Thank you for the reply!
No, no, I was actually hoping for this sort of in-depth feedback, as it better helps me figure out potential issues! I will try to answer your points one by one.
Can we get a hint as to who the abbreviated named are supposed to be?
I tried making the markers as self-explanatory as possible, but I can see how people might have an issue getting my thought process.
Basically anything like "Grl", "Bys", "StuXX", "TchXX" etc. are random minor characters, which are not necessarily needed to be named - "Girl(s)", "Boy(s)", "StudentXX", "TeacherXX" and so on. Yes, I used "T" for "Teacher" in the first scene, and it's different because my marking style haven't clarified yet, and I haven't fixed it since.
If anyone else has an issue with these, here is a full list:
MC - "Main Character", probably the most obvious one
FMC - "Female Main Character"
MCF - "MC's Friend", Takeda Shin'ichi
Toko - FMC's Friend, Nishida Touko. I wanted to introduce her to provide a third person's perspective on FMC, from someone who knows her and actually likes her.
This is the main cast. As for the secondary/side characters (in order of appearance):
T - "Teacher", used in the first scene - I should actually make it either consistent with the rest of the script, or use smt like "Ondr" as a shorthand for her name.
HM - "Headmaster"
Grl - Used whenever there is a female side character talking, which I don't intend to name
Bys - Same as above, but for male. In the first script, I unnecessarily used it for MC&MCF (line 79), which I just noticed. Fixed.
Stu - Short for "Student"
Tch - Short for "Teacher"
Fjm - Fujimori, the stiff male teacher
Ymnk - Yamanaka, the school nurse
Tnnj - Tennouji Akira, Judo captain, (former?) boyfriend of Imamura Kyouko and the catalyst for this game's story
FMom - Shin'ichi's mom
Immr - Imamura Kyouko - A self-centred, popular chick, who tried banging Kenji, only to accuse him of an assault after he rejected her
Knj - Shiozawa Kenji - Akira's friend. Expelled from the academy due to Imamura's charges against him
Crwd - "Crowd"
Aizw - Aizawa, the kind music teacher
Kkch - Kakuchi, the hard-ass P.E. coach
Yes, my markings are a complete mess, I apologize for this. The truth is, I am working on this completely alone, and a lot of this stuff I have in my head already, so I did not feel the need to make it consistent, but I guess if I am going to ask for feedback, I should make it clearer to other people.
First impression: Wow, you've already done a pretty good job here. Nice work. I guess you've done creative writing before?
I actually haven't xD
Not much, anyway. I wrote occasional short stories here and there, like a character background story for an RP forum or a short introduction to a story which popped into my head after listening to some anime OPs and such, but I lost most of it since I never really cared all that much about it. Then there's also the fact that I've spent a lot of time in my head, thinking up movie scripts, though I never considered them to be anything serious, just a way to kill time when I was on a bus. I'm mostly going by gut feeling, and basing myself on some writing theory I looked up online, so it makes me really happy you would say this, thank you!
Second: mechanically so hard to read! the text indent between the speaker name and the dialogue ruins the line wrapping (i guess you maybe did it in a word processor with a tab stop? anyway, it's hard to read in text file format). Consider either doing it like Renpy dialogue, or script writer style
Aaaah, yes. My friend, to whom I've sent this for a review, mentioned something similar. I am working on this in Notepad++, this is why the formatting is so weird - I've defined my own "Ren'Py Script" language, which is not
actually Ren'Py script, just a way for me to quickly identify and write what I have in mind, so that I don't have to spend those extra seconds typing <, i, > and <, /, i, > for italics for example. The indents make it much easier for me to identify what is going on, but I can understand how it might be breaking the flow of text on another machine... I will try looking into those other styles.
the "MC's internal thoughts" asides seem wrong somehow. perhaps they are written in the wrong viewpoint or tense? First person is good for novels, but in a game it's more of an interaction between game MC and player, so using second person can work better. (There's a good post here in the devs section that does a thorough breakdown of the pros/cons of different tenses/viewpoints/active/passive styles and how they suit different game types. I wish I could find it for you.)
I wanted to use the first person because I considered this to be sort of a personal transformation story for the MC. Also, when I think about classic Japanese visual novels, they very rarely use second person for narration, it's more of a western AVN thing. I was also basing myself on Pale Carnations with the
(Internal monologue) vs. Narration. The idea originally was to introduce two levels of MC's consciousness to better emphasize the internal conflict between his desires and his consciousness rejecting them, though now I am not sure how this is going to come off as.
