Another new guy here and i am beginning my first project and have a question.
A question for you all (exciting i know)…
When writing your game/story and with each scene do you tend to use chapter1,chapter2 etc method or perhaps give them a chapter name to help give an overview of the development of the story or do you give them branch names to help maintain a sense of order when story threads might jump around a bit? or an entirely different method altogether? perhaps a number system and spreadsheet?
Just curious to know the best way or the various methods that can be used that are helpful in story/game development and what works for some of you.
I try to give each scene a name that describes a bit of what happens in it, or where it is in the storyline, so I don’t have to open a million text files to find the one I want.
For one of my works in progress, this is a snapshot of part of what’s in my “scenes” directory:
This isn’t the order in which a player meets them, of course.
I created a “_template.txt” file and in that I put the bare bones of a scene so I will remember to keep to the technical structure I am using:
To handle the branching of the story I use a mindmap developed using Mindomo. In the mindmap I can track completion of scenes (the little clock faces) and where storyline branches touch (the bright lines):
I personally prefer to have everything in a scene rather than jump from file to file. I usually use Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc. However for a different story of mine I prefer to use named Chapters simply for ease of use.
I don’t think it makes a difference really, its more of a preference
It depends on how your story is going to unfold. if the game plays through each scene no matter what choices are made then you could write chapter 1, 2, 3… and such. the benefit to making a name for each scene and not just chapter 1 2 3, is that you can know somewhat happened in that scene and such