: Re: Learning storywriting for videogames - Handling deep nonlinearities A recent question asked for pointers for writing for games, and the gist of the answers was that it's not very unlike writing

@Dunderdale623

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I can describe the system used in aforementioned Tsukihime. This isn't a solution how to do that at writing phase, or how to physically write to have the right grip of things but may serve as a general guideline how to keep things at manageable level while affording great flair and a lot of freedom with significant decisions drastically changing the outcomes.

You can hold all the threads easily and manage their interconnections if the number of threads is small - up to three tightly coupled threads, that strongly influence each other. Tsukihime holds much more than that, I'd estimate the number of threads at roughly 20.

The trick is to keep the initial pool of threads early on loosely coupled. In each of them you keep tally of points towards given outcomes, or observe essential events. They follow through time whether the player is present or not. Then you arrive at key point or achieve critical score in one of the threads, and a key event occurs, changing the scene drastically.

New threads are spawned. Most of old threads either are killed off or reduced to skeletal forms that don't have any importance. Very few most essential threads are picked out and continue in their full flair, reset to known state by the event and maintaining only very minor amount of prior player decisions. New tallies are counted, new events observed, and converge towards another critical point.

This way the actual decision tree is trimmed to manageable size, the number of threads running at given time is strongly reduced, the number of interconnections perfectly manageable, and the initial trunk with most threads is loosely-coupled and so easy to manage.

Example: in the initial stage you can interact with any of the five heroines of the story, and build romantic interest with any of them. Your choices which one to woo will increase the romantic interest towards that one. At certain points the rest of the girls fade into background and you lose most (all significant) options to interact with them... except for specific case when one becomes an antagonist, and a thread of intense war between the two begins, with you on one side or another. If you leave both off, the whole war between them goes only through mild cameos if even that much, while entirely different set of events occupies your focus.

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