How to Fail at Interactive Novel Games

A comprehensive guide to how to fail at making an interactive novel game, this step by step process will help you fail guaranteed or your money back.

If you would like to learn to code, I recommend these great online courses! (It's what I'm using.)

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Music:
Doh De Oh by Kevin MacLeod

Elevator Music by Kevin MacLeod

[humman]

How to fail at creating game based on story? - Simply by writing a plot as nonsensical, strange and illogical as one in this video, another great piece of advice, as always ;)

[ysmqthlqyh]

What the hell did i just watch?!
This is some next level humor. Doing the answering the title question in the first sentence and an outro fakeout 20 seconds in, except the video really is over and the rest is just some sarcastic incoherent mess.
This entire video feels like a very good April fools joke.

[sukun]

Some new devs(like past me) often think VN is easier to work on if they got the art situation sorted out. Unfortunately writing good story and interesting dialogues are harder than most other things in gamedev imo.

[Steammoch]

As a fan of visual novels, this was very accurate

[Poruasecas]

You got it backwards, the way to fail at doing an interactive novel is by making it a game

[MeagenImage]

Fine, I'll do it myself

A good interactive novel relies on a compelling story and memorable characters, so don't have those. Definitely don't read any books or visual novels, because you might learn things from them and be inspired by their ideas and techniques. Instead, go read reviews of visual novels, preferably by people who don't like them, and note down the most frequently mentioned story and character tropes, and string those together loosely. This will ensure there is nothing about your writing that stands out.

If despite all this you still manage to come up with a story and you think it might be interesting or original, don't panic! You can still make a platformer around it instead (see How To Fail AT Platformers episode for more).

The medium of interactive novels gives you unique opportunities to grab and direct the reader's attention not possible with a book or movie, so avoid doing those when possible! Sure, you could have a sudden noise play in the middle of a block of text, effectively startling the reader, but it's much easier to write "Suddenly, [Main Character] was startled by a loud noise."

Narration is really the key here. Never take advantage of the medium by having things be communicated partly by the visuals or sound. Yes, you *could* have multiple portraits for each character to show different expressions and help in characterization, but that's too much work - just have the narration *tell* the reader they are sad, happy, wistful or ashamed, and then you only need the one image. And even if it seems like this medium is most suited to character interactions, relationship building, and conversations with meaningful choices, that doesn't mean you need to constrain yourself. Narration can do anything! You can describe a long military campaign, or a trek through uncharted wilderness, or a super intense fight between two highly-skilled ninjas, just by having text on a static background! Your reader will definitely be glued to their seat reading about all those awesome things and will not at any point think "you know, I could just go play a game where I do all those awesome things, on this very device that I am using to read this block of text".

And of course, make sure your text is hard to read. Most interactive novel engines will make it easy for you to set the text to an illegible font, or turn it eye-searing colors, or make it very hard to make out against the background. And what better measure of whether something is a game then that it has DIFFICULTY? Checkmate, haters!

[Greywander]

I feel like visual novels are one of the genres that really blurs the line between what is and isn't a game. At one extreme are kinetic novels, so called because the story simply moves forward in a straight line, no choices to be made, no challenges to be overcome, no branching paths, it really is a literal "visual novel". Then you have games like Ace Attorney that essentially combine a visual novel with a puzzle game, requiring you to pay careful attention to what's going on in order to solve the puzzles. TBH, a typical JRPG is actually three games in a trenchcoat: you have the combat, the exploration, and then the dialogue, which, you guessed it, is essentially a visual novel.

