Behind the Scenes #3: The Big Picture (Patreon)

In the first two Behind the Scenes posts I discussed making the visuals for a visual novel. This month I'm moving on to the novel portion, discussing how I plan out a project like Freshmen: Physical Education before the actual writing begins.

As always, this is a very, very lengthy post—but if writing is something you're interested in, I hope this look at how I create the game inspires you. And of course, fair warning—this is how I write, and when it comes to writing, no one size fits all.

Who am I?

There may be a question as to why anyone should trust my writing advice over anyone else's. Unlike with 3D renders, I have a lot of professional writing experience. "Danny Nym" is obviously a pseudonym—sorry if that's shocking news to some of you 😉

I vaguely say in the description for the game that I'm a "pro writer." To be more specific, I've been working as an author within the traditional publishing world for over two decades. I've published 20+ books in my home country and internationally, having worked with some of the biggest publishers in the world.

I say that not to brag—being published doesn't mean being read. I can guarantee if I said my real name, no one reading this will have ever heard of me. Instead, I say it to give an idea of the type of knowledge and experience I brought into this project.

The early stages

There's more or less two ways to enter a writing project meant to be shared with the public. One is having an idea and then finding the right audience for it later. Another is seeing a market and writing to that market, crafting a concept aimed at a specific audience. The latter is how Freshman came to be.

There's a cynical way to write to market, which is to set aside your own preferences and try to appeal to an audience with the widest reach. Been there, done that, and hated it. I chose to write a visual novel like Freshmen because it catered to my own interests, and it happened that there seemed to be a smaller but dedicated readership with similar tastes.

Part of writing to market (please forgive how crassly commercial that sounds!) is knowing what else is out there. I had already browsed through some adult, gay visual novels just 'cause I wanted to see the porn-y stuff, but obviously there's more to games like this than just sexy pictures. Playing games like Coming Out on Top assured me that funny, deep-but-not-too-deep writing had a place here. The pictures complimented the stories being told, and the stories were built off of engaging with vibrant characters.

And so to be frank, I kind of just copied the premise of that game, taking the "sexy times at college" idea and spinning it in my own direction.

Writing to your strengths

I also chose to write college-age characters because I have a lot of experience writing for a more youthful audience. I never grew up, and so I can get into the head of college aged guys easier than men my own age... in part because stories about my age group would be a little heavier. I don't really want to languish in that when writing!

Just from experience, I know I'm not super great at writing lyrical prose or evocative description. What I am pretty good at is dialogue, plotting, and characterization. Since my writing vibe was already youthful and I lean towards humor, honing in on that helped lay the foundation for the type of story to be told.

There are other visual novels in this genre that definitely lean into heavier themes and introspective prose, like Straight!?. I think the success of that VN is because the author learned early on that his strengths lie in a type of existential musing. And I stress learned early on, since the vibe of the early chapters in the first version of the game were much different than what came later.

Which means that you don't need to have literal decades of experience to know what your strengths are—you can figure it out as you go, and then revise to focus more in that direction. Though you'll certainly want to learn all aspects of telling a story—I did train myself to write serviceable prose and descriptions!—knowing where you are at your best can help you shape your project from the ground up to flatter that side of your writing.

The idea

So at this point we have a basic premise for what this game might be. It'll be set in college, it'll focus on snappy dialogue, and it'll lean into interesting—sometimes outright weird—characters. I also know I'm writing something that's going to have a lot of explicitly sexual CGs, which means there needs to be a focus on romance and sex. And I know I want to follow the lead of many of the VNs I played and do branching storylines.

I'm an artist, and I know a lot of us are delightful weirdos. So I decided the setting wouldn't be a standard college campus but a school of the arts. That means the player character would also need to be an artist—so why not write from experience and make him a writer as well?

This is hardly a world-shatteringly unique idea, of course. But going back to the "writing to market" concept, I started with an end goal and worked backwards. If the main character is going to hyper focus on sex and romance immediately upon starting college, what would inspire that? And so I came up with Will's writing assignment.

We now have a more complete premise and an inciting incident—but we still need an actual story. And as I noted above when discussing Coming Out on Top, the story is the characters.

Creating the cast

Something you'll pick up is I often look at the tried-and-true and then extrapolate from there to come up with something somewhat unique. Any story you can imagine has already been told—but not told by you. Ideas mean nothing without solid execution, so sometimes success lay in honing in on the tropes of a genre while trusting your unique perspective will make those tropes not just meet a reader's expectations but sometimes subvert them.

With that in mind, I sat down and brainstormed everything trope-y about a school setting. In books and VNs and TV and movies, what are the archetypes we see most often? What types of disciplines do you expect people to be training in at an arts school? What character tropes are specific to life as a young gay man? And when it comes to romance, what personalities might you expect?

