All the Decisions

I recently taught a class about branching path story structure in video games.  Whenever I do that, I always talk a bit about visual novels since they contain some of the best branching path stories to be found.  And one topic that comes up is how many decisions points and branches a branching path story should have.  Of course, there’s no set answer.  I’ve played visual novels with only a couple of branching paths and ones with dozens.  Personally, I prefer visual novels with a larger number of decisions.  It just doesn’t feel like there’s much point in having a branching path story if you’re not going to go all out with it.  Plus Fate/Stay Night is sort of my gold standard when it comes to visual novel structures and it included quite a lot of decisions and branches, both major and minor.  So that’s the approach I’m taking with Aurora’s Nightmare as well.  It’s a lot more work (each decision and branch means more writing, art, design, etc.), but I think it’s worth it in the end.