard, detailing what happens in each scene, even if I have to switch/replace the writer mid way, it should be possible to keep what has been already written, maybe just review the texts, but not discard everything and start from scratch like happened too many times in the past!

I’ll need to spend a bit of my time doing this (Never Forget Me storyboard took me about a month to make) but probably in the long run it will save me a lot of time!

Of course, even using this system, if a game has a lot of romances or two playable genders, it will still take a lot of time to make. There’s no shortcut to write a long AND good story 🙂

20 thoughts on “Size does it matter!

  1. marjan

    for what its worth we are believing in you(or at least I do).
    if I could I would email each and everyone of game creators/developers/writers….. from bioware to bethseda I would but alas I can only encourage one….and that’s you…..don’t worry about it we can wait(I cant…im dying to play your upcoming games… but you know what I meant)so when your down or wanna change something for the worst(making less yuri romances in rpg’s or turning lesbians into bi’s(which I could deal with) and karma forbid straights) remember there is a Persian girl who believes in you….and wants a lot of romances for both genders(im not sexist) specially LGBT romances(cuz who doesn’t like LGBT) anyway keep doing what your doing…and your the best at what you do…but you already knew that

    Reply
  2. Bob The Mob

    I personally would be very interested in seeing stories you yourself wrote Jack. 🙂

    I only know of the one, and that was the original thing for SH, and I found it awesome! So I Think this is a great idea! 😀

    Reply
        1. admin Post author

          Ah yes true, that one too! 🙂
          In practice I started using external writers only from mid-2011, so starting with Spirited Heart’s Girl love, Winter In Fairbrook, Loren, etc

          Reply
      1. Tanagashima

        wow i loved the Heileen games they were how i discovered loren and found your site. i think it would be cool to read stories you wrote.

        Reply
      2. Bob The Mob

        My apologies, then.

        But indeed, such further proves my point! As I see it, you should DEFINITELY go back to doing at least a few stories on your own! 😀

        Reply
  3. Troyen

    Yeah, I’m surprised you stopped doing storyboarding. I thought you usually had at least a vague outline of what the story was supposed to become, even if it was a one-line sentence summary for each scene.

    We have a similar issue on the coding side with it being really tempting to throw everything out and start over because the old code sucks. But that’s often a very terrible business strategy – see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html for some real life examples of companies that screwed themselves always rewriting instead of delivering something new.

    Of course, there are still some situations where the writer might have written themselves into a corner and there’s no easy way out. Or maybe things that sounded good on the storyboard become riddled with logic holes as the details are fleshed out, and you need to go back and tweak the plot. So in some cases, a rewrite is acceptable, but it really needs a strong justification to sink the time and money into it.

    Reply
    1. admin Post author

      Yes I stopped doing it, in some cases because had no time, in others because writers didn’t want to follow it. But in this last case, some writer then also did a good job, while others screwed up. So giving too much freedom is not always good 🙂

      Reply
  4. DarkWolf

    On to the original question I think size does matter, if you want to have a really good storybased game I think you have to make it a decent size, there ceternly are some short storybased games that are still very good but those are exceptions not a rule.

    Reply
    1. admin Post author

      Well the thing is, what is the “decent size”? 🙂
      Excluding the japanese VN which are notoriously INSANELY HUGE (stuff like 300k words and more). Games made in the west? I once saw some company making story-based games boasting the fact that their latest game was 50,000 words! (including the code though, while Ren’Py calculates only the actual story text). So when I think about my games which are around 120-150k words… 🙂