Here's a snapshot of some of my earliest brainstorming notes; a bigger version is in the gallery:

With this list and other ideas that came later, I started pairing up archetypes to form the most basic concepts for the guys. Here's a pic of my nigh illegible notes where I started planning this out:

Asher (broody musician) - feels like he's selling out

Alex (hyper streamer) - fame hungry

Dominic (straight?) - not straight

Griffin (destitute townie) - desperate for opportunity

Isaiah (femme dancer) - self loathing

Marco (horndog roommate) - led by dick

Matt (sweet best friend) - horizons expanding quickly

Owen (super friendly frat bro) - thinks too much about others

Riley (virginal RA) - shy about body issues

Some of these early ideas stayed intact as the initial first impressions for each character. Others got rearranged—Dominic's "(straight?) - not straight" got ported over to Julian, for instance. But these focused my brainstormed ideas into a variety of romanceable characters that could, in the writing, feel somewhat distinct.

From tropes to characters

Keeping characters at a surface level is fine, but not something that could carry a full game with branching choices. More brainstorming ensued, this time focusing on a personality trait, quirk, or personal goal I could add to the descriptors to give them a few more facets.

Part of this was just assigning them areas of study. A few had them built in with the basic idea, but making Matt an actor, Griffin a filmmaker, and Riley a writer shaped them further, giving them each their own desires that could carry through the game.

I also started to consider their relationships beyond Connor and how they speak, giving me a starting point for their external and internal lives. Here's some scribbles about Asher:

ASHER

Archetype - The Brooding Musician

Dialogue style - Taciturn

Hard to impress. Need to work to earn affection. Only interested in sex if there's romantic attracting. Monogamous. First sex scene needs to be extra rewarding.

Character links:

- Griffin (through bar)

- Isaiah (later on, composing piece for a dance performance)

- The band (ofc)

- One more - former hookup?

- Dominic (for similar vibes) (through Griffin/dating Noir?)

Asher/Griffin/Dominic friend group

And this is where I stopped.

What we have now for each character: Names, archetypes, basic goals, speaking style, general vibe, and links to other characters.

What we don't have: 20-page dossiers with their dates of birth, full names, home city, parents, favorite color, etc. etc. etc.

What's been created here are some healthy bones—but if I start layering on the muscle and flesh now, I risk leaning even harder into tropes. Characters reveal themselves as they are now via their actions and interactions. Their backstory specifics come as I write, when I look at the dialogue I created for them and how they act in their current situations, then rewind back to figure out what led them to this point.

The road map

Premise? Check! Writing style? Check! Cast of characters? Checks and more checks!

Now we need an actual map of the full piece, an outline to keep us focused as we move through the story. Alongside brainstorming characters, I've also been considering what the shape of their storylines might be.

Plotting and pacing can be a tricky thing, and this is where being familiar with all sorts of writing comes in handy. I knew I'd be making this a sort of episodic story, which meant analyzing TV/book series that felt solidly plotted to figure out what works and what doesn't. And of course, there is also a path through the early days of an actual romance that could inform the peaks and valleys of a fictional journey.

In addition, I knew I wanted this to take place over a few months at most, and realized that meant a good ending point could be 31 October—Halloween. That helped me divide the story into 8 weeks plus the first 2 days to set the events in motion—10 parts in total.

This is what it looks like in my flowchart notes; this image is intentionally too small to read to avoid game spoilers:

You'll notice the earlier sections have many more notes than the later sections, which I'll come back to later. But now I have something laid out that helps me visualize the path the story will take beginning to end.

The 10 sections are as follows:

Day One - Orientation

An alternate title for Day One could be First Impressions, and that goes not just for Connor's thoughts on the characters he meets but your first impressions as a player when you begin the story.

Visual pieces like VNs, TV, and movies have a little more leeway than books when it comes to gaining someone's attention. The visuals can keep things interesting even if the story may be a little slow to start. With books, if a reader isn't interested right away, that means their imagination isn't sparked, and without their brain engaging with the writing, it's easy to put a book down.

With that in mind, I knew I could put off the inciting incident a little bit and start by presenting a microcosm of what was to come. The aim for the first half of Day One was to introduce you to a few hot & interesting guys via dialogue and CGs, give a look into Connor's very horny mind, and then have a fantasy sequence to show that sexually explicit stuff lay ahead as well. Within this are a few story branches, indicating the type of gameplay you can expect

With your attention hopefully grabbed, I expanded the cast and ended with another sexy fantasy sequence to keep you intrigued for more.

Now, if I were writing this as a book, I may have truncated or excised much of this and started closer to Will's class. Pacing decisions can very much change based on what you're writing—it's good to be familiar with your genres!