Perhaps visual novels aren't really a genre, but more a method of presentation. Kind of like cutscenes. If the whole game is just one big cutscene, that's not a game, that's a movie. But plenty of games use cutscenes, and some of them use cutscenes extensively (Metal Gear comes to mind). At the same time, visual novels do have a certain "style" to them that seems to set them apart as a unique genre. I feel like they're closely related to RPGs, as both have a heavy focus on the narrative and, in games with multiple endings, both put a heavy emphasis on how the player's choices affect the story. I think "RPG" as a genre is also multiple different genres pretending to be one, as Baldur's Gate, Skyrim, Final Fantasy, Dark Souls, Pokemon, and many other so-called RPGs have very little in common beyond the superficial. I guess what I'm saying is that I think visual novels are secretly RPGs, but a very specific type of RPG.

Now that I think about it, western RPGs were developed from tabletop wargames (see D&D), while eastern RPGs seem to have evolved out of visual novels. These two have no business being lumped together, and yet something about them makes them blend together so well. D&D isn't always dungeon crawls, and when it does venture into something with more of a narrative focus, the visual novel format suits it pretty well.

[ugib]

Short and sweet. I do love your pixel art for these videos, and the meme you took the time to draw was great here. Rapid fire dad jokes assisted by pixel frames = Winning.

[catharsis]

this video makes me so mad im gonna need to turn off my computer and play a game of sorts to calm down, this choose your own adventure book will do nicely

[lightcatdev]

at first i thought it was just a troll when the video "ended" but i was pleasantly suprised

[potatoheadpokemario]

Making breaching paths with choices that affect the ending does make a novel a game

[wobbachustash]

Hmm... Although this was a funny video, I am a bit curious.
In what ways could you fail at mixing interactive novel elements into a game? (For example, the persona games have some interactive novel elements for the "normal" sections)

[GammingPotato]

2 how to fails in under a month, you are really treating us. Loving the sarcasm.

[Okada_Caelun]

How to fail? at Interactive Novels (less sarcastic edition):

An Interactive Novel is, first and foremost, a novel - that is, a story. Therefore a successful IN should be constructed as a well-written story first and foremost.

The second point is the interactive element. Now, you COULD simply introduce mechanics and elements that require player skill to execute and progress the story. However, this is getting dangerously close to being a GAME and we don't want that. On the other hand, you could tell the story as it is, but then players might question the "interactive" label, and you end up with a Visual Novel. To be INTERACTIVE, but NOVEL, the reader should be presented with a number of choices allowing them to have an influence over the story. A well made IN would even go so far as to make some choices result in drastic alterations to the narrative, creating multiple routes that are each chapters long.
For example, if the opening chapter has the rebellion is raiding an imperial prison to free their leader, and they free the reader in the process, the reader might be given the chance to choose whether to join the rebellion OR to stop the prison break and redeem themselves in the eyes of the empire, resulting in two drastically different stories branching from the same beginning. Naturally, this is the successful option, so the option for failure is to present the player with minimal choices, and to make those choices either inconsequential (like what color of bowtie you wear), or irrelevant (like choosing what girl to be your date to a formal event, only for both options to accompany you anyway).

Lastly, remember that what readers want to see with an interactive story like this is how their decisions influence the outcome of the story, most importantly it's ending. So, obviously, the way to fail this is to make the only tangible effect of the ending being that the main character ends up romancing whoever the reader showed the most interest in, with only a single scene of the two characters in frame together to show for for it.

[Artindi]

People ether gonna love or hate this one.... But don't worry, next episode will be mostly normal... probably.

[simonw.]

well how about this.

no interactive stuff
or
make the novel bad

[bread]

These videos are helping me keep motivation so hard rn. The beginning is literally perfect for keeping away the doubts of failure. Can't fail if you dont try! Love these can't wait to see more

[twixchexmix]

My first experience with developing any kind of game was making a visual novel for my high school computer science class, and can confirm that I succeeded in failing to make a game for that project

[PortaTerzo]

This channel is criminally underrated, here is engagement, algorythm do your job.

[walugusgrudenburg]

Ace Attorney exists though. And it is almost certainly a visual novel, and almost certainly a game. Just because most aren't games doesn't mean all aren't. (anything that excludes the more game-like visual novels will also exclude puzzle games)