And that end abandoning their game, or totally rushing it because they don't wants to looks like a quitter.
I thought that the thread was precisely about how to not be like that...
Stick for a game for long, does in my eyes unfortunately not mean to have a plan. That would of course be nice, but there are also many examples of games, that go for long showing the MC just corrupting one LI after another without proper aim. And people who rush a game, might actually have a plan but rather capitulate in front of the amount of work they didn't expect and the lack of support they hoped for.
I don't think, one will ever be able to determine if a developer will finish a game or not, as there are too many unknown variables. And while people, who are rather unstructured might be more among those who quit a game without proper ending, they might also be more among those, who have interesting creative ideas and create interesting characters and give the lewd world something new and interesting rather than the XYZth "I'm a male MC who lives with his mother and his sisters, my father died and I'm determined to create a Harem with my sisters and my mother and any female I'll ever meet."-Game.
You understand that creating a game and storytelling aren't the same thing, right ?
Even a Kinetic Novel or a text based game do not effectively follow the same journey that writing a story.
There's a reason why movies starts with a storyboard, and books don't. When you works on a book, you seat and write. But when making a Kinetic Novel, you constantly switch between the text and the visual, you need a stronger structure as base for this, in order to always remember precisely from where you come from and where you are going.
Same for text based games, that imply branching, and therefore need for you to know where you need to go at the end of each path. And also where you have to pass through in each one, because by default you'll be tempted to follow the same route since it's the one still fresh in your mind.
I think, creating VNs has many similarities to creating stories, especially screenplay-writing, as VNs are basically visual told stories. For creating games with more gameplay and less story, there might be total other working processes needed. That's something, I can't speak about.
Regarding the movies: You're speaking about creating highly professional movies, with big budgets: Those are gigantic processes with many people involved, who are specialists and have quite different roles. You have the one who has lots of writing experience and creates a screenplay (basically a book that contains descriptions of the scenes and the dialoges is here only the first step), the one or maybe even some (as this might be a rather complex process) who are specialists in cinematography and image composition, who create the storyboard from the screenplay and finally the actors, camera operators, lighting-engineers, the director... who use the storyboard and the screenplay to create the scenes for the movie and then the many persons, who do cutting and post-processing. For any process with many people involved, you need very strong structures to avoid chaos as much as possible (what surely not always works in those cases). And also there there are quite different strategies. As far, as I know, for the TV-Show "Breaking Bad" basically every twitch of the actors and every camera-setting was pre-determined, where there are other productions that allowed for much more freedoms. I guess the early DOGMA-Works of Lars von Trier were surely rather produced with lots of improvisation.
For the future and with the available of more easy to use image-creation-tools, I wouldn't wonder if the roles of screenplay-author and storyboard-creator for movies might more and more melt together and the screenplay basically doesn't include descriptions of the scenes but already rough images. But that's just a guess. And I'm actually not sure, if this is even my idea or if I did read about this somewhere.
I actually was involved myself in creating some amateur movies as an actor. There was the creative person who wrote a very rough script, the one who had a camera, who was deemed camera man. Lighting... well... what??? And me and some other persons (including the creative and the camera man), who were determined to be actors and actresses. Script changes took partially place on set, dialogues were all improvised. The results were appr. 30 min long short movies, not professional, but actually quite funny. But we actually never published them just showed them some friends. I was also involved in creating some amateur music videos which were published, but also those followed mostly the same scheme.
Regarding image production: I recognize, that image production might cost more time than writing visualizations down in words, but I hardly think, that many VN-creators, even if they have the necessary knowledge of cinematography/visual story telling and image-composition think more complex than from scene-to-scene. So one will mainly need to know what the last scene was and what the next scene might be and then create the images accordingly.
Regarding creating branching without concept:
I agree, that the more branching one has, the harder it might be to follow without proper (pre-)structuring. I would at least say, one would need to track the whole story structure in a kind of diagram to not lose the track. Proper pre-structuring has surely heavy advantages to create a branching story to not lose track, but one can also not plan this all completely through, because during the writing process many things might just pop up, one didn't think about when pre-structuring. And the whole plot structure might change heavily, when one shapes out the plot and develops characters. They might just start to feel and behave totally different as one had initially planned that they should feel and behave and this might finally make big structure changes during the writing process necessary. I don't see this negative at all. Just a normal process.
I must confess, that I'm currently trying to create a script for a possible VN myself. And I couldn't do it without proper pre-structuring. I have just not the necessary skills for pantsing my way through the world. I have created a three-act-structure for a 4-week-long-story, layed out a rough idea, for what should happen every day and even tried to plan out any day before starting to write a single word and have now started to write the script for the first week. But I also see, while fleshing out the characters during this first week, that my initial idea might change quite a lot during the writing process, because the characters slowly develop a life of their own.
Finally from all I've seen and read, I really don't want to advise people who work rather unstructured totally against creating a VN. This might be harder and one can only give the advise to structure it initially just to make it easier, but it can still lead to very creative and interesting VNs, as long as the people have fun in creating.