Why does MC react like this? Are there no female students allowed in the building? Is she not in uniform? it seems he doesn't know or recognize her...
Yeah... Originally I used "kid" there, in that classic "Oh, this little girl stumbled into our scho-OW, why are kicking me!" gag, then changed it into "girl"... I just wanted to show FMC having a sore spot when it came to her being a shrimp and a washboard.
you could improve on the reason for why simply expelling MCF would be a bad thing for Itsuwari college: perhaps his placement there is not just a recommendation by a teach, but is also a scholarship via a local religious organization, so there would be community anger at the fancy school not helping disadvantaged students enough...
I actually
don't want it to be a bad thing for the academy. Not necessarily. The idea isn't that the school is going to lose someone valuable, but that this is going to permanently remove Shin'ichi's option to fulfil his dream in the future. The school couldn't actually care less about him, since he's far from being a great student, and his attitude - from the staff's perspective - leaves much to be desired. This, I hoped, would create a situation where MC has kind of personal stakes in this affair, pushing him into ultimately accepting Sayuri's deal.
Making Shin'ichi's expulsion a loss for the academy, I feel this would actually weaken the reason for MC to enter this relationship with Misaka, since he could just use
that as a leverage in negotiations with the Headmaster. I could still make it a purely emotional affair, and I sort of want to do that, but introducing some third-party organization contesting this deciscion kind of feels like something coming completely out of the left field...
Shinichi knows who the mysterious girl is, with a lot of details about her reputation. yet somehow his best friend has never seen her before. One solution would be to make her a recent transfer student (although you'd need to adjust the backstory i.e. Shinichi knows about her exploits from a cousin at her previous school or something). EDIT: i see that later in the script that there are many other students who know her. So the fix is to make MC recognize her, but he is afraid of her due to her reputation, even though he has never spoke to her before.
- then we find out from the conversation with Aizawa and the Gym girls that Sayuri is in the same *year* as MC, yet he doesn't know of her....
Well, I might have gotten the wrong idea from the Japanese media, as my only real experience in Japan was with university students, but I didn't think that everyone would know everybody else, just because they are in the same year. Misaka herself is sort of trying to keep a low profile, and MC wasn't particularly interested in social happenings, with his only real friend being Shin'ichi. The idea here was that, those who come in contact with her know her, but she's generally trying to avoid being the centre of attention - not due to shyness, but because she finds it annoying, and also because she doesn't want people to know her background, which will come much later into play. As a result, she's often spending time alone, away from people, which would then limit the amount of MC's opportunities to overhear people talking about her.
Plus, though there are rumours going on around her, and the
story is centred around her, I don't want the
school to be centred around her, if you catch my drift.
I'm still wondering if the setting is a high-school or a private college.
Ughhh... Yes, this is something I am struggling with.
The reason for it being, my initial idea was to make it in high-school, but I am worried about the whole underage thing, especially since I don't live in the US, so I would have to figure out the law regarding that in my country... Which is a pain in the ass, to be frank. So instead I decided against my better judgement and chose to go the ambiguous "Sort-of-high-school-but-I-can-still-insist-this-is-college-so-everyone-is-of-age" route. At this moment there are no lewds yet, but I am planning to make it
VERY sexual soon, and with the ambiguous law, I would rather not wake up one day with charges regarding propagating Cheese Pizza.
The more I read, the more i feel it's too much like a novella, not a game script. In general a game script needs to be more like a movie script - SHOW don't tell. Short conversational lines. Few (if not NONE) internal dialogue scenes.
Another thing I had a problem with, something I mentioned in my previous post. I still want to have that internal monologue, since - like I said - this is supposed to be MC's transformation, and I want to show MC processing thoughts and emotions, but I also do keep in mind the SDT rule, so it basically comes to a matter of striking the right balance.
Don't have too much exposition, especially from a narrator or "mc's thoughts" point of view - readers can work out a LOT from context as long as you put clues in (facial expressions, visual clues, side comments)
I am not sure whether you are referring to the (Internal monologue) or narration, but I assume you mean narration - the second reason I wanted narration, was because when I start writing lewds, I want a way to describe things which aren't visual in nature - smells, tastes, the feeling of warmth or coldness, pain and so on. But if I write 90% of script without any narration whatsoever, and then suddenly throw that in during the H-scene, that is going to be jarring, right? Which is why I was trying to keep a consistent stream of narration to establish it, so that when I
actually need it, it won't pop out of nowhere. I am not saying this solution is perfect, but it is the best I could come up with.
some of the dialogue sections need to be trimmed to about half length: the first meeting between Sayuri and MC. a couple of the conversations between MC and Shinichi. the scene in the gym with Houzuki.
