Meet Rachel

I promised earlier that I would introduce some characters of the visual novel when I was done doing their story.  I finally finished story 4, which is the largest of the 6 stories, and the one I needed to finish to get it out of the way, so I could move to the easier stuff.  I am trying to make each story have a different tone and style, but my fiction writing skills are not at the expert level, so I pace myself and think things through.

Story 4, which I dubbed “A Man About Town” is the most “visual novel” like story, the most like the dating simulator (though no where near as complicated).  There are 13 different location sets in the various possible branches of the story, six of them are sets from the original date simulator, four more (the bar, the movie theater, the salon, and the dress shop) are ones I blogged earlier, I’ll talk about another in a future post, the last is a spoiler, so you’ll just have to wait.

Defining Characters

I mentioned before that writing a visual novel is like writing a novel, meaning you have to define your characters and stay in character when you voice their dialogue.  Otherwise everyone starts sounding the same, which is boring.  That means I have to define each character before I start writing them.  That means I had to define Ariane as a character.  Ariane’s online persona is me of course, a science and sci-fi geek and a gamer.  But in the dating simulator she never expressed those types of interest, so I could define her character differently.  Based on her actions in the dating simulator (and in the sequel), Ariane has two defining characteristics: she loves to do daring things, and when she gets mad she gets brutally honest.  Combining those characteristics with the fact that she drives around in a four wheel SUV with no doors or a roof (a free model I found online when I needed a car model, had I found a free sedan model she would be driving a sedan), and Ariane is defined as “action girl”.

The upshot of that definition of Ariane is that it frees “science and gamer geek” for another character.  Rachel is the main character in story 4, she is the “Ariane” of Something’s In The Air and will likely be the most talked about character when I finally release the game.  Hence the title of “science and gamer geek” fell on Rachel, thus helping me write her dialogue.  Besides an interest in science and video games, Rachel is also a social butterfly feeling comfortable around crowds.  That is kind of a contradiction, I know, but it will all be explained eventually.  For now I can tell you that she is a 19 year old college sophomore taking summer classes because she missed the spring semester.

For those of you keeping track, there are 6 total stories.  I’m now mostly done with two of them, leaving 4 to go.  That means I’m about a third of the way done with this project.