Braincast

[Doppleganger]

About a month ago (after the flurry of interest in Katawa Shoujo) a bunch of new VN projects sprung up. The one I joined was "Warvn", a contraction of War VN, but the actual premise is rather convoluted and needlessly complex, a contrast from my KS development. I'm skeptical Warvn will actually get off the ground because of it.

Let's storm ideas for visual novel premises, and then build on that. A premise is like a topic sentence, without one, there can be no direction for where a story can go.

Last year, I came up with one featuring A Christmas Carol, but I feel now it was perhaps a bit too complex and tried to do too much. So, premises should be kept simple and evolved from that.

Feel free to add on/debate premises and ideas, if we get something good and want to make a VN, getting a script down should be pretty easy.

So, mine.


A girl gets in an accident and loses her left eye. She receives a new one from an anonymous donor. However, she starts receiving the donor's memories through the eye.
A genre savvy guy discovers he's living in a magical girl universe, and tries to get involved. But behind the scenes it's not all cupcakes and roses.
A guy on an earth-like planet in the Andromeda galaxy learns that humans have colonized a good portion of galactic space, but it's a government secret. He finds a way to sneak off the planet and explore outer space.

The first one is probably the easiest to work with. It's basic enough to take in any direction. Number two is a personal favourite because I love guys who go out and try to manipulate the rules of the world, and I've had a recent obsession with making a solid magical girl universe. Three was one I came up with during the initial thought cascade following KS, and I think it's interesting for establishing a setting, but could use a bit more focus. I was thinking of taking it in the Baldur's Gate direction - a non-intrusive main plot with a ton of exploratory sub-plots to go along with it.

[unownmew]

I'll bite. Not much good with details (besides spotting them), but I think many thoughts.

Hmm, ...
... ... ...
ouch! >.<

I didn't think this one up exactly, but it's a good story premise, not sure about VN though..
During the United States Civil War, not only did the Confederates invent Iron Clad Ships, but also found ways to utilize Hot-Air Balloons as aerial warships, and this new technology has prolonged the war and given the South the upper hand, as the North tries to even the footing.
This one I thought up:
Following the story of a Privateer/Pirate who uses an Air Ship for his pirating, either as cutting edge technology and preying on water-based ships and having to contend with faster airplanes/jets as enemies, or in a world where air ships are common.

[Raptor Jesus]

So, mine.


A girl gets in an accident and loses her left eye. She receives a new one from an anonymous donor. However, she starts receiving the donor's memories through the eye.

Has she murdered any people yet? When the Eye of Vecna is displeased, it does stuff like that. If it's pleased, she can start shooting necrotic laser beams.

[YUKI.N]

A girl gets in an accident and loses her left eye. She receives a new one from an anonymous donor. However, she starts receiving the donor's memories through the eye.

This sounds pretty cool, reminiscent of R11. Although the whole "loses an eye but gains a special replacement" deal feels a little cliché. Perhaps because I've been watching Another (though I recall Cowboy Bebop also did something similar with Spike).

I'm not good at coming up with ideas for original stories, but a thought occurred to me based on my theory of how FSN should've been handled: How about a VN that reverses the "dating game" formula where you can choose to play as any of the girls instead, and each one offers a different view of the MC? The goal would be to try and uncover his secrets bit by bit, and once you've played each girl's "path" in turn, you unlock the True Path from the MC's perspective.

I don't know how much this premise would appeal to the VN audience, whom I assume to be mostly male, but you could adjust it so as not to be so much a strict "dating sim" as simply a story told from different POVs. I just like the idea of changing up the "path" concept so each playthrough you actually get to experience through the eyes of a different character. The most roles I've seen a player able to typically take on so far is two. Why not three or four, or even five+?

[Talon87]

Haven't been able to contribute to this thread yet, but I was just letting this video (http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/mailbag-4) play in the background while I did stuff and I came over to the computer, rewound, and decided to write down the names of the books they mentioned once that bit came up. So here you go:

Q. Are there any books you would recommend on game design?
A. The Art of Game Design: a Book of Lenses by Jesse Schells, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Richard R. Bartle's Designing Virtual Worlds, and David Perry's On Game Design: a Brainstorming Toolbox.

