Hey Doggo, How Do You Go About Writing The Story Script (not Coding, Just Writing) For Your Games?

Hey Doggo, how do you go about writing the story script (not coding, just writing) for your games?

Particularly how you incorporate the "choose your own adventure" concept where choosing an option can lead to an entirely different exchange.

I am making a (sorta) Dayshift fangame and found myself having to write the entire story as an "if then" flowchart.

Is this the method you use as well? Or is there annother way?

Depends on the scale.

For DT, specifically, I usually plot the route story out on a flowchart first and then when I'm happy with the story, I go scene by scene and write the characters doing what I've plotted out. It's not uncommon to go BACK to this chart and make changes as I'm writing though, as you usually think of good scene ideas/changes on the fly.

Specifically I mainly just list what happens in a scene (aka, what characters discuss, basically a few sentence summary) and then I represent splits that majorly affect content, like when you make a route divergent choice. in DT, all content after these splits are totally divergent, so this is pretty clear cut. With the exception of one short split at the start of Karen's route, you don't tend to really get stuff rejoining after major choices.

Then when it comes to writing the actual script, I just write everything in plaintext (no character tags or anything like that) because I'm unhinged. The only dialogue that's really indicated as being different in any way is Gingi's bc it's in quotation marks. However, in multi character scenes it tends to be obvious who's saying what just based on what the characters are saying and how they say it.

As a for instance, this is from from Oliver + Theoroar's scene. You can kinda tell from context who's who without the caps affect being applied for Theoroar's dialogue.

You can map dialogue in flow charts if it makes it easier (draw.io is what I use as it's free + easy to use) but if you plan to have a LOT of dialogue, it can make the process of actually implementing dialogue a little more time consuming since you have to paste from a format that isn't already more or less engine-ready. The idea of having it in a plaintext doc like this, for me, is that I can copy + paste really fast.

But yeah, usually when I write these sorts of things, I just shut the windows, doors and go into a scary trance like state of hyper-concentration and then wind up with something that passes for a finished conversation by the time I've finished. Hope this helps!