The productions of the KineticNovel label are unlike other visual novels in that no choices are given to the player.

The player can choose when to go to the next dialogue screen or else put the game on autoplay and just sit back and enjoy, analogous to listening to a CD or watching a DVD movie.

The majority of KineticNovels products contain adult material of a sexual nature, though all-ages products are produced as well, such as Keys Planetarian: The Reverie of a Little Planet.

However, there are instances where kinetic novels will be ported to consumer consoles, as with what occurred with Planetarian when it was ported to the PlayStation 2 by Prototype.

After over three years since the last kinetic novel was produced in April 2006, the VisualArts brand Issue produced a new kinetic novel, Meitantei Shikkaku na Kanojo, on August 28, 2009.

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For a year weve been working on and off on a high concept game with lots of characters, and we had gotten used to bouncing ideas off of each other and collaborating I would write up character profiles, and then Mia would draw the characters.

The five act play, the action movie script, the detective novel, contemporary lit; these categories exist as categories because they have a structure, and the exceptions to existing structures are structured around their opposition (and eventually become their own genres).

The visual novel, as a genre, has a lot of conventions (like being massively overwritten) but really the main thing is just that the writing is structured around a choices, which you can think of as the game mechanics if youre into that sort of thing.

Indie devs interested in making a concept for a game usually base their projects around seeing how much they can do with a single mechanic, and thats actually how we wrote We Know The Devil: as the smallest implementation of a simple mechanic.

We were able to figure out the structure and the word count of the project less than a week after deciding to do it, because we derived the structure from the mechanic, saw the scope of the project unfolding, and scaled it to something so reasonable that we actually had a chance of finishing it.

This postmortem will go step by step for both how we came up with the initial idea, how we came up with the mechanic to implement that idea, how we came up with a structure around that mechanic, and how we came up with a word count and asset list from that structure.

We were able to plan so tightly because it was such a small and simple project, and things still went way outside our expectations.

Planning small gave us plenty of room to fuck up on our first commercial game project though, so I hope this will be helpful to you, too.

Screenshot of the finished script of We Know The Devil This is what We Know The Devil looked like to me until a few weeks before we shipped.

I wrote the whole thing in Scrivener, and I definitely couldnt have written it in anything other than Scrivener I cant overstate this enough so I hope youll really keep in mind that most of the structure and organizing Im going to spend this postmortem talking about were possible because Scrivener had the tools for it.

This is how I write anything at all longer than a single essay, regardless if its game, or not, nonlinear or not, because anything bigger than a single idea needs to be broken down into smaller pieces for me to hold onto the mess of it So Im going to go step by step for how we built the groundwork up from concept to characters to chapters to word count.

Pitching Mia Schwartz and I had been working on a big and ambitious project on and off for a year, and we were inspired by Amandas ILU game jam to make something small in a month.

Mia felt strongly that she wanted the game to feel complete not a proof of concept or prologue or vertical slice.

That sounded great to me because visual novels are so notorious long and overwritten the idea of a short storynovella length game felt really nice to me.

So I told Mia about a handful of little ideas I had for small games that had a story seed and a mechanic I was interested in exploring.

The idea of what became We Know The Devil was originally a tabletop RPG idea, actually but the core mechanic was lets explore multiple characters interacting with each other instead of a singular protagonist, with the tension hanging on on the risk of forcing one of those characters out.

It was also the most fleshed out idea since I had both a premise for the fiction and a way of mechanically implementing it.

We Know The Devil is organized around the smallest implementation of a simple mechanic: for characters A, B, C, it is possible to choose a scene with two of these characters while leaving out the third, with a different ending for each of those possible sets.

The math of it is the combinations of ABC; so AB, BC, and AC, but this is just the vocabulary we use to describe the experience of repressed young people seeking companionship, in much the same way that I described people with the adjectives young and repressed.

Because we both wanted to actually complete this game in a month, we cut the characters from my original pitch to Mia from four to three.

The themes and images of sunday school and summer camp came with the initial pitch; to me they were inseparable from the whole premise.

We watched a lot of horror movies and had a strong commitment to lo-fi aesthetics that would both fit the mood and our budget (preview: nearly all the worldbuilding in WKTD, including the radios, wouldnt exist until the third draft).

Character Designing The template I used to create the initial character concepts before sending them to Mia This is one of Mia and my favorite things, and its the reason this project came together.

Visual Novel Vs Kinetic Novel