Not sure to what extent you have access to a library or bookstore with these books, but it's something to look into if you're at your "Enough is enough! :evil:" breaking point and you're really serious about wanting to make that VN that we've all probably dreamed about making at one point or another. Some of the books listed have zero applicability to conventional VNs (e.g. that third one :lol:), but I've listed them all just because. Never know if they might not prove useful (a) to somebody else reading this thread or (b) to you in future, non-VN-related endeavors.

[Talon87]

All this talk about the Titanic's centennial has had me wondering about doing a story which, at least in part, does something similar. Some vehicle's maiden voyage, or any other large structure with a habitation ring (e.g. space station, discworld, whatever), that ends up failing and endangering the lives of everyone onboard. Obviously, we've already seen this with Ever17, but if the argument can be made that Ever17 was different enough from the story of the Titanic to be worth telling, then so too could our story. Like I'm saying, you wouldn't just do "Titanic in space." That'd be too transparent and would beg the question, "Why not just go and watch Cameron's Titanic again? :?" But telling a story in which an assortment of main characters find themselves desperately trying to survive because their habitation ring, which is in dangerous territory (e.g. the real-life Titanic being in frigid waters), has suddenly broken and they have precious little time to figure out a solution.

Even if you don't like this particular idea or concept, there are quite a few other things from the story of the Titanic that you might want to incorporate into a story of your own. Things like ...
chivalrous sacrifices (I know, we see these in other eroges too ... but they're always good! :) [/sap])
Man tempting Nature with science/engineering
social hierarchies
survivor's guilt
good guy rich people with true class
bad guy rich people with no class
looking at all the different roles on the ship / station / whatever (e.g. with the Titanic you have the piloting crew's story, the engine room crew's story, the musicians' story, the rich people's story, the poor people's story, the guy who built the boat's story, and so on)
I mean, there are a lot of things you could take from it, really, and apply to your own story.

[Doppleganger]

I think Titanic in space is a good idea, because if one distills the specifics of the Cameron movie, a lot of the detail is rooted in it being a sinking ship during a certain time-period.

Set it during the 1960's, for example, with a fictional US lunar base, and it becomes more interesting since we have a sense of limitation on the technology.

[Talon87]

I think Titanic in space is a good idea, because if one distills the specifics of the Cameron movie, a lot of the detail is rooted in it being a sinking ship during a certain time-period.

Set it during the 1960's, for example, with a fictional US lunar base, and it becomes more interested since we have a sense of limitation on the technology.
Oh, why, hello there, Apollo 13! :)

I kid, I kid. ;-) We're going to find stories that exist for ideas we have no matter where we look. The important thing is to craft something where the aggregate is new. But yes. Titanic in 1960s space = Apollo 13. Well, the early '70s, but still.

If our game has a Gene Kranz character (Ed Harris's, "Failure is not an option!"), we will have won, Kirei. [/Tokiomi]

[Doppleganger]

Came up with another idea -

Remember how Naruto had Kage Bushins? And later it was shown Naruto could gain the "experience" of training his bushins did?

We can make that the twist of a story. Take a main character, and have him/her live in different environments in distant parts of the world, set in different chapters. The main dies at the end of each chapter. Over time, the reader discovers shared events between the chapters but this is revealed slowly. For example, let's say there's a war going on between Country A and Country B...in chapter 2, the main character might actually be in Country B, but in chapter 3 he/she lives in a distant land and hears about a far-off war shortly before the chapter ends.

Finally, in the last route, it's revealed the previous chapters starred "shadow clones" or some kind of split being of the same person, and the original (or the last one standing) assimilates the experience of the rest and closes the plot-lines of all the other chapters.

I thought of this idea because of the parallel world implications of Muv-Luv and the nuances of defining self, but getting into parallel worlds also touches on science fiction inaccuracies. This way, we get the different universe feel without stepping into reincarnation problems.

This is also related to a twist in The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer, but I shan't say what.