Day Two - First Day of Class

Day Two serves to introduce the story proper and also to delve beyond the surface level for a number of characters—in particular, the romanceable characters.

At this point, if you're still playing I expect you're interested in learning more about the guys you're drawn to... or are at the very least eager to click through the dialogue to unlock more CGs. Much like real life, if someone tells you their life story the first moment you meet them, it can be off-putting. We're past their introductory hump, so pacing-wise, now's a good time to let you slow down and dig a little deeper into the guys who most intrigued you.

The latter half of Day Two is when the story branches much, much more than anything than came before. Everything about Day Two is easing you through a transition from the straightforward to the more complex. It's no coincidence that it's not until this point you meet possibly the hardest to read character, Griffin.

Week One - The Morning After / Getting to Know You

From here on out each section has its own specific theme, designed to lead the character stories on a certain pacing path. It's at this point we begin advancing from first impressions and early insights to really delving deeper into new relationships. Part of that is establishing how you navigate the fallout from your interactions with other characters. The other part is choosing who you want to continue to get to know now that you have a firmer basis for who they are as people.

Week Two - In Their Element

The subsequent week will take you into the areas of 21CA each guy inhabits—a play rehearsal, perhaps, or watching a dance class. We've opened up to one another and now we're experiencing the other guys' passions by watching them perform.

Week Three - Going Deeper

We now expand out even further, going out on the town to not just see the guys in their element at school but how they live their life in the city.

Week Four - Getting Closer / Cooling Down

And it's here that we pull back just a little bit by letting you and the other guys decide if you want to keep proceeding down the paths you've started. You can stay the course or play the field; less of a story beat than a check in with the player about how they're feeling about the progression.

Week Five - Complications, Part 1

The closer you get to each character, the more their personal lives affect yours and vice versa. A good story needs drama, after all, and though there will already be some dramatic storylines, here everyone will have some sort of complication. Some complications are much harsher than others, and your choices shape the latter half of the full story.

Week Six - Defining the Relationship

By now you may have cottoned on to how this story was shaped. There's a gradual climb before a small dip with Week Four, and then a steep drop with Week Five. Week Six is the time to once again decide how you want to proceed—do you stay the course or do you go down a different track than the one you've been on?

Week Seven - Complications, Part 2

And the rollercoaster continues as the climax nears. There's an end in sight, but how you come to a stop depends on what you do here.

Week Eight - Happy Endings

...That title referencing both meanings of the phrase 😉 We've reached the crescendo and are now calming down, letting everything settle after a ride that began slow and steady and then became a bit more rocky.

Think of each section here as an episode in a television mini-series with each individual episode having plotlines with its own version of the rise and fall, the good times and the challenging times.

With each section planned, we now have the two key parts of the framework needed to really begin writing—the flow of the whole game and the characters who will affect that flow.

A map, not an itinerary

In the writing world, there are some people who are pantsers—those who write by the seat of their pants and make up everything as they go. On the flip side, there are the planners—those that write meticulous outlines and backstories so they know where they're going each step of the way.

I've fallen into a place somewhere in the middle after initially being a staunch planner. I view plotting like planning a road trip from New York to Vegas. I decide on the roads I'll be taking and the big stops I'll make along the way... but in between those stops there is so much to discover just by virtue of exploring and handling unexpected complications.

This is why I don't necessarily go too deep when creating characters. As I reach each section, I do outline the storylines within—this is especially important for a branching narrative like this. But the specifics of each character, their quirks, their anecdotes, their reactions—all of it comes about as I write.

To make this work, it's important to have characters that feel distinct to you, the writer. Writing dialogue is basically conversing with yourself, and without having those key word archetypes like "hippie actor who's way too open sexually" or "sly bartender who likes to goad you" in the back of your head, it can be easy to slip into just writing what you would say to you and what you would say back... to you.

So to sum up, when making the big picture I'm drawing a map from Point A to Point B, and the characters I created are going to follow that map while also following their whims when choosing to make detours.

tl;dr

The Idea

Figure out what you want to write; don't be afraid to steal good ideas since it's not the idea that makes the story, it's how you write it.

The Characters

For a story like Freshmen: Physical Education, the characters drive the action. Begin with tropes that are common to the genre—the types of characters readers expect to see. Then add facets to make them unique to your story.

Plotting & Pacing

Pacing and plotting is something that can take some practice to hone in on, but examining and following the templates of other media can help you formulate your plan for a whole piece. The key factors are easing someone into the story, pulling them forward with engaging interactions, and then adding in complications at moments where things can risk becoming mundane. There's always a climax before a coda—hit a beat of big feelings and big events before letting the story come to a final, hopefully fulfilling rest.

That's what I've got this time! In a future Behind the Scenes post I'll zoom in closer on how I actually outline a section of a game—both what I plan and what I leave open to discover while writing.