      Reply
  5. DarkWolf

    I don’t think that you should exclude Japanese VNs as majority of OELVNs fans are also fans of Japanese VNs and it is unavoidable that people will compare your games with them. Like you said Japanese VNs in average have around 300k words so if you want a decent size I think should have at least 120-150k words. It is true that OLEVNs tend to have a lot less then that but to begin with serous OELVNs are a very new thing and up till few years ego nearly all OELVNs ware free games made for fun only and even now majority of OELVNs developers that sell their games are aiming for a nice short game sold for low prices rather then trying to make a really good game. For example If a company that up till now made only few short 10k words OELVNs sold for 1$-3$ made a 50k words long game offcourse they would bust about it as they “leveled up” as company but if a company that was aiming higher and used to make longer games jump back to making short ones and aiming for an nice games that would be a “level down”. Offcourse there is noting wrong with releasing a few short ones in between main games, even some huge Japanese VN developing comapies do that but that is a different thing as completely jumping down to making only shorter games. Also OELVNs are increasing in both length and quality in general and from my impression companies that make longer OELVNs and aim for very good games do seem like they want to try to cach up with Japanese VNs. It is true that your games are among longest OELVNs but it is because of that that you are considered one of biggest OLEVNs developers and why Winter Wolfs is among most popular OLEVNs developers excluding developers supported by localization companies such as Sekai Project.

    Reply
    1. admin Post author

      Considering how hard is to make just games with 150k words, I definitely cannot (and don’t want) to make games comparable in size with the japanese VNs. See all the posts I made recently about being tired of working for 3+ years to make a game (and the fact that if I continue to do that, I’d be out of business very quickly).
      But beside all this, the thing is – I’m really moving away from pure VISUAL NOVELS. I want to make story based games, but mixed with gameplay. My last “true VN” was Bionic Heart 2 back in 2013 🙂

      Reply
      1. DarkWolf

        I understand that you can’t do it now but that doesn’t mean that that won’t change in future, who is to say that in 5-10 years Winter wolfs won’t grow to be one of those big baddest companies with 1000’s of workers for you to whip 🙂 . VNs popularity is growing in west so it is possible. And didn’t you say that Roger Steel is going to have 300K, as I see it if that ones turns to be a big success it is natural that you would want to try it again.

        Reply
        1. admin Post author

          Yes that game will be 300k 😀
          The main issue I see with it, is that if I have a 300k words game I should price it at $29.99 like those japanese VN (they’re even more expensive) but I’m not very confident it’s a viable strategy here in the west. Anyway, we’ll see!

          Reply
  6. Ricardo Belo

    Couple of rather unrelated things i wanted to say/ask

    First, because of PSCD’s sales, will PS2 get delayed/cancelled? It seems its thread is not very active as of late. I loved the setting and it seems some artwork is already done for it, no?

    Second, from what i read in the forums & even in your previous news posts, i seem to get the impression you are putting way too much weight on the art being the main reason the game did not sell. I would like to say that while i own almost all Winter Wolves games/VNs on Steam, what made me not buy Colonial Defense was the fact it was advertised as a Card game.

    I remember the first time i took a look at its store page, my initial reaction was “Oh, so this is like a “Planet Stronghold Tactics” but with a card game…”

    Also At the time of its release, that was also the general consensus that i got from both VN Steam groups & fuwanovel forums, everyone told me that the game was too focused on being a card game.

    While now i know thats not true, that was the reason that made me & 2 other friends i know of to not buy the game. While people saying the art was weird did exist in all of those groups/forums, the predominant argument for shying people away from the game was the card game focus (or at least it seemed so).

    Just wanted to give my 2 cents on this 🙂

    Reply
    1. admin Post author

      Thanks for sharing your info, that’s interesting. I still think the art mattered a lot, but for sure also the gameplay type.
      However, as you probably know, you can play the game in “VN Mode”, like I’m doing with several future games. So in this case people could still play it without ever seeing a card 😉
      Of course if people wanted a RPG, that’s another thing. But if they wanted to play it as pure VN, then it’s one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) visual novel I made! So this leads me to think that even art had some weight.

      Regarding PS2 no, it’s not cancelled! We plan to get to work on it next year. The artwork is at good point (character and CGs are all done, we need to do some GUI/items stuff).

      Reply

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