I assume you mean formatting? If so, then it's because... OK, it will be easier to show you how this looks on my screen:
The marked line is the one I assume you are referring to. I decided to break the line and adjust it to the upper script, because the other option was to either abandon the TAB adjustment altogether, and let the longer lines blend in with the character markers, which makes it hard to read, or insert TAB adjustments in the middle of the line, which causes the layout to become even more screwed up:
you're introducing a lot of named sub characters. I'd recommend keeping it tighter, don't bring too many into scope. it adds little and makes for more work.
I am actually not planning on using a lot of them, I just thought it would be weird if people didn't introduce themselves or spoke to each other as "you" or "someone do this" or such. The main story is very much centred around the MC and Sayuri, with their friends being, like I said, kind of a mirror to better reflect different aspect of their personalities. Any additional characters might get used in one-off scenes, just to break away from
1. MC with Sayuri
2. MC with Shin'ichi
3. MC with Sayuri and Touko
4. MC with Shin'ichi and Sayuri (should I use this, I am still considering whether to introduce a direct conflict between the two)
routine. I don't want it to feel like MC has no life outside of him, interacting with the heroine, but there's also not that much that I can show, which would be interesting to the reader. Let's be honest here, you are not here to see MC playing video games on his own or going on random walks. Which means I will need some hook to make additional scenes interesting - that's why I was considering leaving Houzuki as a named sub-character, who could stir shit up later down the line and serve as a trigger for showing MC and MCF in different situations. Other than that, yes - I literally only use names when it makes sense for the other character to know them (Fujimori barking orders to his students), or when it would be unnatural for the characters to refer to each other as anything other than something-san or something-kun or such.
it would be good to have more "scene setting" in the script to explain what the locations look like, what stances/expressions/actions the characters are taking. Again, more like a movie script. This will guide you when it comes to making the artwork.
Yes, this makes sense from your perspective, and I again apologize for making it this hard to read, but from my point of view, I either have a lot of it in my head, so I know precisely which map and which angle I want to use, and when I don't, I sort of plan to wing it, potentially changing the script on the fly to adapt to the technical limitations of the engine. Going into too much detail in describing these scenes, I feel like it would be counter-productive, though I do understand I am making it more difficult to provide feedback this way, and again - I apologize for it. If you still think this is something essential, even if just for the purposes of this conversation, I might insert some cues describing the locations, though please do understand, that from my perspective this is sort of sinking time into something that will
only serve this specific forum thread.
yes, but not as a part of the plot. minor side character. Reason: don't complicate things, this is your first game. don't make it even harder than it is, the story idea you've got is more than enough.
See above.
is that supposed to be MC's first name or family name? If first, then it is quite an unusual name for a male in modern japan (although apparently historically it was considered a male name). If family, then it's a very unusual surname - this is the first time I've encountered it.
Ugh, yeah... This is my edgy last name I often use when creating male characters in games set in Japan xD I can be a pretty big edgelord, so I made a name using 黒 and 羽, but "Kuroha" sounded even weirder, so I settled for "Kureha". TBH, Jisho.org does list it as an existing family name though, just with different kanji... But I can understand if you may find it jarring when compared to rather commonplace family names of other characters. I might change it, or even allow user input when it comes to family name, though I am also not really going that hard for the whole "This is YOUR story" angle, so I am not sure how it would work out...
mc would not use the girls name there. Too formal for same-year students to use between each other.
I don't want to dismiss your viewpoint, considering you have a background working in Japanese society (longer than I do, at least when it comes to actually spending time there, haha), but I am pretty sure it would be weirder for him to use her first name here, considering they've just introduced themselves to each other. Unless there was some serious cultural shift in Japan during the last few years, I am convinced going by family names is the standard when it comes to someone you don't know, and if she was older than him, and he wanted to be formal, he'd use senpai, either as a form of address, or as a honorific suffix attached to her name. Plus, MC isn't exactly a social butterfly, so he's not supposed to be this open, extraverted guy who drops the honorifics as soon as possible, so...
I know this might be slipping too far into the "Anime knowledge" territory, though - personally - I wouldn't necessarily consider it a bad thing. I want to create a plausible,
believeable setting, but it doesn't have to be 100% accurate to the real world, I guess.
Anyway, thank you very much for the response again! A lot of it was about formatting, but some stuff like the MC's name I will definitely consider, other things - I'd like to hear more of your thoughts in response to my own reasoning before I make any decisions. Thank you for your time!
