Am I using too many scenes?

Game Development ChoiceScript Help
1

I generally start a new scene and use the *goto_scene command whenever I put in a choice but I’ve recently seen other people’s code and I’m wondering if there’s a problem with doing things this way? I just find it easier to organise if there’s only a small amount of writing per scene. Any help is appreciated I’m very new to doing this.

2

It generally takes longer to load a scene than to move between choices within a scene. I can’t say for sure that that’s true if your “scene” is only e.g. 20 lines long; if it were, then your players’ experience would be more laggy, but it might not apply to super short scenes. Other than that, I don’t know that I can think of a problem with it – though you’re right, you’d be pretty much unique (AFAIK) in writing one scene per choice.

Personally, I’d find it a lot harder to find my way through a hundred scene files than through choices within a single searchable file…but maybe you’re not planning for a game that ever gets that long? At the end of the day, you do you.

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3

I don’t think its the wrong way, but depending on how long your game is or how many choices, it will be difficult to organize. You’re going to end up with a lot of scenes, even short games tend to have dozens of choices which will be a lot of text files.

I also can’t imagine the nightmare that it would be to have multiple nested choices since you’d be jumping all over the place.

It does give the vibe of a traditional Choose Your Own Adventure Book, in a way.

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4

Yeah, I’d worry more about organisational preference than performance. It’s really up to you, although I will say one choice per scene is definitely on the extreme side.

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5

The scene files are organisational chunks and, like other people have said, you can organise however you find useful. The norm is 1 file = 1 chapter, with chapter being the typical organising unit of a large story. Having 1 file = 1 choice is a lot like how passages work in Twine. If you’ve got long passages between your choices (like a visual novel would) then this might work fine.

Other possibilities include be 1 file = 1 interaction/encounter (what would be a scene in a film: a location and set of characters, which could have several choices within it); 1 file = 1 day, week or year, for a game that proceeds chronologically; 1 file = , 1 room, settlement, port, for a game organised spatially.

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6

Thanks to everyone that responded. I’m going to try and cut down on my scene usage. I think I’m way too used to old school choose your own adventure books and that’s how I’ve been writing so far.

7

You can make a great one using ChoiceScript. But where it sounds like you’ve been writing as if each CYOA “page” is a scene, it’s more common to write each “page” as a *label within a single scene.

So where a traditional CYOA would have

If you go left, turn to page 76
If you go right, turn to page 202

you can render that in CS like this:

*choice
  #You go left.
    *goto 76
  #You go right.
    *goto 202

*label 76
You go left and are eaten by a grue.
*finish

*label 202
You go right and find [...]

although without actual pages to turn to, most writers find it more intuitive to give the labels written names rather than number references.

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8

Thanks for your help, that makes a lot more sense than what I was doing.