{"id":640,"date":"2026-05-14T12:16:37","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T12:16:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/?p=640"},"modified":"2026-05-14T12:16:37","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T12:16:37","slug":"%e2%9a%a0-why-my-mechanics-research-doesnt-primarily-revolve-around-visual-novels%e2%9a%a0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/2026\/05\/14\/%e2%9a%a0-why-my-mechanics-research-doesnt-primarily-revolve-around-visual-novels%e2%9a%a0\/","title":{"rendered":"\u26a0 Why My Mechanics Research doesn’t primarily revolve around visual novels\u26a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When I was doing early mechanics research, I did not focus entirely on traditional visual novel mechanics. Although The Verdant Trail<\/em> contains a lot of NPC dialogue, character relationships, and branching choices, I did not think the project should be understood as a pure visual novel. It already included an explorable map, item collection, environmental clues, objectives, and spatial movement. Because of this, the player experience was not only about reading text, but also about actively searching for information, triggering events, and understanding the world through the scene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I only used visual novels as references, I was worried that I would understand the project\u2019s mechanics in a way that was too flat. The core of a traditional visual novel is usually text progression, branching choices, and changes in character relationships, and these are definitely related to our dialogue \/ reputation system. However, the GDD of The Verdant Trail<\/em> also emphasised exploration and environmental atmosphere. Players needed to move around the map, interact with items, find objectives, and understand the story through the environment. Because of this, I thought it was more useful to reference exploration games, narrative adventure games, and games with environmental storytelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is why my research focused on areas such as backtracking, environmental storytelling, objective clarity, mode separation, and player guidance. What I wanted to understand was: why would players want to return to old areas? How can the environment communicate information? How can objectives naturally come out of dialogue and exploration? How can players understand their progress through items, paths, and changes in space? These questions were closer to the actual needs of our project than simply researching \u201chow to write branching choices\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, dialogue was still an important mechanic, but it should not be separated from exploration as a completely different mode. The player receives an objective through dialogue, then enters the scene to look for an item or clue. The player finds new information through exploration, then returns to an NPC and triggers a new dialogue branch. In this way, dialogue, exploration, inventory, and reputation can form a loop, instead of becoming a simple combination of \u201cwalking sections\u201d and \u201creading text sections\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because of this, my research direction leaned more towards exploration mechanics and environmental feedback, rather than pure visual novel systems. I wanted to understand how The Verdant Trail<\/em> could connect scene interaction with narrative choice. Visual novel mechanics could help me understand branching dialogue and character relationships, but they were not enough to cover the whole gameplay loop of this project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This judgement also influenced my later design reflection. The reputation system should not only stay inside dialogue choices. It needs to connect with item delivery, quest completion, area unlocks, and NPC reactions. The objective system should not just be a UI list either. It needs to naturally emerge from dialogue and exploration. In other words, what this project really needed was not a flat dialogue tree, but a narrative mechanics system built through exploration, dialogue, and feedback together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was doing early mechanics research, I did not focus entirely on traditional visual novel mechanics. Although The Verdant Trail contains a lot of NPC dialogue, character relationships, and branching choices, I did not think the project should be understood as a pure visual novel. It already included an explorable map, item collection, environmental […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-s2-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":641,"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions\/641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}